Mindbody vs. Podium vs. Zen Planner

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

The way we use Podium is that when the customer agrees to purchase a vehicle and is waiting to go into the finance office for paperwork (which can be anywhere from a 10-60 minute wait), the salesperson sends the review invite while sitting with them. The customer is more likely to write a review during some downtime, while they are excited about their new purchase, and happy with the salesperson who has been serving them.

Incentivized

I have used Zen Planner at 3 different Jujitsu schools. Every school that has used it, has had great success in keeping their attendance records straight for their students. This is great when promotions are coming up, or special seminars that need to reach everyone. I don't know that Zen Planner is a great product for places that don't need to communicate with their clients on a regular basis.

Incentivized

• Mindbody has a plethora of capabilities that range from something as simple as check in to more complex as reports. All in one spot.
• Mindbody has an over-the-phone support time and major of their team members are well versed and educated.
• Mindbody allows for you to cooperate with both your clients and your staffs needs.

Incentivized

• Maintains conversations indefinitely, so we are able to go back to confirm details from conversations.
• Provides the ability for our company to have a 'team' messaging platform where we can communicate with one another via single person to a single person, groups where we can add/subtract members of the group... this is invaluable to our organization.
• Until today(!), we could 'share' or forward a message to one another; oddly, that feature disappeared just today, so I'm hoping it's a glitch!

• Being able to log in from a phone saves quite a bit of time
• If I want to see if there is an upcoming class I can check in on the app
• I can have multiple accounts for any company that uses Zen Planner without having to download a separate app to log in.

Incentivized

• Some processes are not initially intuitive and take some training to learn.
• The price could be a little lower to help small business owners succeed.
• Some sort of alert when a client creates a profile and already has one.
• A way to view which clients haven't signed a waiver when logged into the staff computer.

Incentivized

• Account manager communications: I had been asking my Podium account manager for integration with our CRM tool for over 8 months before my account manager fell silent. After another 6 months, I proactively reached out only to find out that the integration had been in Beta for months and 8 other companies had already integrated. It was frustrating that my account manager did not remember a key request and make the Beta available to me the minute that it was open.

Incentivized

• The kiosk (attendance) interface seems to be lagging.
• A stronger android app.

Incentivized

Again, Podium has been so wonderful in the year and a half we have been using it, we are able to integrate it with our CRM and use alot of the available features. The most helpful has been getting TONS of reviews on MULTIPLE sites through Podium!

Incentivized

No questions about that, I'm with Zen Planner for a while! They have everything I need and more.

Incentivized

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

While giving our clients the ability to leave a review was there, we had much worse results and got fewer reviews through the Podium portal than we did by sending our clients simple email requests, or simply having our service staff ask for a review while still on the clients' job sites.

Constant errors and TERRIBLE PRODUCT support

We haven't had any outages or issues whenever we need it over the last few years of use

Incentivized

Fails at everything form availability to reliability.

It moves quickly and has no issues with delays. Performance is good as it is a web-based tool

Incentivized

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

I have to send an email to get information. They have a chat system but I end up having to go through my rep for account questions. It was a little frustrating to not have a direct phone number to call with questions. I would like to see a helpline added.

Incentivized

We only had a hard time getting our technicians to remember to send the review invites.

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

To be completely candid, I have not used another review software other than Podium. I've worked here for just over 2 years, and our company had just started using Podium. Podium has been useful and successful for our team; therefore, there has not been any reason for me to search for a new company. We are happy with Podium

Incentivized

I have not used any product that are similar to Zen Planner in any way.

Incentivized

Constant errors and ZERO support from the company.

Its easy to scale to different departments as needed. We initially began using it to solve one problem and as new features became available it was easy to scale this and include other departments who could benefit from its tools

Incentivized

• Working with the Mindbody software has been a very positive experience overall. i have only had a few problems arise but was able to get those squared away by taking with my boss.
• Mindbody keeps me positive about wanting to come in to work because I do not have to spend time scheduling and taking in payments. I just get to come in and teach my class which is what I really love to do and after a few clicks on my app it does the rest for me.
• The only negative impact Mindbody has had on me is that I have to carry my laptop computer around with me to classes since taking credit card payments does not work on the app. i also have to make sure i always have wifi available if i am using my laptop which i wouldn't have to if it worked on my phone.

• I am glad there are card readers now, sales team members too often try to just send a request instead of taking payment onsite.
• It's made capturing messaging leads much easier.
• It's worth the cost but if it did a few more things it would be worth a lot more to us. Document signatures, surveying after jobs, even geotagging of photos/reviews for SEO

• Zen Planner has cut the time I need to wait in line to sign in. I can do this right from my phone without any issues.
• Being able to track my progress and seeing special classes that will be coming up is a great way to find out, without having to go into the school and ask

Incentivized