Sexton and Chronicle

Start with the obvious thing

Chronicle offers a free tier — Chronicle Basic — for simple record keeping with a limited number of users. Sexton costs $750 a year. If your cemetery needs somewhere to type names and dates and nothing more, free is a serious answer and you should take it seriously.

Where free stops being the cheaper option is when the thing you actually needed was not record keeping.

Price, as published

	Sexton	Chronicle
Entry price	$750 a year	Free tier; paid plans by quote
Setup	None	Done-for-you digitization, typically 5–12 weeks
Mapping	You draw it, no charge	GIS, 360° and 3D mapping available
Where records live	Your computer	Chronicle's servers
Works with no internet	Yes	No

Choose Chronicle if

• You want to start at no cost and see how far it gets you. This is a good plan and I would give the same advice about my own product if I had a free tier.
• You want somebody else to digitize decades of paper, and you can wait a couple of months for it.
• You want serious mapping — real GIS, aerial imagery, 360° views.
• Your cemetery is large enough that "limited users" would be a problem, and the paid quote still fits.

Choose Sexton if

• You need the association's finances, dues, perpetual care, stone repairs and events — not only the burial register. This is the gap a free record-keeping tier usually leaves.
• You want the annual report, the certificates and the wall map to come out of the same place as the records.
• You want a fixed price you can put in a budget, with no quote and no negotiation.
• You want the register on your own machine and working with the internet unplugged.
• You do not want to wait five to twelve weeks to start.

Being straight about it

Chronicle is a bigger operation with more capability than I have, and their digitization service does a real job that I do not offer. If your paper is bad and your board has money, having professionals turn it into data is worth what it costs.

What I would push back on is the idea that a free tier is free. The cost of software is mostly the hours spent getting your records into it and the years spent depending on it afterward. Choose on whether the shape of the thing fits your cemetery, and treat the first year's price as the smaller question — because for most small associations, it is.