vs Mindbody

Start with the marketplace, because it is the only item on this page that a feature list can't answer. Mindbody's consumer app is a place where someone who has never heard of your studio goes looking for a Tuesday 6pm class and finds you. That is distribution, and distribution is hard. We do not have it. If a real share of your first-time clients arrive that way, a switch costs you those people, and no amount of white-labelling makes that back.

Then there is plain maturity. Mindbody has been at this for two decades across fitness, spa, salon, and wellness, and it shows: deeper retail and inventory, an add-on catalogue, staff-side tooling for businesses much larger than ours, insurance and financing products, and an integration ecosystem we can't match. If you run six locations with a full front-desk org chart, they have solved problems we have not met yet.

The reasonable read: Mindbody is the safer buy for a studio that wants the biggest vendor and values the app listing. We are the better buy for a studio that wants to own the brand and the bank account, and pay one number.

The marketplace has a price, and it is a percentage of new business plus a member relationship that starts inside someone else's app. With Eco Systems there is no percentage, because there is nothing to take a percentage of: your member app lives on your subdomain with your logo, the public schedule is server-rendered at your own /book page, and there is a schedule widget you can drop into an existing site. A client who books with you is a client of yours, in your list, reachable from your number.

Money works the same way. Card payments run through Stripe Connect on your Stripe account — direct charges for pack and membership purchases, Stripe Checkout for the web flow, Stripe Terminal at the desk. Settlement, refunds, and disputes land in a dashboard you already own. Until a studio connects Stripe, booking simply runs in free mode: no plans, no packs, no payment gate, so you can pilot the schedule before wiring money at all.

And the operating machinery underneath is the part studios actually feel: credit packs with family wallets and a ledger that cannot go negative, waitlists that only charge at promotion, standing reservations, class reminders at 24 and 2 hours, appointments, a front-desk POS with a till count that reconciles to float plus cash sales minus cash refunds, tiered instructor pay with a payroll CSV, and fourteen reports that all export. When a class capacity goes up, open seats fill from the waitlist by themselves. When the teacher changes, the people booked in get told.

Flat pricing is the last piece. $200/mo with 5,000 texts included, 2¢ a text after, $500 once for setup and migration, month to month. That number does not move when you add a second room, a branded app, or a marketing tool — because those aren't add-ons here.

Nobody stays on a platform they dislike because they like it. They stay because the thought of moving five years of clients, half-used ten-packs, and a live schedule is worse. So the importer is a real piece of the product, not a services promise: it reads a Mindbody export and brings across clients, remaining pack and credit balances, and the class schedule — and it runs in dry-run first, which prints what would be written and what it would reject, before a single row lands. You get to look at the diff and say no.

Two honest notes. First, balances are the thing to check line by line, because a half-used pack is money you already took and a client will notice to the visit. Dry-run exists for exactly that argument. Second, marketing consent does not migrate: texting permission collected in another vendor's checkbox arrives as pending, and members opt in again on our side. That is a deliberate choice — carrier A2P registration and TCPA both ask where consent came from, and "the old system said so" is not an answer we're willing to give on your behalf. More on how we handle that in SMS marketing and in what actually breaks in a platform migration.

Running a gym or box rather than a class studio? The same engine adds a leads funnel, paid-in-full terms, and door check-in — see Eco Systems for gyms or the closer fight, vs Zen Planner.