Your 6 a.m. Vinyasa filled up, three people no-showed, and two of them were on the class pack that expired Tuesday. You find that out on Thursday, from a spreadsheet, after the second one already texted you about a refund.
That's the actual job of yoga studio software. Not the feature grid.
The question is whether it catches a failed card at 2 a.m. and quietly tries again on Friday, or whether it waits for you to notice.
It usually waits.
Most studio owners pick a platform on price, and then meet the real cost about four months in, usually on the afternoon they finally add up what the payment processing percentage took versus what the subscription cost, or when they notice the "free" tier has been quietly shaving every class pack they sold since March. Honestly, the sticker price is the least interesting number on any of these pages.
So this comparison leads with money: the subscription, the payment structure, and the billing cadence a few of these vendors bury.
Yoga Studio Software Compared
Every figure here was pulled from the vendor's own pricing page on August 12, 2026. Where a vendor publishes in Australian dollars, the USD equivalent uses the AUD→USD rate of 0.707 on that date.
Three rows deserve a second look, because they're where the sticker price and the real price part company.
Hapana bills fortnightly. The pricing page says A$199, and the number your brain files away is "about two hundred a month." Fortnightly billing is 26 payments a year, so A$199 per fortnight works out to roughly A$431 per month, about US$305. That's the highest entry point on this list. The page never says so.
Momence's free tier isn't free if you sell anything. Basic costs nothing per month and takes 5% from you and 4% from your client on top of standard processing, per Momence's pricing page. A studio turning over $12,000 a month hands back roughly $600 of it. The $60/mo Pro tier cuts your side to 2.5%, and the $199/mo Custom tier removes the platform cut entirely.
Which means the free plan is the most expensive one on offer, for anyone actually selling anything.
WellnessLiving's headline numbers are a promotion. The $39 and $69 figures shown prominently on their pricing page carry an asterisk reading "Save 80% for 2 Months." List price is $199 and $349. Budget for those.
How We Put This List Together
Comparison posts written by software companies deserve suspicion, so here's the method, including where it came up short.
Pricing. Every number came from the vendor's own pricing page, loaded fresh on August 12, 2026, never from a review aggregator or a third-party roundup. Where a vendor publishes no price, that's recorded as "quote only" and treated as a finding about how they sell.
Currency. Clubworx and Hapana publish in Australian dollars. A US reader can't use those numbers, so each is converted at the AUD→USD rate on the verification date and labelled as an approximation.
Ratings are missing on purpose. The previous version of this page carried G2, Capterra, and Software Advice scores with no date attached. Both G2 and Capterra refused automated verification on August 12, 2026, so none of those figures could be re-confirmed at a point in time. Swapping one unverifiable star rating for another isn't an improvement, so the ratings are gone. Read them on the source sites, where you'll at least see the date and the sample size.
Feature claims about Gymdesk were checked against internal product documentation. Where a claim about Gymdesk's own payment processing hadn't cleared product verification, it isn't in this article.
What Actually Matters When You're Choosing
Seven questions do most of the work. They're ordered by how much money each one moves.
What happens when a card fails
This is the one that pays for the software. A member's card expires, the charge bounces, and the class pack keeps working because nobody noticed.
Ask any vendor how many retry attempts you get, whether you control the interval, and whether the member is emailed automatically. "We handle dunning" is not an answer. The number of retries is an answer.
What the payment structure costs at your volume
Take your monthly revenue and run it through each platform's percentage before you compare subscriptions. A $0 plan with a 5% platform cut costs a $12,000/month studio more than a $199 plan with none.
Our gym software cost calculator runs this across 11 platforms if you'd rather not do it on paper.
Whether the price is per location
Mindbody, Hapana, and Walla all price per location, so a second studio doubles the line item. Gymdesk is not exempt from this either—every tier covers one location, and additional ones are $50/mo each. We're cheaper on that line, not innocent of it.
If a second location sits anywhere in your two-year plan, price it now across your shortlist.
Pamela Yague founded Pink Pilates Fitness in El Paso after the pandemic closed the local women's gym, and grew it to four locations running weight training, cycling, fitness classes, and Pilates. Their first platform worked fine at one site and fell apart across four, with memberships across locations becoming unmanageable.
That's a Pilates operator, not a yoga one, and the mechanic is identical: one member, several locations, several class types, one record.
Whether class packs and memberships both work properly
Yoga runs on both, and plenty of platforms treat packs as an afterthought bolted onto a membership engine. Check that a pack can expire, that expiry can be extended per-member without a support ticket, and that a member can hold a pack and a membership at the same time.
