Mindbody vs. Timely booking & payments system

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

I've researched a lot of salon software, and Timely was the top-of-the-line software that does it all compared to competitors. It has a friendly interface, offers easy ways to communicate with clients via text and emails, and provides insights and reports, so it indeed does everything you need for booking software. On top of that, it's cloud-based, so say goodbye to only accessing your appointment book through your computer at the salon.

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.

• Integration with Google Calendar allows avoiding double ups
• Automatic appointment bookings with SMS reminders
• Xero integration and Automatic Invoicing, Payments and Partial Reconciliation
• Multiple Staff Members to be booked
• Facebook Integration, allows people to book from Facebook

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

• UI/UX
• Cloud based system
• Has to be more customer friendly

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

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

Timely is by far the most user-friendly and fun to use. It's got a great interface, works on iPads, and training is super easy for the team. Other software is clunky and takes too long to set up and train the team to use.

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.

• Bragging rights, yes. Always cool to tell how automated your business is.
• ROI, no. In our case, it wasn't worth the time spent in integration into the website, system setup, plus subscription fee. However, take into account, that High-Value Professional Services is a wrong industry for this product.
• Convenience and confidence that there will be no double booking across G Suite and Timely was tested and were really handy at the times.
• No ability to use our own SMTP. If your server has Anti-Spoofing DKIM and etc., setting it up with Timely was a nightmare as support had no idea. So a lot of emails were going to Spam on the client's side.

Incentivized