Eight questions worth asking before you buy anything, starting with whether you should buy anything at all.
Software does not disciple anyone. It removes the friction that stops leaders doing it, which is a real problem but a narrower one than most sales pages imply.
You probably do not need a platform if you are running one or two groups and the leaders can hold every person in their heads. You probably do if you have crossed the point where nobody can answer "where is this person up to" without asking three people.
Most tools report completions and attendance because those are easy to count. The question a leader actually has is about a person: what have they finished, what have they stopped, what did they say last time. If the product cannot answer that on one screen, it will not change how anyone leads.
Ask whether you can bring your own material, edit what ships with it, and take your material with you if you leave. A platform whose content you cannot change eventually decides your theology by default.
Get the answer in writing before signing. Export format, how long the data is kept, and whether members lose their own history. This is the question most churches ask a year too late.
If students will use it, ask specifically what a leader can see about a minor, what a parent can see, and what is collected. The right answer is that a minor's personal reflection is not visible to a group leader by default and that a parent has a way in. Ask them to show you, not tell you.
You almost certainly already have one, and your people already exist in it. A discipleship tool that needs its own separate roster creates two versions of the truth, and the one nobody maintains is the one that gets used.
Your leaders are not staff. If using it takes a walkthrough, it will be used by the staff member who bought it and nobody else. Put it in front of an actual volunteer during the trial and watch without helping.
Per-person pricing that works at eighty people can be the reason you cap a ministry at four hundred. Ask for the number at your realistic three year size, not today's.
Discipleship software is a small market with a lot of abandoned products. Ask how it is funded and who builds it. A clear answer is a good sign regardless of the answer.
We built Start Discipling around the first question, because it is the one we could not get answered anywhere: a leader opens a person and sees where that person actually is. It connects to Planning Center rather than replacing it, the courses are editable, and a minor's reflections are not shared with group leaders by default.
It is a poor fit if you want a church management system, if you need attendance and giving in the same tool, or if your church is small enough that one leader already knows everyone. In that last case, keep the money and start the group.
If you want to see the reasoning rather than the pitch, how it works is the shortest route, and for churches covers the church side.
The fastest way to evaluate any of this is to run a single real group through it and see whether your leader uses it in week five.
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