How members actually book
Your booking flow is your storefront. Look at whether it embeds on your own site or bounces people to a vendor-branded page, whether waitlists promote automatically when someone cancels, and what happens on a phone.
What you're paying for the app
Check whether a branded app is included, an add-on, or unavailable before it becomes a surprise. Walla charges $149/mo plus a $500 build fee. Gymdesk charges $100/mo, first month free—cheaper, still an add-on.
One distinction does most of the damage here. A member app carrying the vendor's name is not the same product as one carrying yours, and vendors quote both as "the app." Ask which they mean.
Whether you can leave
Ask where your member list, payment history, and card tokens go if you cancel. Card tokens are the one that traps people. If your processor relationship belongs to the vendor, moving means asking every member to re-enter a card, and studios lose members in that gap.
Milad Moghaddam, who runs ActiveRange Method in Newmarket, Ontario, picked his platform before opening and evaluated it against the size he intended to reach, comparing it to bookkeeping: get the foundation wrong and year-end is painful.
The 10 Platforms
Entries run from the cheapest credible option upward, with Gymdesk first because it's ours and hiding that would be worse. Read the bias disclosure at the top again if you skipped it.
1. Gymdesk
Gymdesk was built for martial arts schools first. Yoga, Pilates, and dance support came later, as the same billing and scheduling engine got pointed at other studio types. That origin shows up usefully in places, since belt-and-rank tracking became a general progression system, and it shows up unhelpfully in one place covered below.
Pricing (verified 2026-08-12): $75/mo up to 50 active members, $100/mo for 51–100, $150/mo for 101–200, $200/mo for 201–400, custom above that, per Gymdesk's pricing page. A 30-day free trial needs no credit card, and there's no contract.
The unusual part: every feature is on every plan, and price scales with member count rather than with feature unlocks. The $75 plan and the $200 plan do the same things.
There are still four paid add-ons, and it's worth naming them rather than letting "all-inclusive" do work it hasn't earned: a white-label branded app at $100/mo, a white-label website at $100/mo, additional locations at $50/mo each, and Seam door access at $100/mo. Every tier covers one location.
Payments and billing. Six processors are supported (Stripe, Square, Authorize.net, GoCardless, Ezypay, and Gymdesk Payments) and a studio can run more than one at once. Failed payments hit an automatic retry cycle where you set both the number of attempts and the interval. Late fees apply on a configurable grace period, expiring cards trigger an alert before they fail, and members get an automatic email at each step. Proration handles mid-cycle plan changes, and two independent tax rates are available if you collect more than one.
For a yoga studio specifically: class booking with waitlists, POS and an online shop for mats and apparel, gift cards sellable in-studio or online, the Gymdesk-branded member app at no extra cost (a white-label one is a $100/mo add-on), and a Zoom integration that creates the meeting on first booking and sends the link to everyone booked.
What Gymdesk doesn't do for you. There's no native on-demand video library. If your business model includes a subscription library of recorded classes that members browse inside your app, Arketa, Momence, and Walla all host that natively and Gymdesk doesn't. Gymdesk handles live remote classes through Zoom, which covers scheduled virtual classes and stops well short of a streaming back catalogue. For a studio where on-demand is a real revenue line, that's a genuine reason to choose something else. Gymdesk Payments is also US-only, though the other five processors cover most other markets.
On the AI question, since every vendor in this category now advertises one: Gymdesk isn't racing to staple the label onto a feature list. The investment goes into the automation that gets you off the computer.
Good fit if: you want predictable pricing with nothing gated, you run live and in-person classes, and you'd rather own your processor relationship.
Poor fit if: on-demand video is central to how you make money.
2. StudioBookings
The cheapest credible option here, and it's been in the category a long time.
Pricing (verified 2026-08-12): plans start at $25/mo for a solo owner, and every listed feature is included in every plan at no extra cost, per StudioBookings' pricing page. Free trial, no credit card.
StudioBookings claims a "best of" listing from a fitness software directory three years running on its own homepage. The pitch is straightforward: one low price, everything included, no upsell ladder. The interface looks its age, and for a solo teacher running a handful of weekly classes that's a fair trade.
Good fit if: you teach alone, you want a small predictable bill, and a modern-looking client app isn't the priority.
Poor fit if: you're running multiple instructors, retail, or anything approaching a full studio operation.
