Compare
vs Zen Planner
Zen Planner was built in 2006 by a martial arts school owner, it is owned by Daxko now, and it is the default answer for boxes, dojos, and academies for good reasons — belt ranks, skills tracking, and twenty years of gym-specific habits baked in. This is a closer fight than most pages on this site. Here is exactly where each of us is stronger.
01 — Side by side
The honest table.
| Category | Eco Systems CRM | Zen Planner |
|---|---|---|
| Heritage | Built by retail and studio operators who run their own locations on it; the gym build is newer than the studio one. | Built inside a martial arts school in 2006, refined ever since, and used by thousands of fitness businesses. Deep genre knowledge. |
| Ranks & workouts | Not built. Belt ranks and workout logging are roadmap, not product — we say so rather than describe an intention. | A core strength: belt and rank progression plus workout tracking, which is precisely why martial arts schools pick it. |
| Lead handling | Included: a funnel board, a public capture endpoint with a honeypot for your site, and convert-to-member in one action. | Capable, but the CRM piece is commonly sold as a separate priced module on top of the base plan. |
| Membership shapes | Recurring plans, one-time sign-up fees as a checkout line item, and paid-in-full terms that expire on schedule instead of running forever. | Mature recurring billing with auto-renew, scheduled payments, and reminders. |
| Failed payments | Billing engine mirrors Stripe invoice outcomes into a schedule, applies a late fee once (never twice), dunns once a day, and gives the desk retry / cancel / mark-paid on every row. | Recurring billing with retries handled inside its own payments stack. |
| Payments & payouts | Stripe Connect on your own Stripe account — direct charges, Checkout, Terminal. Payouts and disputes in a dashboard you own. | Steered toward its in-house processing; public sources report added gateway fees for bringing your own processor. |
| Door & check-in | Member QR in the app, a USB scanner listener that works anywhere in the portal, a door toast with photo, standing, and notes, plus kiosk and self check-in in a −60/+30 minute window. Kisi smart-lock control is experimental and untested. | Check-in and kiosk options with an established hardware/access ecosystem around them. |
| Pricing shape | One published number: $200/mo + one-time $500 setup, 5,000 texts included, 2¢ after, month to month. | Tiered monthly plans where CRM, website, and branded app are separately priced add-ons that stack on the base tier. |
| Leaving | Month to month. Export everything, no exit invoice. | Month-to-month by default with discounted annual terms; a data-export charge on departure is reported across public review sources. |
Zen Planner details drawn from its own site and public review sources as of September 2026. Its plan prices move and are reported inconsistently across third-party sites, so specific figures are deliberately not quoted here — get them from Zen Planner. Spot something out of date? Email [email protected] and we'll fix it.
02 — Fair is fair
Where Zen Planner beats us outright
Ranks. If you run a jiu-jitsu academy, a karate dojo, or anything where a student's progress is the product, Zen Planner tracks belt and rank progression and we do not. It is on our roadmap and it is not in the product, and a page that fudged that would deserve to lose your business. Same story for workout and WOD logging — theirs works, ours doesn't exist.
Behind that is two decades of accumulated gym-specific detail, a large installed base to compare notes with, and the support apparatus of a much bigger company. When a vendor has been doing one niche since 2006, it has already met the strange edge case your school is about to hit. We are newer, and we will meet some of those the hard way.
03 — Where we win
Sales, money, and the front door.
Leads are included, not a module. A trial enquiry lands from a public capture form on your own site — honeypot-protected, no third-party form embed — onto a funnel board, and converts into a member in one action. A growth report tells you what happened to the cohort. When lead handling is a separately priced CRM add-on, the small gym that most needs it is exactly the one that skips it.
Membership shapes that end when they should. Sign-up fees ride along as a one-time line on the subscription checkout. Paid-in-full plans are a payment-mode checkout that writes a term membership with a real end date, and an hourly job expires it — so a 12-month PIF stops granting access in month 13 instead of drifting. A renewal email goes out seven days before.
Failed payments handled like an operator would. Stripe's invoice results mirror into a payment schedule; a late fee is applied once and marked before it charges, so a retry can never double-fee a member; dunning runs once a day, not on every tick. The desk sees Failed & overdue / Scheduled / Paid, and can retry, cancel, mark paid, or schedule a one-off charge without leaving the tab. Money invariants are enforced in tests: credits never go negative, refunds cap at what was granted, a waitlist member is charged at promotion rather than when they joined, and the till expects float plus cash sales minus cash refunds.
The front door. Every member has a QR code in the member app. A twenty-dollar USB scanner anywhere in the gym office raises a check-in toast with photo, name, standing, and notes — red and sticky if something's wrong, with a deliberate "let in anyway" button, because software should never strand a paying member at the door at 5am. Pack and pass holders without a membership show up as visitors so nobody is silently mistaken for a member. Class check-in also runs from the counter kiosk and from the member's own phone in a −60/+30 minute window.
One number. $200/mo, 5,000 texts included, 2¢ after, $500 once for setup and migration, month to month. Website, member app, leads, billing, reports, and the door are all inside it. And if you scan InBody, the challenges engine turns body-composition results into a real competition with automatic point awards — see Eco Systems for gyms.
Weighing the bigger vendor too? The honest version of that fight is vs Mindbody, and the full lineup is on the compare index.
04 — Questions
Straight answers.
Do you track belt ranks or skills progression?
Not today. Belt ranks and workout tracking are on our roadmap, not in the product, and Zen Planner does both well because it was built inside a martial arts school. If ranking is central to how you run classes, buy the tool that does it and tell us to come back later.
Is there a Zen Planner importer?
Not a purpose-built one. Our importer was written against Mindbody-shaped exports — clients, remaining pack and credit balances, and the schedule — and a Zen Planner migration is mapped onto it by hand as part of the one-time $500 setup. Every run happens in dry-run first so you approve the row counts and the rejects before anything is written. Marketing consent never migrates: it arrives pending and members opt in again on our side.
Can members get in the door without a staff member at the desk?
Yes, with a scanner. Every member carries a QR code in the member app, and a cheap USB scanner at the door pops a toast in the portal with their photo, name, standing, and any notes — red if something is wrong, with a deliberate "let in anyway" button so nobody gets stranded by software. Powered turnstiles and smart locks are a different matter: our Kisi door-access integration is experimental and has not been tested against a real Kisi organisation, so we will not sell it as done.
How do paid-in-full and sign-up fees work?
A sign-up fee is a one-time line item on the subscription checkout. A paid-in-full plan is a payment-mode checkout that creates a term membership with a real end date, and an hourly job expires it when the term runs out, so a 12-month PIF does not quietly keep granting access in month 14. Renewal email goes out 7 days ahead.
05 — Next step
Judge it on the desk, not the table.
Twenty minutes: a real check-in scan, an overdue member getting retried, a paid-in-full plan expiring on cue, and an honest answer about ranks.
$200/mo platform · 5,000 texts included · no contracts