What is funeral manager software, and what does it charge for?
The phrase is partly a product name. Funeral Manager is a British system sold to UK funeral directors, and it prices by the record. Around it this search returns PlotBox, which runs a funeral home and a cemetery off one family record; Obit, an Irish cloud system priced by the funeral; and Funeral Data Manager, an American arrangement-room database sold for a flat yearly figure and installable on your own machines. Four of the five below publish a price and no two of them count the same unit, so the cheapest one on paper changes with how many calls you take. Two of the four publish in pounds and euros rather than dollars. Below, what each vendor prints on its own page, read on the same day, then four situations where the difference decides something. Two of the four go elsewhere.
What each vendor's own page shows
Which one, depending on what you are solving
A firm that also holds ground is running two inventories and two sets of books for one bereavement, and the seam between them is where the double entry, the mismatched name and the argument about who was told what all live. PlotBox is the only vendor on this page that offers to close that seam rather than sit on one side of it: it says it will "integrate your funeral home with cemetery or cremation operations" on "one platform that connects both sides of your business", with "one family record" across them. Wrenbook cannot do any part of that. It holds one case at a time with its arrangement, its statement and its payments, and it aggregates nothing above the case: no report, no consolidated figure, no dashboard, and no stock of anything, which for a cemetery means no plots, no sections and no interment rights. The gap is not a missing screen, it is a missing half of the business. The question worth putting to PlotBox, since the page carries no figure, is what the all-inclusive price is when only one of the two sides is yours.
Forms carry revision dates, registrars reject the old one, and the revision is nobody’s project until the day it is urgent. Funeral Data Manager is the only vendor here that hands a firm the means to deal with that itself: customisable forms and reports are part of the product, so the document can be rebuilt in-house rather than waited for. That is a real advantage and it is worth naming plainly, because Wrenbook has no form designer at all and Georgia is the only state it has built. In the other forty-nine there is no form set and no filing clock, and this page publishes no plan for changing that. What the trade-off costs the other way is worth knowing before you choose: a designer means the accuracy of the form is now the firm’s responsibility rather than the vendor’s, and the page describes the tool rather than who keeps it current. Neither Funeral Manager nor Obit answers this at all, because neither is sold for US state filing, and PlotBox’s page does not describe a form library.
This is ordinary and it is where files go wrong. The son signs the authorisation, the daughter gives the certificate details, an aunt in another state is settling the account, and by the third call somebody has phoned the wrong one about money. In Wrenbook the people on a case are modelled with the part they play rather than dropped into one list, so the informant, the family and whoever is paying are separable in the file, the statement and the payments hang off the case rather than off a name, and the signature carries its own consent record. A contacts book is the other shape of this, and Funeral Data Manager names one; a family portal is a third, and PlotBox names that. Neither is the same thing as a role, and what the four other pages describe is who can be reached rather than who is which, which is a statement about those pages on the day they were read and not a claim about what those products hold. It is worth asking in any demo: show me the person who signs, the person who informs and the person who pays, and show me them being three people.
A manager reads more cases than they arrange, and the questions that arrive are about somebody else’s afternoon: where did that date of birth come from, did the family give us this spelling or did we take it off the hospital sheet, was that figure quoted or assumed. Wrenbook records where each field of a case came from, so the answer is in the file rather than in whoever was on that week, and it sits next to the notes taken on the call and the dated milestones of the case. That is the unglamorous half of the record and it is the half that matters when an amendment, an insurer or an estate lawyer arrives six months later. Funeral Data Manager keeps a case summary and a tasks list, Obit names templates and wizards, PlotBox names document management, and Funeral Manager names arrangement records: what none of those pages describes is field-level provenance, which is a statement about those pages rather than about those products, and it is a fair thing to ask them for. Wrenbook’s own limit here is the same one as everywhere on this page: this is a good account of one case, and it is not an account of the firm.
