Sexton and Cemify

The short version

Cemify is cloud software with mapping and digitization services behind it. You reach it from a browser on any machine, and Cemify's people can do the hard first step — turning your paper into data and drawing your grounds — for a fee.

Sexton is a program that installs on the office computer. The records are a file on that machine, there is no account, and you lay out the map yourself. It costs one flat price with nothing added on.

The decision is usually not about features. It is about whether you want to pay somebody to do the setup, and whether you want your register in the cloud or in your own building.

Price, as published

	Sexton	Cemify
Yearly	$750, one price	$799, $1,299, or $1,899 depending on tier
Setup	None	Records-only setups start low; mapping is commonly quoted at $1,000–$1,500 per acre
Where records live	Your computer	Cemify's servers
Works with no internet	Yes	No
Billing	Yearly invoice, check accepted	Annual plans

The number that actually decides it

The yearly prices are close enough not to matter much. The first-year cost is not.

Mapping quoted by the acre is the line item to look at hard. At $1,000 to $1,500 an acre, a six-acre country cemetery is somewhere between six and nine thousand dollars of setup before a single subscription payment. For a board with an annual budget under $100,000 — which describes most cemetery associations in the country — that is not a line item, it is the whole year.

Sexton has no equivalent charge because the map is not a service. You drag sections into place until the screen matches the grounds. It takes an afternoon, and it is free because you did it.

That is a real trade, not a free lunch: an afternoon of your time against a professionally produced map. Which is worth more depends entirely on whether you have the afternoon.

Choose Cemify if

• You want somebody else to do the digitizing and the mapping, and the board can fund it.
• Several people in different places need to be in the records.
• You want to look things up from a phone at the graveside.
• Nobody at the association wants to be responsible for a file on a computer.

Choose Sexton if

• The budget is small and a four-figure setup bill would end the conversation.
• You would rather hold your own records than rent access to them.
• The office has poor internet, or none.
• You also need the association's side of things — dues, donations, perpetual care, the yearly ledger, headstone repairs, Decoration Day — and not only the burial records.
• You want one invoice a year that you can pay by check after a board meeting.

What Cemify does that Sexton does not

Professional mapping and digitization as a service. Access from any device, anywhere. A hosted system where the backups are somebody else's job. If those matter to you, Cemify is a good product and I would rather you bought it than bought mine and resented it.

What Sexton does that Cemify does not

Runs with the internet unplugged. Keeps the register in a file you can copy to a flash drive. Costs the same in year one as in year five. Treats the association's money, events and stone repairs as first-class parts of the job rather than add-ons.