3. Arketa
Arketa has become the default recommendation among independent yoga teachers over the last couple of years, and the on-demand library is why.
Pricing (verified 2026-08-12): the Individual plan is $49/mo billed annually, which Arketa's pricing page notes saves 17% against monthly. It carries a 3% transaction fee plus Stripe's own fees, and includes one team member login. Studio Core and the tiers above are quote-only, with the page reading "Request a demo for pricing."
The genuine strength: an unlimited on-demand library is included at the entry tier, alongside class packages, memberships, programs, workshops, and embeddable booking widgets. For a teacher selling a recorded library as a product, that's the whole business in the base plan. Gymdesk doesn't compete with it on that axis.
Watch: one team login on Individual means the moment you hire, you're into quote-only pricing. And 3% on top of Stripe is real money at volume, so a studio doing $15,000 a month pays roughly $450 in platform fees before Stripe takes its share.
Good fit if: you're an independent teacher or small studio whose product is partly recorded.
Poor fit if: you have staff, or your volume makes a percentage fee painful.
4. Momence
Momence sells hard on the free tier, and the free tier is where you need to read carefully.
Pricing (verified 2026-08-12): Basic is free per month and takes 5% from you and 4% from your client on top of standard processing. Pro is $60/mo and drops your side to 2.5%. Custom is $199/mo with no platform cut on payments, unlimited add-ons, and dedicated support. US processing runs 3.9% + $0.30 online, 3.7% + $0.05 in person, and 1.8% for ACH.
Basic also excludes staff members, locations, reporting, retail products, phone number, and inbox, so it functions as a solo-teacher plan.
The genuine strength: the product is modern and the marketing and automation tooling is more sophisticated than most of this list. Land on the Custom tier and you get a lot.
Watch: the 4% charged to your client is charged to your client. Some studios are fine with that. Some find out about it from a member.
Good fit if: you'll run the percentage math and land on Pro or Custom deliberately.
Poor fit if: you were going to take the free plan at face value.
5. WellnessLiving
Positioned squarely as the Mindbody switch, down to a savings calculator on the pricing page.
Pricing (verified 2026-08-12): Starter $69/mo, Business $199/mo, BusinessPro $349/mo, Enterprise by phone. Paying annually saves 10%, taking those to $62, $179, and $314. The $39 and $69 figures displayed prominently are a two-month 80%-off promotion.
The genuine strength: rewards and loyalty programs are native, which matters more in yoga than in most categories, since a points program against a class pack renewal is a real retention lever. Free setup and data migration are advertised, lowering the cost of switching.
Watch: the Starter tier is one staff member. Most studios land on Business or above, so plan around $199.
Good fit if: you want loyalty mechanics without a third-party tool.
Poor fit if: you're shopping on the advertised entry price.
6. Mindbody
The incumbent. Most yoga studio owners have either used it or been quoted by it.
Pricing (verified 2026-08-12): "Starting at $79 USD/month per location," per Mindbody's pricing page, with everything past that handled by sales. The page directs you to connect with sales for available discounts and publishes no tier structure.
The genuine strength, and nothing else here matches it: the Mindbody consumer app is a real discovery channel. People open it looking for a yoga class near them and book with studios they've never heard of. Every other platform on this list, Gymdesk included, is software you run your studio on. Mindbody is software plus an acquisition channel. If a meaningful share of your new students would arrive through that marketplace, that's a genuine argument for paying more.
Watch: per-location pricing, a sales-led process with no published tiers, and a long-standing reputation for contract friction. Price it with your actual location count and get the exit terms in writing.
Good fit if: marketplace discovery would move your numbers.
Poor fit if: you want to know what you'll pay before you talk to anyone.
7. Clubworx
The most transparent pricing page on this list, and it starts at zero.
Pricing (verified 2026-08-12, published in AUD): Free forever up to 20 active members. Growing is A$109/mo (~US$77) for up to 100 members. Accelerating is A$149/mo (~US$105) for up to 250. Established is A$169/mo (~US$120) for unlimited. Annual billing drops those to A$88, A$120, and A$136 per month. Clubworx's own FAQ describes the range as A$0–A$169.
The free tier is genuinely usable: 20 members, online booking, payments, email and SMS, a self check-in kiosk, and attendance tracking. For a teacher testing whether a studio is a business yet, that's a real on-ramp.
Watch: everything is priced in Australian dollars, so your actual bill moves with the exchange rate. Feature depth is lighter than the premium end of this list.