What each one does, and where it stops
Funeral Manager
The only vendor on this page that prices the work itself rather than the month or the seat, and the one whose name this search term is. It charges "£3.20 for a care of the deceased record" and "£8.50 for an arrangement record", so a quiet month costs less than a busy one without anybody renegotiating, and it says there is no long-term contract to leave. It describes itself as "The software of choice for UK funeral directors, built on 30 years of experience", and it runs in the browser on tablets, phones and desktops, hosted by Amazon Web Services. Its named integrations are the ones a British firm actually touches at the counter and in the books: Apple Pay, Google Pay, Open Banking, Xero and Funeral Notices. It holds mortuary records, arrangement records, compliance documents and payments, and it names the Scottish Government’s Code of Practice as something it is built to satisfy.
It is not sold where most readers of this page work. Its market is the United Kingdom, its regulatory reference point is Scottish, its money is in pounds, and none of that converts: a Georgia death certificate is not a British registration, and Xero and Open Banking are not what an American office runs on. Pricing by the record also moves the question rather than answering it, because a firm has to know its own mix of care records and arrangement records before it can turn two figures into a budget, and the page prints the rates rather than that arithmetic. What the thirty years covers is the company rather than this product, and the page gives a reader no way to separate the two.
PlotBox
The one that treats the funeral home and the cemetery as the same business rather than two customers. It offers to "integrate your funeral home with cemetery or cremation operations" on "one platform that connects both sides of your business", held as "one family record", and it describes the funeral side as running "your front office - cases, custody, payments and your website - on one record" so that staff "stay focused on the family in front of them". What it names is unusually physical for this market: chain of custody with QR decedent tracking and mobile scanning, transfer management for removals, a digital schedule covering services and facilities, and in-house cremation with authorisation checkpoints. Alongside those sit arrangement management, at-need and pre-need in one system, document management, a family portal for uploads, PlotBox Pay with general-ledger reconciliation, and an obituary assistant it calls Eva.
It publishes no figure at all. "All-inclusive" describes the shape of a bill rather than its size, and a firm that wants to know whether this is a $200 decision or a $2,000 one has to book the call to find out, which is the opposite of what the four other rows on this page allow. The breadth is also the exposure: when the cases, the custody chain, the payments, the website and the cemetery all sit on one record, leaving is not a migration of one system but of five at once, and nothing on the page describes what that looks like. And the offer it makes to switchers is about forgiving the contract you are already in, which is a sales term rather than a statement about the product.
Obit
The shortest answer on this page to what it costs, and the unit is the one a funeral director can count without a spreadsheet: "€ 10 /funeral", quoted excluding VAT, with "No minimum term contracts" and the whole product included rather than split into tiers, for unlimited users and unlimited devices. Its pitch is the paperwork itself, "Bury your Paperwork in the Cloud", and what it names under that is a short, legible list: remote working, templates and wizards, alerts and notifications, reporting, online notices and condolences, and data security. Reporting and the public condolence page are both on that list, which matters below, because they are the two things this comparison turns on that we do not have at all.
It is priced and sold for Ireland and the European Union, in euros, with sterling as the other option, and nothing on the page describes a US state filing, a general price list under the Funeral Rule, or an American form set. The per-funeral unit also cuts the other way for a firm with a pre-need book or a long tail of work that never becomes a funeral: the meter only runs on the thing it counts, and the page does not say what the rest costs. The feature list is short enough to read in a minute, which is a virtue, and it is also short enough that a reader cannot tell how deep any one of the six goes.
Funeral Data Manager
The one that answers the budget question in a single number, and the only one here that will still run on a machine in your own building. It sells "a complete database solution for managing your Pre-Need and At-Need funeral home cases" for "$995/year", deployed "On-Premises or in our Private Cloud", and available for Windows, Mac, iPhone and iPad. Its centre of gravity is the arrangement room rather than the back office: it names a Visual Arranger for entering data where the family is sitting, and it holds first call information, a case summary, a contacts book, a service schedule and a task list. Customisable forms and reports are part of the product rather than a professional-services engagement, which is the thing that makes it work in a state nobody has built for. It says it "invented the first arrangement room software almost 20 years ago".
