Synodo — every group, walked together
Synodo is software for churches to run their small groups. It gives your church one place for the studies, the leader guides, the meetings, and the conversations in between.
What Synodo does
- Leader guides your leaders actually use. Each meeting has a leaders-only guide — preparation, a run of show, discussion prompts — kept separate from what members see. Assign sections to specific leaders, highlight the parts you are covering, and print it.
- Build the study once. Write your study a single time and every new group gets its own copy. Tag it for the kinds of group it suits, or leave it untagged and every group can use it. When you improve it, a resync pushes changes down without wiping what each group has tailored.
- The group's life in one thread. Messages, prayer requests, photos, polls, and announcements live alongside the study instead of scattered across texts and email.
- See who is drifting, and reach them. Attendance, homework and message activity roll into one view, week by week — and you can call, text or email them from your own phone in one tap, or forward the announcement they never opened.
- Your kinds of group, in your words. Community, Life Group, Mentor — name them the way your church already does, and each group says what it calls its leaders and its people. Say whether a group keeps going or runs once and finishes.
- From sign-up to groups. For churches that run a round of intake: nominations, approvals, leader applications, pairing co-leaders, matching people, availability polls, and the whole meeting schedule.
- At the desk and in their pocket. Leaders plan on a computer; members open the same group on their phone or tablet, where it installs to the home screen and sends push notifications.
Every feature, a page each
- Leader guides for small group leaders
- Group messaging for church small groups
- Small group curriculum and study builder
- Small group attendance and care tracking
- Small group meeting schedules and calendar sync
- Planning Center Groups integration
- Discipleship and mentoring software for churches
- A small group app for phones, tablets and computers
A walk through Synodo — what members, leaders and admins see.
Pricing
Synodo costs $49 per month per church and includes unlimited groups and people, with every feature included. Churches start with a 30-day free trial and no credit card required. You can export your data at any time and cancel whenever you like.
Questions
- What is Synodo?
- Synodo is software for churches to run their small groups — community groups, life groups, mentoring pairs, short courses. It holds the study, the leaders-only guides, groups and meetings, homework, attendance, and the group's conversation in one place.
- Is it only for mentoring groups?
- No. A mentoring pair and a Tuesday-night community group are both groups, and Synodo runs either. You name the kinds of group your church has in your own words, each group says what it calls its leaders and its people, and you say whether a group keeps going or runs once and finishes. Mentoring is where the leader guides go deepest, which is why it is the example most often shown.
- How much does Synodo cost?
- Synodo is $49 per month per church, with unlimited groups and people. Every feature is included — there are no per-seat charges and no add-on tiers.
- Is there a free trial?
- Yes. Every church gets 30 days free, and no credit card is required to start. You only enter payment details if you decide to continue.
- How is Synodo different from church management software?
- Church management software tracks membership, giving, and attendance across the whole congregation. Synodo focuses on the group itself: what a leader prepares before a meeting, what happens during it, what the group does afterward, and who is quietly drifting away.
- Does Synodo work with Planning Center?
- Yes. Connect your Planning Center account and you can import a group’s people into Synodo, or push a Synodo group back into Planning Center Groups — filtering by your own Planning Center tags to find the right groups. People are matched on any email address either system holds, so nobody is duplicated, and Synodo never removes anyone from your records. You pick which groups; nothing is synced automatically.
- Can we use our own material?
- Yes. Build your own study from scratch, or copy a ready-made template and edit it freely. Every group gets its own copy, and you can push later improvements down without overwriting what an individual group has tailored.
- Is our church's data private?
- Each church's data is fully isolated from every other church. Passwords are hashed, all traffic is encrypted, and uploaded files are restricted to the church that owns them. Your content is never sold, shared with advertisers, or used to train AI models.
- Can we export or delete our data?
- At any time. An administrator can download the entire church as a single file, and any member can download their own data. You can also delete a person or the whole church permanently from Settings.
- Does Synodo work on phones and computers?
- Yes — on a computer, a tablet and a phone, in the browser you already have. Leaders and admins usually plan on a computer; members mostly open it on their phone, where it installs to the home screen on iPhone and Android and sends push notifications for messages and meeting reminders. It is the same account and the same groups everywhere, with nothing to download from an app store.