Sexton and CemeteryBase

The short version

CemeteryBase is cloud software you can sign up for yourself and use the same day. It includes a public side — families can look up an ancestor by name without an account — plus online plot payments and a deed generator.

Sexton installs on the office computer and keeps the register there. There is no public page and no card processing, on purpose.

If you want families to be able to search your cemetery online, stop reading and buy CemeteryBase. Sexton does not do that and is not going to.

Price, as published

	Sexton	CemeteryBase
Yearly	$750	$899, or $99 a month
Setup	None	None to self-serve; assisted setup $499–$2,499
Where records live	Your computer	CemeteryBase's servers
Public search for families	No	Yes
Online payments from families	No	Yes
Works with no internet	Yes	No

$149 a year apart. Nobody should choose between these two on price.

The real difference

CemeteryBase is a good, honest, flat-priced product, and its self-serve setup is genuinely faster than anything I offer. The question it asks you to answer is whether your cemetery's register should be a service you subscribe to or a file you keep.

A subscription is somebody else carrying the backups, the updates and the uptime. That is worth real money and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It also means that if the company changes hands, changes its price, or closes, your options are whatever the export button gives you on the day you find out.

A file on your own machine puts the backup on you — Sexton writes them automatically, but putting a copy somewhere else is a thing a person has to do. In exchange, nothing about your records depends on anyone else still being in business.

Choose CemeteryBase if

• You want families to search your records online without calling the office.
• You want to sell plots or take payments through a website.
• You want to be running today, without waiting on an invoice or a phone call.
• Board members in different towns need to be in the same records.
• You would rather pay monthly.

Choose Sexton if

• The board pays by check, once a year, after a meeting.
• You specifically do not want your burial records published.
• The office internet is unreliable.
• You want the association's ledger, dues, perpetual care, stone repairs and events in the same place as the plots.
• You want to be able to hand the next volunteer a file, not a login.