Mindbody vs. Square POS 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

Square POS is by far the easiest POS software to use at events and train additional team members on - even with temporary or first-time employees. It's easy to see how each event is doing in live time. It gives the event manager a real-time view of revenue earned. Its really easy to create/manage/delete users to keep the platform secure.

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 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.

• Mobile transactions (not like from a phone, but in terms of the ability to physically relocate rapidly).
• Simple setup.
• Generally uncomplicated pricing.
• Widespread customer familiarity: because it's so regularly in use in our industry (musicians/entertainment professionals), people know and trust it in a way that you might not with a different provider.

Incentivized

• Easy to use interface
• Payment processing is easy for classes or for a small retail shop.
• The free integrated mobile website is great for everyone to check out the calendar and even sign and pay from within it.
• I can also send emails right from the platform when I need to connect with a student.

Incentivized

• 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

• Too much going on for simple users. There are so many different apps and pages now that I get lost almost every time I log onto Square
• The high percentage of fees taken from sales
• The difficulty in changing default settings
• The layout of the “website” you can create is truly a nightmare

Incentivized

• The only thing I would like to see, is the ability to see my entire attendance from the app. I can view it on the desktop though.

Incentivized

I don't really foresee anything being able to dislodge Square from our organization—we're not evangelists or anything like that—it's just the best solution we've found for our use case. Being able to quickly handle transactions from customers and then track all of those sales for analysis/bookkeeping later on.

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

We find Square POS is very user friendly. Its interface is customizable to our needs and very easy to use. Before we adopted Square POS, we used a combination of solutions from different manufacturer to try and achieve a portion of the functionality that Square POS provides under only 1 login

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

An admission - I have NEVER had to use Square POS support. The system is seamless, it just works! I have never had any queries about how the system worked as everything is so clearly laid out. I have never had any problems with payments. If their support systems are anywhere near as good as their software, I think we'll be in good hands.

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

We only used Square POS while we were getting set up with Authorize.Net. It isn't as flashy or recognized by the general public, but in our industry, that isn't a priority. We do very large transactions so the higher rates and fees from Square add up insanely quickly making the lower rates and fees from Authorize.Net the nail in Square's coffin for us.

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.

• 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.

• The opportunity cost of waiting for payments and manually bringing them to a bank means that we don't have to visit our bank branch. That alone saves us several hours each month.
• We can use ordinary computers and mobile devices with Square instead of paying for expensive software or terminals.
• Our clients appreciate not having to process payments to us, and anything that helps our clients and makes them happy carries more import than I can explain in this space.

Incentivized

• Saves me time in using a paper attendance record sheet.
• Payments are automated, no need to request checks or payments from anyone. Emails are sent out if a payment fails.
• I can keep track of 10, 20, 30, or even 50 students using this platform.

Incentivized