---
slug: evolution-fms-alternatives
title: Evolution FMS alternatives - Oak Technology funeral software | Funeral Casework
description: Four UK alternatives to Oak Technology's Evolution FMS funeral case management, what each publishes as a rate, and the undefined record behind the search.
published: 2026-08-13
---

Token estimate: ~2,200

# Alternatives to Evolution FMS, the UK funeral software from Oak Technology

Four other UK products compete with Oak Technology's Evolution FMS, and three of them publish a per-funeral rate against its undefined per-record one.

Four other UK products compete with Evolution FMS: eFD by Seker, Funeral Manager, Arranger and Eulogica. Three publish a per-funeral rate; Evolution FMS publishes a per-record rate and never says what a record is.

The subject here is **Evolution FMS, the funeral case management system sold by Oak Technology Ltd at funeralsoftware.co.uk**, in use since 1993. It is not the Evolution DMS dealer management system, not the GNOME Evolution mail client, not a fleet management system and not a flight simulator, all of which share the name.

Rates read from [www.funeralsoftware.co.uk/information](https://www.funeralsoftware.co.uk/information/), [seker.co.uk/pricing](https://seker.co.uk/pricing/), [funeralmanager.co.uk/pricing](https://funeralmanager.co.uk/pricing/) and [arranger.com/pricing](https://arranger.com/pricing), last verified on 12 August 2026.

## The undefined record is what sends firms shopping

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, so £6.00. No adjacent sentence, footnote, FAQ or worked example anywhere on the site says what a record is, when it is counted, or whether one funeral consumes one or more.

So £6.00 a funeral and £12.00 a funeral are both consistent with what Oak publishes. At £6.00 it is the cheapest UK funeral software by a distance; at £12.00 it is dearer than Funeral Manager's £11.70. The question to put before signing is whether a funeral where you take the deceased into your care and then arrange the service consumes one record or two. The sourcing on that gap is in [the Evolution FMS pricing piece](https://funeralcasework.co.uk/articles/evolution-fms-pricing).

## The four UK alternatives

| Product | What is counted | Published rate |
| --- | --- | --- |
| eFD (Seker Tech Ltd) | A funeral | £10 Premium, £15 Enterprise, plus onboarding at 30% of year one |
| Funeral Manager (Funeral Manager Ltd) | Two records per funeral | £3.20 plus £8.50, so £11.70 |
| Arranger (Funeral Zone Ltd) | A funeral, tiered by volume | "From £10", no ladder published |
| Eulogica (Eulogica Ltd) | Unknown - subscription, modular | Nothing published |

**eFD** is the serious incumbent: built inside CPJ Field, a multi-branch funeral group, before it was productised, and rolled out company-wide by East of England Co-op through a formal tender in November 2025. It is the strongest documented mortuary product in the UK, tracking each deceased person's location in real time with capacity monitoring and condition checks. Aftercare and CMA-specific reporting sit behind the Enterprise tier.

**Funeral Manager** is the compliance-led option, advertising a complaints and governance module no other UK vendor markets and a field-level change log recording reason and author, aligned to the Scottish Government's Code of Practice.

**Arranger** sells the arrangement meeting: a visual catalogue on a tablet, instant estimates with auto-prompts for missing items, remote arrangement by phone or video. Its parent also runs the funeralguide.co.uk marketplace at £99 plus VAT a month per home, a second bill from the same company.

**Eulogica** has the most developed family-facing layer with a public product page, sold as a paid add-on on top of a core system, and publishes no price at all. [What an Eulogica quote is built from](https://funeralcasework.co.uk/articles/eulogica-alternative) is its own page.

## What Evolution FMS does that the alternatives do not

**Documents in the firm's own layouts** - letters, forms, reports, estimates and invoices in your preferred layout, merged into Word. Eulogica, by contrast, tailors templates for you during onboarding, so a wording change is a support ticket.

**Free accounting integration** to Xero, QuickBooks and Sage 50, each with its own module, advertised as free rather than as a paid add-on. The Sage module is capped at Sage v33.

**Chain of custody on a phone.** The Companion App scans QR codes to confirm a person, personal belongings, coffin, cremated remains or donations related to a particular funeral. Version 9.0.20 added scanning the fridge _bay_ rather than the person, explicitly to avoid unnecessary opening and closing of the fridge.

**No setup fee and no support fee**, on Oak's own statement, against eFD's 30 per cent first-year onboarding charge. Oak also publishes a SignNow integration for e-signature and publishes funeral notices to the firm's own WordPress site free.

## What Evolution FMS does not do

**No paperwork chase.** Nothing published models the wait on a doctor, medical examiner, coroner or registrar; the diary is outsourced to Outlook or Google as a marketed feature. That is a whole-field absence rather than an Evolution FMS one.

**No CMA-shaped price list** - no Standardised Price List schema, no computed attended-funeral total, no one-click publication of the CMA list to the firm's site, despite already shipping a WordPress plugin that publishes notices there.

**No statutory form library published.** Whether a Cremation Form 1 template ships is unknown. Eulogica, by contrast, published exactly which fields its Form 1 report prepopulates.

**Templates as installed files.** Word templates arrive via an installer and live beside the application, so they drift per install and cannot be pushed centrally when a statutory form changes.

**Hardware on top.** The chain-of-custody feature needs QR wristbands, and Oak sells the Zebra ZD510 printer at £499 plus VAT, the wireless variant at £529, and £240 plus VAT per 1,200 wristbands. At 100 funerals a year that printer is ten months of licence fees, taken up front. Oak notes a firm can use a label printer it already owns.

**No family intake published.** A client portal with online payment appears once in the homepage feature list and is described nowhere else - no portal page, no screenshot, no sitemap entry.

## What Funeral Casework will do

Every outstanding wait will be recorded as its own item carrying who it is waiting for, when it was last chased and how many days it has been open, grouped by who is being chased rather than by case. The family will enter their own details from a link with no account and no password.

Cases will be bought in prepaid packs, with unlimited users at every pack size and no VAT added.

| Pack | Price | Per case |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 10 cases | £100 | £10.00 |
| 50 cases | £425 | £8.50 |
| 200 cases | £1,500 | £7.50 |
| 1,000 cases | £6,500 | £6.50 |

Because packs combine, 250 cases will be £1,925, against Evolution FMS's £1,500 to £3,000 at the same volume, which is the undefined record in one line. Published rates across the market are in [what UK funeral director software costs](https://funeralcasework.co.uk/articles/uk-funeral-director-software-cost).

## Q&A

### Who makes Evolution FMS?

Oak Technology Ltd, company number 05783986, an independent family-run IT firm trading from Fitzwilliam, Pontefract, with a registered office in Cheltenham. The product dates to 1993. Oak files under IT consultancy and sells general infrastructure, support and telephony alongside the funeral product.

### How much does Evolution FMS cost?

£5.00 per record plus VAT, so £6.00, with no setup fee and no ongoing support fee on Oak's own statement. What is not published is what a record is, so a funeral could be £6.00 or £12.00 depending on whether care of the deceased and the arrangement count separately.

### Is Evolution FMS cheaper than eFD or Funeral Manager?

At one record per funeral, yes, by a distance: £6.00 against eFD Premium's £10 and Funeral Manager's £11.70. At two records per funeral it is £12.00, above Funeral Manager and below only eFD Enterprise at £15. The vendor is the only source that can settle it.

### Does Evolution FMS work outside the UK?

No. Its trial page states that Evolution FMS is only available for the UK funeral industry, and there is no configuration surface for another jurisdiction. Within the UK it claims code-of-conduct compliance across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.