Zen Planner Reviews

Very Helpful Customer Service!!!

Comments: Zen Planner software has enabled our company to introduce a program to our customers in a seamless fashion. Their customer service was vital in helping us with this process.

Pros:

The software is very slick and versatile!

Cons:

There was a lot to learn that I wasn't familiar with.

Perfect for managing a martial arts studio

Comments: I was really impressed on how well they understand how martial art schools work. The software takes into account everything you need to keep your school running - from scheduling out classes students reserve for, to taking payments and setting up merchant accounts, to desk check-in software, to students having their own portal to track their membership and status. Customer support was very helpful during the onboarding.

Pros:

You can tell this software was designed for martial artists. One of my favorite things you can do is designate belt rankings to students, and design your system in a way that when a student is ready to test for the next belt, whether its the amount of time they've been training with the studio, to achieving certain skills required, Zen Planner notifies you and helps you plan belt testing. I loved that they recognize how important it is for martial art schools to know where students rank. I was able to plan out all my belts, what skills are required and minimum of time with the school they need to have to test. Most gym software don't recognize all the small nuances that martial art schools need to track where their students stand.

Cons:

The apps for desk login can be a little buggie sometimes and require an update or reset the iPad to get the software to work.

Alternatives Considered: Mindbody

Reasons for Switching to Zen Planner: Zen Planner was designed for martial arts schools, not your typical gym. There are a lot of things we need to track that most gyms don't need to track, whether its belt rankings, to skills, to testing. Their pricing was also much more fair than other software like Mindbody.

Used it for three years - feature rich but hard to use

Comments: We switched from Mindbody to Zenplanner and used it for three years. Zenplanner is chock full of features (other than membership discounts, as mentioned above), but it's so full of features that it becomes clunky and hard to use. I could do just about anything from my admin account, but my fellow coaches who spent less time in it had a harder time working with it. Customers also struggled a lot. We have now switched to Upper Hand, and while it has fewer features and the reports aren't as good, our customers are actually booking their own classes instead of making me do it.

Pros:

I was the primary account administrator, and I could fix just about anything retroactively. Once you really know your way around, it's got almost everything you could think to want. There are a lot of customization options for emails you can send your customers, and it was easy to check which emails an individual had opened. The reports were great. Best reporting I've seen, and it's pretty much the only thing I'll miss. Support was good - very responsive, with multiple ways to contact them. I also appreciated the discounts they gave businesses at the start of the COVID shutdowns.

Cons:

The software was very difficult for customers to use, so much that about half of our parents (and a couple of our coaches) just wanted me to do everything for them. Doing so on my end was time-consuming. Zenplanner offers some options to integrate with our existing website, but it didn't work in every circumstance. What customers could do from our primary domain was pretty limited, and it wasn't easy to switch back and forth between our site and the ZP site. Zenplanner does not offer automatically-applied membership discounts, so we had to have customers use offer codes. Membership discounts (such as on retail or private lessons) are pretty standard in fitness businesses and not having that option was a major pain. There was no way to easily see which coaches had availability at which times.

Amazing

Pros:

I love how simple this software made it to do everything our yoga studio needed. It was also user friendly for our students. We love it overall.

Cons:

I do wish there was a cheaper option for small studios just getting started.

Customer support is outstanding

Comments: I'd give it a B- on a grading scale. The customer support is outstanding but any time you want to go beyond just keeping track of how many students you have, things become way too complicated.

Pros:

Customer support really is top notch. The on boarding team is fantastic and truly went out of their way to ensure we had every available resource for success. Any little quirky issue or question we have is answered quickly and professionally by the customer support team. They are fantastic.

Cons:

The basics are great but it seems to go from "ok to use" to "I have absolutely no idea what to do here" the minute any complication arises. There does not need to be a "staff user" and a "kiosk mode" on the Ipads, it confuses everyone and wastes a lot of time. Converting reports to pdf feature should be a breeze, but doesn't convert the entire report and is useless. It should have a much easier pos system as well. No real way for instructors to leave notes for students, why not? Never use the mass email or text because its just too complicated-these things can be fixed if they gave it some attention.

Alternatives Considered: Mindbody

Reasons for Switching to Zen Planner: Because they harassed us relentlessly and were so annoying we wouldn't even consider them. Didn't have too many options at first.

Poor Tech Support during COVID-19 Crisis

Comments: Up until the COVID-19 crisis, we were big fans of ZP. However, since the crisis began their Tech Support team has been dismissive and unhelpful. This comes at a particularly bad time for us because we are building a new website and our web designer needed to have a phone conversation with a "live" staff member. ZP has refused to do so, which leaves us in a very had position because our designer could easily make technical errors that will cost us a lot of money to fix in the future. When we consider that, prior to the COVID-19 crisis, we had almost always been able to get through to ZP’s Tech Support within 2 days, we can only assume that the company is now experiencing significant internal difficulties. We don't have an answer to that question because ZP has not offered any explanation as to why its Tech Support has plummeted. For this reason, we are currently considering switching to a ZP competitor. Finally, like many in the fitness industry, ZP might be going through a tough time right now. If they had simply been candid with us, we might have been willing to overlook this situation as an aberration. As it stands, however, they don't seem to care that they've left us in a bad situation and their is no ed in sight.

Pros:

Zen Planner is intuitive and easy to navigate. Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, it's Tech Support staff were professional, knowledgeable, friendly and available by phone from Monday to Friday. We were generally able to get through to Tech Support within 2 days.

