Podium vs. Zen Planner

Zen Planner

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Podium	Score 7.0 out of 10	N/A	Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.	$249 per month 3 users
Zen Planner	Score 7.0 out of 10	N/A	Zen Planner is a comprehensive member management software for gyms, affiliate gyms, martial arts schools, MMA schools and fitness studios. The vendor says this solution provides everything necessary to turn the user’s passion into a successful business. With integrated payment processing and automated billing, a self-service Kiosk iPad App, an engaging Member App for Android and Apple devices, scheduling, automations, Advanced Workout Tracking, belt and skill tracking, site templates and…	N/A

Pricing

Podium

Zen Planner

Editions & Modules

Podium Essentials: $249
per month 3 users
Podium Standard: $409
per month Unlimited users
Podium Professional: $599
per month Unlimited users

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Podium	Zen Planner
Free Trial
Yes	Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

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Zen Planner offers straightforward, no-nonsense pricing plans for fitness businesses. Pricing is based off the number of active members your fitness business currently has. Pricing plans start at $75 a month. There are no contracts, startup fees or hidden fees, and key features like payment processing and workout tracking are included in the monthly plan.

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Podium	Zen Planner
Considered Both Products	Podium Verified User Anonymous Chose Podium In my opinion, Openphone is 10x better. Literally 1/5 the price. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Podium I haven't used any other service. Incentivized Helpful? LQ Laura Quintero CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) Chose Podium Just selected Podium as it had a partnership with our parent dealer company, a choice we do regret today Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Podium We haven't tried or looked at others. However, we are now looking at 8X8. Incentivized Helpful? Stephen Ogburn Vice President Chose Podium We are currently talking to them because of our interest in document signatures. Incentivized Helpful? DH Donna Hampton Office Administrator/HR Chose Podium Reviewvio was terrible. Actually, it was always done and having "bugs" that keep things from working properly. And we have attempted to cancel the subscription and they are still charging our card. Incentivized Helpful? GH Greg Housewirth Partner Chose Podium I trust Podium and am not willing to switch to another platform. Incentivized Helpful? MM Megan Mazer Digital Communications Professional Chose Podium I can't recall the 'other' company we considered this year, but Podium won out because of the 'team chat' feature. It is our primary means of communicating with one another, both one-to-one and via teams/groups. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Podium Similar but Birdeye is less expensive. Incentivized Helpful? MM Matt Merrick Board Member Chose Podium Podium had reached out to me years ago and stayed in touch. I felt they were the best and most professional company. Some others in our industry had tried competitors with mixed results. I did not even shop around when we went with Podium. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Podium We had the advantage of Podium integrating with our point of sale software already so that was a huge plus. We also felt that SMS gave people more freedom to communicate at their pace on their mobile device rather than being tied to a web browser or figuring out which tab they … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Podium I haven't looked into the competitive platforms yet but I will be doing that. Incentivized Helpful? SP Shay P Owner Chose Podium We have tried a few, but I won't mention them by name. This is a review of Podium. Incentivized Helpful? LM LEANORA MONTELLO Manager of Sales Chose Podium used to use "Skipio" for texting and "social climb" for reviews, using all different systems for something one product can do, is just a pain! So it has been FANTASTIC! We use Podium all day every day and we had to log in to multiple account systems to do all the things that … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Podium I have never heard of any of these other companies. I met Podium at the Las Vegas Furniture Market Trade Show and signed up right away because I could see the value in it. The sites we see most reviews on are Google, Yelp, and Trip Advisor. I didn't know there were more … Incentivized Helpful? Jordan Barrick Vice President Chose Podium We have evaluated multiple smaller companies that do not appear on TrustRadius including Swell, Yext, Solutions by Text, and ReviewInc. We currently utilize Podium for its integrations with our point of sale system and the fact that they have negotiated the cheapest rate on … Incentivized Helpful? MC Matthew Comer Sales Consultant Chose Podium The other software we have used which I will not name has an incredibly clunky UI that is straight out of the '90s. On top of that conversations are hardly organized making it difficult to manage multiple conversations. Podium is faster, more efficient, easier to learn, and … Incentivized Helpful? Joshua Christopherson Chief Executive Officer Chose Podium I haven't seen a comparable product to Podium. They do the best job at this. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Podium We used Reputation.com in the past. We were receiving tons of negative reviews from their email blasts. Incentivized Helpful? Brock Bruce President & Co-Founder I Onsite Paper Shredding I Document Destruction I Hard Drive Shredding Expert Chose Podium BirdEye was not easy to use and it did not give us the features we were looking for such as SMS and our employees would not use because it slowed them down with little ROI. Incentivized Helpful? Emily Gatlin Fixed Operations Marketing Chose Podium 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Max Pourlak Director of Sales and Marketing Chose Podium This is the first of its kind we have used for reviews. Incentivized Helpful? Jorel Cook Operations Manager Chose Podium Their product is up to date and always improving. The other software we were using was more expensive and ancient in the software world. Incentivized Helpful? Ross Lugasi Web Content Specialist Chose Podium Very comfortable, however, where Podium offers a flat rate for all of its services, Reputation.com has an "al la carte" approach where you select the services you wish to use. Examples: Auto-sending review request, responding to messages sent back by customers, in-depth … Incentivized Helpful? Scott Keeler Corporate Internet Director Chose Podium We use Digital Air Strike at our two GM dealerships because it is one of a small list of reputation management companies authorized by GM as part of their SFE program. Digital Air Strike surveys our customers and invites them to write a review about our dealership. It is not as … Incentivized Helpful?	Zen Planner Ben Egbert Realtor® Chose Zen Planner I have not used any product that are similar to Zen Planner in any way. Incentivized Helpful? Sanjit Mandal Digital Marketing Strategist, Founder Chose Zen Planner I switched from Mindbody because their costs were adding up, and I wanted to have the ability to have the students log in to track attendance. If I wanted a certain feature, I had to upgrade, then downgrade if I wasn't using it. ZenPlanner is paid by the number of students, not … Incentivized Helpful?