Customisable forms means the form is your job. A designer is not a form library: somebody at the firm has to build the state’s document, keep it matching the revision the registrar accepts, and notice when that changes, and the page describes the tool rather than who does that work. On-premises has the same shape, in that a machine in the building is a machine somebody backs up. And a flat annual figure is flat in both directions, so a firm taking thirty calls a year pays the same as one taking three hundred. What the page does not say is what $995 covers when the firm has two locations, which is the first question a growing business will have.
Wrenbook ours
Publishes both figures on the pricing page, "Solo" at "$149 /mo" for firms "up to 75 calls a year" and "Standard" at "$249 /mo" for firms "up to 300", with "Unlimited users" on both, one location on Solo and up to three on Standard, and the terms printed beside them: "No setup fees. No contracts. Free migration. Cancel anytime and take your data with you", plus "Thirty days, no card, your data imported for you." Leaving is described as a thing the product does rather than a thing support arranges, and the code carries it: one click builds a single archive of "cases, documents, contacts, price lists", and a whole organisation’s data can be deleted on request. What it holds is the case and its money. The people on a case are modelled with their roles rather than listed as contacts, so the family, the informant and whoever is paying are distinguishable in the file. Every field carries where its information came from. Notes taken on the call stay attached to the case, milestones are dated, and documents are produced, filed on the case and generated again on demand. The arrangement holds the goods and services chosen, composed as packages from a price list that is versioned, held per establishment and kept in the product rather than beside it; the statement is itemised line by line, archived once settled, with payments recorded against the case. Documents are signed electronically with the consent kept as its own record. Several establishments run under one organisation, teammates are invited by email, and counties are held as data because the registrar that matters depends on the county. For Georgia it fills the death certificate worksheet, the disposition permit, the SSA-721 and the cremation authorisation, and carries the state’s filing deadlines with the statute each one is read from.
Georgia is the only state built, and there is no form designer to build another with, so in the other forty-nine there is neither a filing clock nor a form set and no roadmap of states is published here. It records where a filing stands and does not push a case into a state registry. It exposes nothing publicly, so there is no firm website, no obituary, no condolence page, no online store and no online payment, and no cemetery side to connect to. It prints nothing for the family: no program, no keepsake, no prayer card. It tracks nothing physical, so no remains, no chain of custody, no vehicles and no rooms. And it aggregates nothing at the level of the firm, so there is no report, no dashboard and no inventory. Against this particular set of five, the last two are the ones that decide, and they are the two situations below that go elsewhere.
Where this information comes from
- 01 Each vendor’s claims were read on that vendor’s own pages on September 16, 2026: funeralmanager.co.uk, the funeral home software page on plotbox.com, obit.cloud, funeraldatamanager.com, and our own pricing page.
- 02 None of the four other vendors on this page has appeared on this site before, and the vendors compared on our other pages are absent from this one. The set follows what this search term returns rather than the set used elsewhere.
- 03 Two of these products are priced and sold outside the United States, in pounds and in euros. Those figures are reproduced in the currency the vendor prints, and the rows say which market each is sold into, because a converted figure would be a number no reader will ever be charged.
- 04 These pages were read from France. The vendors here publish one currency each rather than a different one by visitor, so what is reproduced is what their pages print.
- 05 Four lines shown on our own pricing page are not reproduced anywhere here, because the code behind the product does not carry them, and one of the four is a commitment about future states. That gap is being handled where it belongs and not in an article.
- 06 What a vendor says its product does is that vendor’s claim, attributed here rather than confirmed. There is no first-hand use of the four other products behind this page.
- 07 Where this page says a vendor’s page does not describe something, that is a statement about the pages listed above on the day they were read. It is not a claim about what those products can do, and the two are easy to confuse.
- 08 The description of Wrenbook comes from its own code and its own rendered pricing page rather than from a brochure, which is the stricter of the two sources and occasionally the less flattering one.
- 09 Software directories were not used as a source for anything here, including prices, although they are what most of this search term returns.
- 10 The date above is when these pages were read, not when this page was published. Vendors in this market change their pages without notice.