Good fit if: you're starting small and want to pay nothing until you have members.
Poor fit if: you want USD billing or a deep feature set.
8. Hapana
Built for multi-location fitness brands, and priced like it.
Pricing (verified 2026-08-12): Basic is A$199 billed fortnightly per location, roughly A$431/mo or about US$305. Premium is $299 per fortnight. Pro is demo-led. Published processing on Basic runs 3.0% + $0.30 card-not-present, 3.0% + $0.20 card-present, 1.0% + $0.40 ACH, with a $2.50 failed-payment fee and $25 for a dispute. Premium's card-not-present rate improves slightly to 2.95% + $0.30.
The genuine strength: the reporting. Basic includes 15 operational reports, Premium 40+, and Pro 50+ with custom dashboards. Multi-location support, room and resource management, and client transfers between sites are all there. Running four studios and needing one view, this is a serious product.
Watch: the fortnightly cadence is the most misread number in this entire comparison. Note the $2.50 failed-payment fee too. On a studio seeing 30 declines a month, that's $75 charged to you for the privilege of a card bouncing.
Good fit if: you're a multi-site brand that lives in reports.
Poor fit if: you run one studio.
9. Walla
The newest of the premium boutique platforms, and the one most obviously designed by people who've worked in a studio.
Pricing (verified 2026-08-12): Core is $320/mo per location billed monthly. Pro is $599/mo per location. Premier is custom, for multi-location rollouts. Add-ons per Walla's pricing page: a branded studio app at $149/mo plus a $500 one-time build fee, two-way texting at $100/mo, website and SEO services at $199/mo, Google Business Profile management at $149/mo. The app and texting are included on Pro.
The genuine strength: the client-experience design is the best here, and the retention intelligence tooling is included on both tiers with no gating. Unlimited users on every plan is a meaningful difference from platforms charging per staff member. If your studio competes on how polished the member experience feels, Walla is built for that argument.
Watch: $320/mo per location is more than four times Gymdesk's entry tier, and the add-on ladder climbs quickly. A Core plan with the branded app and texting lands at $569 before website services.
Good fit if: you're a boutique studio where experience is the product and the budget supports it.
Poor fit if: you're price-sensitive or multi-location on a tight margin.
10. ABC Glofox
Glofox now trades as ABC Glofox after being acquired by ABC Fitness, and the pricing went with it.
Pricing (verified 2026-08-12): none published. The pricing page is a quote-request form asking for business type, location count, and details. There's no list price, no tier structure, no starting-from figure. Older roundups quoting Glofox at "$110 a month," including the previous version of this article, cite a number the company no longer publishes anywhere.
We could estimate. We're not going to. Evaluating ABC Glofox means requesting a quote, so ask for the per-location structure and the contract term in the same conversation, while someone is still keen to talk to you.
The genuine strength: the branded member app has historically been well regarded, and ABC's backing means a large support and implementation organization behind it.
Good fit if: you're comfortable with a sales-led purchase and want an established vendor.
Poor fit if: you need to budget before you talk to a rep.
Payments and POS for Yoga Studios
This is where studios lose money quietly, so it gets its own section.
You'll see two models. In integrated processing, the platform is also your payment processor. The rate is theirs, the merchant relationship is theirs, and the card tokens live on their side.
Mindbody, Walla, Hapana, WellnessLiving, and Momence all work this way.
In the bring-your-own model, you hold the merchant account and the software connects to it. Gymdesk, Clubworx, and StudioBookings work this way.
Integrated is simpler to switch on. One vendor, one bill, one support line.
What you give up is control of your own rate: it's whatever the platform decides, and if you leave, the card tokens can be difficult or impossible to take with you. Bring-your-own adds an account to open and gives you a processor relationship you can renegotiate or move.
Neither is automatically right. A studio doing $8,000 a month probably shouldn't spend a week on merchant account paperwork. A studio doing $60,000 a month is leaving real money on the table by never shopping the rate.
To see where your own numbers land, we built a payment processing fee calculator that takes volume and average transaction size.
You'll notice this article has no table ranking processors against each other by rate. That's deliberate.
Rate cards move, they're negotiable at volume, and a published percentage tells you very little about what you'd actually be quoted. What's worth comparing is behavior.
What to ask about failed payments. Pull up last month's declines before you shortlist anything. Go on, I'll wait.
A yoga studio on monthly memberships will see cards decline every single month, through expirations, insufficient funds, and fraud holds on a reissued card. The question is what the software does next.
