Mindbody vs. Phorest

Mindbody excels in areas that rely on the "bread and butter" of its design: scheduling, member management, and payment processing. Overall as a fitness center management solution, Mindbody is by far the best product we have used and they have evolved their capabilities in good alignment with our needs as well.

Incentivized

It's well suited if you own a salon and are looking for a software to manage all of your needs - stock/inventory, staff schedules, client bookings and rebookings. It's more salon focused than clinic focused (e.g. if you have a wellness center it's not ideal for consent forms for example). Changing staff price offering is a bit time consuming.

• Mindbody does a great job of sending out reminder emails to clients so they do not miss a class.
• Mindbody does a great job at giving instructors a fast and easy way to check in clients and to see who is all signed up for their classes for the week.
• Mindbody has a great payroll feature. All you have to do is set the dates and it generates a nicely laid out PDF of all the classes you taught during that time period and what you have made from them.

• Appointment scheduling
• SMS Reminders
• Rebooking SMS
• Support
• Managing Clients

• There is so much functionality and not enough accountability. I wish there were more tracking of all transactions done on the clients or operations end to be able to review history and learn from mistakes.
• The Mindbody branded app connection needs more attention.
• Please add a covid vaccination checker to the application (not just to use in the web browser). It has taken way too long to get this feature.

Incentivized

• Better UI/UX - more intuitive to use
• Better customer service support
• Would prefer more hand holding during onboarding experience

Settings are often buried, user interface rules vary depending on whether it's a newer feature or an older one. From daily usage, people learn how it works and get used to it, but it's not something someone could just pick up without any training or hand-holding.

Incentivized

Constant errors and TERRIBLE PRODUCT support

Fails at everything form availability to reliability.

Mindbody support takes forever to get back to you via email in my experience. The process is not as simple as it was back when they had the chat feature. I really wish they would bring that back! Most items are normally some weird glitch that they can fix in minutes but you have to wait days now.

Incentivized

Mindbody is really the only system of its kind that is widely used by fitness and yoga studios. Its app is the industry standard for looking up and signing up for classes, so most students rely on it exclusively. If there were another viable alternative it would have to promise more ease of use and intuitive backend.

Incentivized

Phorest is a more modern software, although it can still be more intuitive to use its much better than other options out there. I feel it works great for someone who has been using salon software for many years and wants to upgrade to something more modern, or for someone who is switching over from pen and paper to manage their appointments

Constant errors and ZERO support from the company.

• I've had agents help me set something up that ended up costing time and money because it was done wrong. [In my experience], less senior agents need to stop guessing or going with "I think so" and talk to a senior agent to make sure what they are telling the client is correct.
• The app is good exposure.

• More organization
• Helped with business processes