There are a couple of dozen serious tools out there, and as many comparison articles that simply copy out the pricing pages. Here's a method instead: seven criteria, one typical month, and a decision in a single afternoon.
The rest — the number of features advertised, the look of the interface, the user count claimed — stands out in a demo and is forgotten within a month.
Subscription + commission on what you collect + tiers based on client numbers + a supplement per user. Work it out on YOUR month, not on the headline price. It's the criterion that settles it most often.
Management software saves you time. A directory brings you enquiries. One doesn't replace the other. If a tool promises visibility, ask how it ranks people.
Create an account, install an app, download a PDF? Every extra step loses you some of them. The best journey is the one where booking takes three clicks in a browser.
Can your client records and your history be exported? A tool that holds on to your data keeps you by force. Test the export BEFORE you enter everything.
Plenty of offers advertise a feature that only the top plan unlocks. List the five things you need and check which plan each one belongs to, one by one.
A contact form with no stated response time, a help centre with no human behind it: you pay for that the day a client's payment fails on a Saturday morning.
You'll find plenty of them elsewhere, full of ticks and crosses. The trouble is that almost all of them are wrong within six months: tools change their plans, move features from one tier to another, revise their prices. A table published today describes a market that won't exist by the spring.
And writing down what a competitor does or doesn't do without having checked it yourself means risking being publicly wrong. We'd rather give you the method and stand behind our own answers.
What we can state without reservation is what BetterSport does — including when the answer is no.
Cost. A free plan with no time limit, then paid plans on quote. No BetterSport commission on what you collect; only Stripe's own fees apply, and they go to Stripe. No tier based on client numbers on the Pro plan.
Clients brought in. Your page is published on bettersport.app, where people look for a coach by town and by activity. Ranking depends on how complete your page is — the scoring is public — and your subscription changes nothing.
Client journey. Booking from a browser, with no account to create and no app to install.
Getting out. Clients, sessions and programmes can all be exported. Cancel any time, no notice period, no fee.
What's included. The free plan gives you one page, one programme, one client. The calendar, the services, payment collection and video calls are paid features. It's written that way everywhere, including on the page that describes the free plan.
Support. A real person, and a compulsory phone call when you open your account — that's where we check that everything is in order.
The one whose real cost over your typical month is lowest among those that cover your five priority needs. The answer depends on your volume, on how you work and on how much visibility you need — not on a general ranking.
For payments and personal data, European hosting and billing in euros make a lot of things simpler. For the rest, the country of origin matters less than whether you can get your data back out.
Technically yes, and plenty of coaches do at the start. But two calendars always end up diverging, and it's the client who finds out.
Allow half a day to move your clients and your services across, and two weeks for your habits to follow. That's where the real cost of switching sits, not in the migration.
Yes, with needs that differ from a trainer working in a gym: cycles, groups, testing. The dedicated page sets out what changes.
