Learn It and Use It

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

I like it but..

Mindbody sets a high bar for business software. But unfortunately their quality of customer services does not match the high premium you pay. There are definitely softwares out there that will suit exactly what you are looking for with a support team that is willing to help you in every way at a fraction of the cost.

Pros

Mindbody is like driving a fully loaded Mercedes Benz. Looks pretty. Has all the features. Very custom and detailed.

Cons

Con: way too expensive. customer service plummeted. Not accommodating. Does not matter if you are a long term customer I feel like I am just a number and they could care less if they lose you as a customer or not.

Way too expensive for what you get. Currently the online booking App displays doesn't work

Not great. I have reached out to support twice in the past month regarding the issue with the App showing all the wrong appointment times and patients being unable to book. As this is the primary function of the software (and 5 times more expensive than my last software) I told them I need to get out of my contract so I can get a product that works, and they so far refuse, Even though they admit the App is broken. Their response is they can just remove my business from the App. (I pay for this, I want the features.) It also often takes Support several days to respond to support requests, which is very frustrating when you're having a issue. This Software is definitely not worth the $260 a month. I was paying $50 for Acuity and it was a better product, and I will be switching back as soon as I can get out of this contract.

Pros

It has a lot of features if you are able to figure out the quirks of the software. The Mindbody App can be really nice, (but right now mine is broken and is limiting the ability for patients to schedule.)

Cons

First off, there is no trial period or Demo that allows you to play with the software and soft launch for you to test to make sure it works for your application, and they force a 12 month subscription. A lot of things they told me the software could do, that it does not in fact do. I learned the hard way that this system is geared much more towards classes and not services. A lot of features I was told to work are things like the waiting list feature, but that is only for classes. (it was a huge reason why I picked the software.) The software can be really clunky and is way too finicky. I have used 4 or 5 different booking platforms in the past and this by far is the least user friendly. The services widgets that go on the website are nowhere near as modern looking as the class widgets, the widget on my website looks like it came straight out of Windows 95, which on a nice designed website looks terrible. The biggest issue, that has apparently been going on for more than a month is that the Iphone App apparently has a bug that has caused my office's availability to show completely wrong times to book. When I log in under the patient app it shows times available for booking that I am not even in the office for. When a patient goes to book one of those times a error pops up. I had several patients reach out to me for a matter of weeks telling me they were having issues booking which I thought was user error but Mindbody confirmed it is on their end.

Mindbody is slower and expensive

It was the worst experience, afther that company, I had hired another that did the programming in 2 days and I was using it in 3 days at the 50% of the cost.

Pros

It has several tools, I don't have a lot of good things to say about. I don't want to lie just to fill a form.

Cons

It is expensive, the customer support is 24 hrs later, if you are in America you need to wait at least 24 hrs to solve your issue. You have to program your platform and I spend at least 3 weeks and the person in customer service said that it has take minimum one week to one month. You spend money and time programming it instead focus in produce more money.

MindBody for Music Schools

Studio automation is always a plus - if you haven't used Auto-Pay, you should really try it. Automated emails are really the best part. For us, it's slow, kind of clunky, and doesn't fit our needs as well as we had hoped. Them withholding our money was definitely the main impetus for our disillusionment.

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.