Three UK products publish a lower per-funeral rate than Funeral Manager's £11.70: Evolution FMS at £5.00 plus VAT per record, eFD Premium at £10 a funeral, and Arranger at "from £10". Only one of the three is unambiguously cheaper once the first year is counted.
Rates read from funeralmanager.co.uk/pricing(opens in a new tab), www.funeralsoftware.co.uk/information(opens in a new tab), seker.co.uk/pricing(opens in a new tab) and arranger.com/pricing(opens in a new tab), last verified on 12 August 2026.
£11.70 is two records added together
Funeral Manager's headline is a composition. Its FAQ states £3.20 for a care-of-the-deceased record, which it calls its digital mortuary, and £8.50 for an arrangement record; added together those are the £11.70 on the pricing page.
The two components are separable, and that matters before a comparison. A firm holding someone in care without arranging the funeral pays £3.20 and no more; a firm arranging without taking the deceased into its own care pays £8.50. A firm doing a lot of removals for others is not paying £11.70 a case, and its real comparison against a flat per-funeral rival is not the headline one. The full composition of that rate is its own page.
Two things Funeral Manager does not charge for, which several alternatives do: there is no seat charge, and there are no tiers, so the full core system arrives at every volume. The £11 figure still circulating in search results is a superseded headline and appears nowhere on the site.
The bill has no ceiling
No volume discount is published, no cap and no enterprise tier. The model is linear all the way up.
A 1,000-funeral firm pays fifty times what a 20-funeral firm pays for the same software and the same helpdesk. Whether the largest customers pay list is unknown. Funeral Manager's best-documented reference, A.W. Lymn, moved to the product in September 2025(opens in a new tab) with 25 funeral homes and more than 130 employees, and no rate is published for an account that size. The absence of a published enterprise tier is not evidence that no private one exists.
Two costs sit outside the rate card. Onboarding is described as including record migration, configuration and an in-person visit from a named training manager, with no price attached and no statement that it is free. And the pricing page does not say whether £11.70 includes VAT, which every comparator that discloses states explicitly.
The listicles return American products
The alternatives page a search hands you returns Osiris, Gather, FrontRunner, Obit and Prospect. Four of the five are built for the United States, and the mismatch is regulatory.
American case management is shaped by the FTC Funeral Rule, which prescribes a General Price List and a Statement of Funeral Goods and Services Selected, and by state electronic death registration, which is what US vendors compete on. None of that touches the UK set. Cremation Form 1, replaced on 9 September 2024, is the form the applicant signs; the green form is issued by the registrar after registration and must reach the crematorium or burial authority before the funeral. No US product on that list publishes either.
Obit is the only one priced in a way a UK firm can read: from EUR 10 plus VAT per funeral, European origin, selling into the UK, unlimited users and devices, Sage50 and QuickBooks integration included. Osiris publishes a floor of USD 79 a month and quotes the rest by phone, priced on at-need call volume rather than per funeral. Gather and FrontRunner are quote-only. Prospect is a US product whose UK availability and pricing are unknown.
Rates read from www.obit.cloud(opens in a new tab) and osirissoftware.com/pricing(opens in a new tab), last verified on 14 August 2026.
Three UK products publish a rate, and one will not define its unit
Eulogica publishes nothing in any of its five country editions and appears on no review aggregator, so there is no starting figure to compare against.
Evolution FMS publishes the lowest number and never defines the noun. Oak's pricing sentence says there are no setup fees and no ongoing support fees because everything is included, for £5.00 per record plus VAT. Nothing anywhere on the site says what a record is, so £6.00 and £12.00 a funeral are both consistent with what it publishes - roughly half Funeral Manager, or more than it. Ask before you sign whether a funeral where you take the deceased into your care and then arrange the service consumes one record or two.
eFD is cheaper per funeral and adds 30 per cent in year one. Seker publishes £10 a funeral on Premium and £15 on Enterprise, no volume limit, a 12-month initial term, and onboarding at 30 per cent of the first year's subscription paid in advance. At 120 funerals that is £1,200 plus £360, so £1,560 against Funeral Manager's £1,404 with an unpriced onboarding on top; at 250 it is £3,250 against £2,925. eFD only pulls clearly ahead from year two, and only on Premium, which is scoped to 1-5 branches and 15 users. Aftercare management, CMA-specific reporting and unlimited integrations are all Enterprise-gated, and Enterprise at £15 is dearer than Funeral Manager at every volume.
Arranger publishes a floor rather than a price. Its pricing page names a per-funeral model with a tiered structure and then routes to email: no tier names, no bands, no setup fee, no minimum, no VAT treatment. There is also a second bill from the same company, since Funeral Zone Ltd runs the consumer marketplace funeralguide.co.uk at £99 plus VAT a month per home. That is £1,188 plus VAT a year, around £12 a funeral at 100 funerals, more than the software headline.
Who each alternative suits
Evolution FMS suits a firm that wants its documents, forms, reports and invoices in its own layouts, uses Xero, QuickBooks or Sage 50, and will establish the record definition in a phone call.
eFD suits a multi-branch firm that needs mortuary capacity tracking, fleet, masonry, repatriation and stock, and will use the Enterprise reporting. It was built inside CPJ Field, a tenth-generation funeral group, before it was productised, and East of England Co-op rolled it out company-wide through a formal tender in November 2025.
Arranger suits a firm whose priority is the arrangement meeting itself: a visual catalogue on a tablet, instant estimates with auto-prompts for missing items, remote arrangement by phone or video. It suits a firm already paying for a Funeral Guide listing far better than one that is not.
Obit suits a firm comfortable buying from a European vendor and reading its bill in euros. Unlimited users and devices, no minimum term, and a floor rather than a rate card.
Staying put suits a low-volume firm. At 20 funerals a year £234 is hard to beat in absolute terms, and Funeral Manager's compliance surface is the strongest in the UK field: a complaints and governance module no other UK vendor advertises, and a field-level change log recording reason and author.
None of them models the wait on a doctor, medical examiner, coroner or registrar as an object with an owner and an age. Across all five UK products the chase is a checklist, a staff task or a note.
What Funeral Casework will charge
Cases will be bought in prepaid packs rather than metered monthly. One credit will cover one funeral, credits will never expire, users will be unlimited at every pack size, and no VAT will be added.
Because packs combine, 120 cases will be £1,050, 250 will be £1,925 and 1,000 will be £6,500, against Funeral Manager's £1,404, £2,925 and £11,700 at the same volumes.
Evolution FMS at £6.00 a record undercuts the pack ladder at every volume, if a record is a funeral. What the packs buy instead is a rate that falls as the firm grows rather than a bill that rises in a straight line, with no seat charge, tier gate or onboarding fee on top. The wider field, including the two vendors who publish nothing, is in what UK funeral director software costs.
Funeral Casework