WorshipDeck vs OpenLP

OpenLP has been quietly running Sunday for churches with no budget for two decades, and it deserves more respect than most comparison pages give it. WorshipDeck is a hosted alternative to OpenLP for churches who have decided the tradeoff is worth paying for: a shared cloud library instead of a service file that travels on a USB stick.

Who OpenLP is for

OpenLP is a GPL open-source lyrics, Bible, and media projector maintained by a volunteer community. It installs on Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD with no seat limit and no licence cost. Their documentation describes importing songs and Bibles from a wide range of other applications, remote control from a web or mobile browser, a stage view served over the local network, and VLC for media playback. There is no commercial SongSelect product.

That is the right tool when the budget is zero, the booth runs Linux, or the church has decided on principle not to rent its software. Those are serious reasons, not consolation prizes.

What you get for paying

The fair way to frame this is: what does a subscription buy that a free installer cannot give you?

• A library nobody has to carry. Sign in from home, from the office, or from the booth and the current service is already there. No exported file, no USB stick, no wondering which copy is current. See team.
• Someone to call. Roles, billing, documentation, and support are a product rather than a forum thread. That matters when the person who set everything up leaves the church.
• Ezra doing the tedious part. Sermon notes become a draft deck, lyrics get arranged into sections, and headlines get tightened — always as a proposal you approve or skip. See Ezra AI and sermon notes.
• Live changes without stopping. Reorder the setlist, fix a slide, or annotate over what is on screen while the service runs. See live presentation.
• More than one kind of screen. Content variants send different content to different displays at once, and presenter views put chord charts and speaker notes on stage devices. Paired Android TV and Fire TV sticks handle lobby screens — see wireless displays.

Where OpenLP still wins

Price, and it is not a small win. Zero is a number WorshipDeck cannot compete with, and for a church plant or a mission congregation that is frequently the only number that matters.

Native Linux is the second. WorshipDeck runs in a browser on Linux, which is not the same as an installed native application, and OpenLP will always have the edge for a Linux-first booth.

OpenLP's importers are genuinely better than ours. It reads song libraries from a long list of other applications. WorshipDeck imports PowerPoint and Keynote files and nothing else, so if your value is locked in an existing song database, OpenLP can absorb it and we cannot.

And there is no vendor risk. GPL software you have installed keeps working regardless of what happens to any company. A subscription does not have that property, and churches that weigh it heavily are being sensible.

Finally, OpenLP keeps its service files local and presents without a prior cloud sync. WorshipDeck's desktop app also presents offline after the booth downloads presentations or services marked Ready offline; those items can start after an app restart and run on paired booth monitors without the server. OpenLP remains the more independent option when local files and no hosted service are the goal.

Moving your Sunday over

Expect to rebuild, and expect songs to be the bulk of the work. Paste lyrics into songs as ChordPro; the lyric slides, transposable chord chart, and credits slide all come from that one source, so the effort is not wasted keystrokes.

Any sermon or announcement decks already saved as PowerPoint or Keynote can go straight into the presentation library as .pptx or .key. Check fonts and embedded video before relying on one live.

You do not have to uninstall anything. Plenty of churches keep OpenLP on a gym or overflow machine, or as a genuinely free fallback while they learn a new workflow. Leaving it installed costs nothing and is reasonable insurance while you confirm every WorshipDeck service shows Ready offline before Sunday.

Related comparisons

The other free installers worth reading are WorshipDeck vs FreeWorship and WorshipDeck vs VideoPsalm. Churches considering a paid installed app instead usually compare WorshipDeck vs EasyWorship.