our church website needs to move from an old platform to something modern. I found some services that do CMS migrations for a flat fee. Are these legit or am I better off hiring a freelancer?
The flat-fee migration services (like CMS2CMS or similar) handle the data transfer but not the design or customization. They export content from platform A and import to platform B. For simple content (pages and blog posts), they work fine.
The limitation is that they do not handle custom functionality, design matching, or SEO setup. You get your content in the new platform with a default theme. For a church website that is probably acceptable.
A freelancer gives you more customization but costs more and takes longer.
for a church website I would honestly recommend just starting fresh on Squarespace or WordPress.com. Church sites are usually 10-20 pages that you can recreate manually in a weekend. The cost of a migration service might be more than the time value of just copying and pasting the content yourself.