How many automatic retry attempts? Can you set the interval, so a retry lands after payday?
Does the member get an email without you sending it? Is there a late fee rule with a grace period, or do you apply them by hand?
Gymdesk's billing runs configurable retries with per-studio attempt counts and intervals, automatic expiring-card alerts before a charge fails, and nine automated payment emails covering receipts, failures, reminders, disputes, and refunds.
None of that is exciting. It is, though, the manual tax you stop paying, and it gets paid down while you're teaching rather than at the desk at 9pm.
Payment links for class registration.
For workshops, teacher trainings, and one-off events, you want a payment page you can drop into an email or an Instagram bio without building a product in a store.
Look for a public payment form with a fixed or open amount and a post-payment redirect. It's a small feature that removes an enormous amount of back-and-forth around a $250 training deposit.
Retail POS. Mats, straps, blocks, branded tanks, and the retail line most studios under-run.
What matters: whether the POS shares inventory with your online shop so you're counting mats once, whether a member can charge a purchase to a stored card, whether gift cards work in-studio and online, and whether sales tax applies at a different rate to retail than to memberships.
Gymdesk handles retail through a combined POS and online shop with shipping or pickup, digital gift cards sellable through either channel, and two independent tax rates so retail and membership tax can differ.
Merchant accounts. Look, if you're searching for a merchant account specifically, a processor sales rep probably pushed you there.
You mostly don't need a separate one, since a modern integrated processor or a Stripe or Square account connected to your software covers a studio's needs. A dedicated merchant account earns its keep when your volume makes interchange-plus pricing worth negotiating, which for most studios starts somewhere north of $40,000 a month.
For a fuller treatment, everything you need to know about payment processing covers the mechanics, and gym payment processing fees breaks down where the percentages go.
Virtual and Hybrid Classes
Most studios that added virtual classes in 2020 still run some version of it, and the software question splits cleanly in two.
Live remote classes are a scheduling problem.
A class exists on your timetable, people book it, and everyone needs the link. What you want is the meeting created automatically when the first person books, the link distributed to everyone who books after, and the whole thing cleaned up if the class is cancelled.
Gymdesk does this through a Zoom integration that creates the meeting on first booking, sends the join link to every booked member, gives the instructor the host link, and cancels the meeting when the last booking goes. Nobody copies a link into an email.
On-demand libraries are a media problem, and a different product category.
You're hosting video, gating it by membership tier, and tracking what gets watched. Arketa includes an unlimited on-demand library at its entry tier. Momence and Walla both host on-demand natively.
Gymdesk does not. Its content feature publishes posts with video, images, and PDFs gated by member status, type, rank, and membership, which serves a curriculum or a resource library well and falls short of a streaming back catalogue.
So the honest split.
If virtual means scheduled live classes, most platforms here handle it and integration quality is the differentiator. If virtual means a recorded library you sell as its own membership, shortlist Arketa, Momence, and Walla, and take Gymdesk off the list for that requirement.
One warning worth passing on. Hybrid pricing is where studios tie themselves in knots, with an in-person membership, an online membership, a hybrid tier, and class packs that work for some of those and not others.
Whatever you choose, make sure a single member can hold a membership and a pack at once without a workaround, because within a year you'll need it. How to price your yoga classes goes deeper on structuring those tiers.
Picking One
If you want features unlocked at the entry price and you'd rather own your processor relationship, Gymdesk starts at $75/mo, scales on member count instead of feature tiers, and runs a 30-day trial that doesn't ask for a card.
Budget separately for the branded app, extra locations, and the white-label website. That's the case for it, made by someone who works there.
The rest of the honest version.
If a recorded library is a real revenue line, Arketa or Momence will serve you better. If marketplace discovery would bring you students, Mindbody's app is a channel nobody else has.
If you're running four locations and living in reports, Hapana was built for that.
If member experience is what you compete on and the budget is there, Walla is the nicest product here. And if you have twelve students and no money, Clubworx will cost you nothing until you do.
Whichever way you lean, profitability in this category comes from retention and secondary revenue more than from class prices.
Studios that hold members past the first ninety days and run retail, workshops, and teacher training alongside classes do meaningfully better than studios selling drop-ins alone, which is worth remembering when you weigh a platform's POS and marketing tools against its monthly cost.
Additional revenue streams for profitable yoga studios covers the specifics.
Pick two. Run both trials with your own class schedule loaded in, and push one real payment through each.
An hour of that will tell you more than another week of comparison tables. This one included.
