Mindbody

Pros

I can not state more clearly that Mindbody is the leader in what they do. They have their faults because of the way it was designed originally but they are working on those every day but no system on the market is better. I have a feeling that a couple years from now, they be much larger than what they even are now.

Cons

the old design structure of the base platform could use some updates, which they are aware of

Pros

Integrated billing/scheduling/contractor & staff payroll. Automated email messaging. Automated customer billing. A large variety of services thought to improve retention and conversion. Tech support is very knowledgeable, professional and helpful.

Cons

We've been using MB for over 7 years. It was affordable when we started, but has continued to increase in cost. It is now very expensive, by comparison to other offerings. The billing system is extremely complicated to set up and is difficult to train. It's really built for yoga studios, etc., and is not a good solution for music schools. The vast majority of the add-on products they promote are not useful to those that only book recurring appointments, like music schools do. They seem to be designed for pushing individual appointment booking, which is the opposite of what we need. There are constant "improvements" which always add more page loads - when we first started, you could go to any page on the site within 2 clicks. The daily tasks you need are now, all, at least 3 page loads away, if not more. In other words, their improvements always slow us down and don't add any value that we can perceive. The reason we're going to move to something else was cemented this week: On Apr. 1 our Auto-Pays ran like normal. On Apr. 2 they sent us an email informing us that 20% of what they owed us was being held to protect our clients due to changes from the COVID-19 pandemic. We were left scrambling for cash to cover checks we had already written. There was no warning that they were going to short us. They claimed that the "entire processing industry" was doing this, but I can find no evidence that that is true. It looks like they were holding back our money to protect themselves.

Pros

My company has been using this software for over 5 years and I don't think that we have even scratched the surface of all of the features that it can do. We have been satisfied with it's easy use.

Cons

Because it is such an extensive software, the price can be rather high. Especially for small businesses. To top it off, they keep raising the prices every couple of months, but we don't see any new features or improvements to justify the price hike.

Pros

The best pert of MindBody was the Branded App. One touch at the fingertips for purchases by the customer.

Cons

Constant updates that caused issues for booking, purchasing and retaining customers. My email box was virtually packed with issues that MindBody caused from an update to the app. "A fix to fix the problem caused by the fix for a problem we fixed" could be the Moto!

Pros

Before the virus hit, I loved Mindbody. The high monthly fee was worth the expense because the software automatically links up with 3rd party vendors like Class Pass and gym pass. Plus nearly every studio is using this software so it's easy to pick up traveling clients or sales via their dynamic pricing option. In short, the subscription is super high but in normal times you get a lot of it in return. This is not the case at the moment. They did offer 1 month subscription relief and 2 if you commit to 2 years but I don't know if we will make it? Most of the support staff is super friendly and helpful.

Cons

Given it's many features, the software is sophisticated and not easy to use. Could never figure out the private yoga feature or how to show the studio was being rented so for us not to be able to do this - it was very expensive. Also we were one of the first studios to live stream so we got set up prior =however not all mb reps could accurately advise how to set up. We paid for adverting on fb and google, got many clicks and zero conversions- people kept getting tripped up in mb. A survey indicated over 30% of users had a hard time booking, paying for or accessing live stream classes on mb. I literally spent all day every day troubleshooting with mb reps, instructors and clients. I wonder ho many people we lost that got turned off? We decided to move our live stream and on demand off he platform.