Best Alternatives
	Podium	Zen Planner
Small Businesses	Yext Score 7.3 out of 10	Kajabi Score 8.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Yext Score 7.3 out of 10	No answers on this topic
Enterprises	Yext Score 7.3 out of 10	No answers on this topic
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Podium	Zen Planner
Likelihood to Recommend	6.8 (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	10.0 (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	7.0 (0 ratings)	- (0 ratings)
Availability	10.0 (0 ratings)	- (0 ratings)
Performance	10.0 (0 ratings)	- (0 ratings)
Support Rating	9.0 (0 ratings)	- (0 ratings)
Implementation Rating	10.0 (0 ratings)	- (0 ratings)
Product Scalability	10.0 (0 ratings)	- (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Podium	Zen Planner
Likelihood to Recommend	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 Scott Keeler Corporate Internet Director Read full review	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 Ben Egbert Realtor® Read full review
Pros	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! MM Megan Mazer Digital Communications Professional Read full review	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 Ben Egbert Realtor® Read full review
Cons	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 Lauren Morgan Marketing Manager Read full review	The kiosk (attendance) interface seems to be lagging. A stronger android app. Incentivized Sanjit Mandal Digital Marketing Strategist, Founder Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	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 LM LEANORA MONTELLO Manager of Sales Read full review	No questions about that, I'm with Zen Planner for a while! They have everything I need and more. Incentivized Sanjit Mandal Digital Marketing Strategist, Founder Read full review
Usability	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. Rick Overholt Founder \ GM Read full review	No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability	We haven't had any outages or issues whenever we need it over the last few years of use Incentivized Joshua Christopherson Chief Executive Officer Read full review	No answers on this topic
Performance	It moves quickly and has no issues with delays. Performance is good as it is a web-based tool Incentivized Joshua Christopherson Chief Executive Officer Read full review	No answers on this topic
Support Rating	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review	No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating	We only had a hard time getting our technicians to remember to send the review invites. Incentivized Jorel Cook Operations Manager Read full review	No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered	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 Emily Gatlin Fixed Operations Marketing Read full review	I have not used any product that are similar to Zen Planner in any way. Incentivized Ben Egbert Realtor® Read full review
Scalability	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 Joshua Christopherson Chief Executive Officer Read full review	No answers on this topic
Return on Investment	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 Stephen Ogburn Vice President Read full review	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 Ben Egbert Realtor® Read full review
ScreenShots		Zen Planner Screenshots