Mindbody is business management software for gyms and spas, as well as fitness and yoga studios built around appointment scheduling and online bookings and calendaring, from the company of the same name in San Luis Obispo, California. Notably, the platform also contains marketing automation to maintain club member engagement, and enrollment.
$129
per month
Phorest
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Phorest is a salon management software platform from, from Phorest Salon Software in Ireland. The software focuses on appointments and online bookings and document management and elimination, as well as review collection, reputation management, staff performance reports, and client remarketing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
