Comparing Martial Art CRMs

Martial Arts Software Battle!

This post is for any other Martial Arts schools out there who is looking at the different softwares.  I spent between 40-50 hours researching all the different platforms.  Below is a full list of all of the dojo management web apps that I looked at. Pretty quickly, I began reducing the list, and it came down to four finalists.

• Champions Way / Perfect Mind
• Atlas
• Zen Planner
• Kicksite
• Member Owl
• Mindbody Online
• Rainmaker
• Black Belt CRM
• Affiliate Acceptance / AAC
• Member Solutions

I reduced them down to the last 4 above using these rules:

1. There had to be an iPad solution for student check-in
2. The software could not be owned by a billing company
3. There had to be a retail component, attendance tracking, and belt tracking 

This was in October, 2015 - I say this because things could be a bit different now for each company. At that time, I decided to sign up with each of the companies in order to get an actual feeling of how each would suit my needs.  I spent hours on the phone, doing trainings, and watching videos to get all of this information.  However, I know that some of the info may have changed since then.

Feature Comparison for Martial Arts CRMs

For my analysis below, here is my color coding for each feature:

• Green meant great,
• Yellow meant so-so,
• Red mean bad.

For features, it tabulated to:

	Green	Yellow	Red
RainMaker	10	15	5
Zen Planner	19	11	1
Mindbody	17	8	4
Champions Way	8	10	12

Price Comparison for Martial Arts / Fitness CRMs

First I must say, that if you have all the desired features, price doesn't matter.  However, of course I had to compare the cost as well.  Prices have changed a bit in the last year, so you can do your own research, but a few things that are interesting to consider:

1) Some CRMs make their real money within the hidden transaction costs.  Of course, they don't advertise this, but you can always ask directly.  This became my main reason for not going with Mindbody.  The idea behind this was that I wanted a tech company... not a fee collecting company.

2) Some CRMs like Zen Planner actually scale their prices according to how many students you have.  Although we have enough to go into the "unlimited" category, it was great as we transitioned from one software to another because they only charged for the number of students that we were actually charging!

3) You must negotiate your credit card fees.  We shared prices with each other and compared the rates they offered until we got the best ones.  PaySimple who works with both Rainmaker and Zen Planner was the best billing company that I found in terms of customer service, price, and value.

In Conclusion

And so, as you can imagine, I did eventually decide on Zen Planner.  And for good reason too!  If you have further questions about a software listed above, let me know and I'll do my best to help.