Cons:

Before COVID-19, we probably called ZP's Tech Support once or twice a week. beginning on or about March 16, 2020 it became impossible to reach Tech Support. We're currently encountering the following Tech Support experience challenges from ZP: (1) We have a question or problem and call ZP Tech Support. We wait on hold for 10 or 15 minutes. A recorded message instructs us to leave a voice message and ZP will call us back. (2) ZP does not call us back. (3) We email ZP with our request, but ZP’s email response is never fast enough to be of use. Then, when we finally get an email answer, it is often unresponsive.

Keeps me organized

Comments: I'm not the most organized person and doing all admin, billing as well a coaching my clients, Zen Planner helps to keep the back end of my business organized and running smoothly. The automations are great if they're set up correctly. Their customer support is amazing!! Not much waiting time and my issues are always resolved. When I started, they're pricing was pretty competitive. Although, they've gotten much pricier over the past year.

Pros:

Having automated billing, emails and scheduling. Being able to pull billing reports at a moment's notice to see where my finances are is a plus.

Cons:

Having so many options for reports and automations. It can be very confusing at times and sometimes having two steps to accomplish a task isn't clear.

Alternatives Considered: Mindbody and ClubReady

Reasons for Switching to Zen Planner: The price, automations and their customer support.

[SENSITIVE CONTENT] the Onboarder is FANTASTIC, I am so impressed

Comments: so far so awesome

Pros:

We had challenges with paysafe integration, and [SENSITIVE CONTENT] stepped in to fix, I am running a busy studio plus teaching/coaching and she was a dream to work with ( I was not), such an asset to Zen,

Cons:

color schemes, and the time it took to imput information that was just not a skillset i had, I learned and I am glad it took time

very happy i made the switch!

Comments: Great! client account alerts are super helpful to make sure we are getting paid any money owed

Pros:

It makes it simple to manage the most important tasks at my gym without over complicating things.

Cons:

a few auto emails could improve/be added

Excellent product with futures that are practical, easy to use, and visually appealing

Comments: Endless , independence and function. Being a small business owner it allows me to run and automate many things such as financial reports, workouts, attendance. Reservation, automations of emails for customer retention , sales funnel , customer support, technically forward thingkong woth use of apps for iPad and iPhone to allow me to function on the run , away from the office, in the field, and manage coaches.

Pros:

I love zenplanner. They started out with few features and no apps but they promised to improve regularly and they deliver. In the short 4 years I have been using they have incorporated a staff app for the iPhone, a users app to reserve, keep track of workouts , PRs, billing and much more. an app for the front desk to use as checking in, reserving, adding new clients at ease. On each of these products they improve and incorporated new needed features faster than any software I have ever used. Their customer service is truly second to none. Helping you not only in the set up stage but anytime you need help and they work to resolve your problem immediately. The software not only is packed full of great functions for financial, workout writing and publishing, emailing automation, reports of attendance, finances , and mass email intervention but it does it with a sleek appearance that is not only visually appealing but with an easy of use that it's simple and powerful.

Cons:

Software is still growing and some features , not many anymore, can be improved. This is truly the worse thing I can think off as I have tried many many others do never been so satisfied and impressed with them delivering a great product and on a regular bases truly adding features to improve it without making it more complicated for the user.

Worst customer service possible

Comments: Zen Planner is absolutely the worst. I decided to go with a different program and half way through the porting process we thought it would be simpler to simply stay with Zen Planner. Nope, they never called us back.

Pros:

I really didn't like anything about it. It was overly complicated, redundant and the same glitches existed for years.

Cons:

It was hard to maintain an idea of what our client base actually was. Some clients were counted twice. We had to check 3 different areas to make sure our billing was going through.

Alternatives Considered: RainMaker and Kicksite

Reasons for Choosing Zen Planner: Mindbody was even more difficult and rarely ever had anyone you could talk to in their customer service. Additionally more expensive.

Switched From: Mindbody

Reasons for Switching to Zen Planner: Price.

Very disappointing

Pros:

Have been with Zen Planner since 2015, it is very user friendly. Costumer service was not bad up until something started to go wrong.

Cons:

Unfortunately they have some flaws that for some reason sometimes they multiple charge my students or don't charge at all. It will happen once in a while and when that happen, their customer service become very slow and dismissive, they will send you to the processor and the processor will send you back to them. For instance, now, I have been asking to talk to a supervisor for days and they simply don't call and when I call to reach someone no one is ever available. It is very unfortunate because as I said the system is very user friendly, but they are not trust worth. Following up: Zen Planner gave me notice of cancellation after I refused to remove this review. Based on the problems I have had with them, I already had in mind and was searching for a more reliable system. Unfortunately I was forced to do it rushed, I have been trusting all my billing transactions and contacts to Zen Planner, and this transfer process does take a long time. one of the supervisors dealt with this situation very unprofessionally, focusing on make me remove my review rather then fix the real issue, treatned a few times and finally just gave me notice. I have never seen this before... I can't stress enough that you can't trust such important information for your business in such hands.

Bad service

Comments: After using their product for a couple of years and when covid forced our company to shutdown, they kept charging our business our monthly rate. After calling them to see if they would be kind enough to refund our payments they wouldn’t oblige nor would they freeze our account so I had to cancel our membership which was a big headache. I had to write a cancellation notice as well as call the different financial companies that had led our credit card transactions, etc. It’s u fortunate that after being a loyal client as well as referring a few of my colleagues to their business they would be compassionate enough to help our their clients with a small gesture.

Pros:

Data entry, membership retention, payment plan

Cons:

Couldn’t refund client right away after credit card payment mistake. Had to call a different company that dealt with the credit card transaction.

Alternatives Considered: Mindbody

Reasons for Choosing Zen Planner: Customer service

Awesome and they continue to work to add new and wanted fuctionality

Comments: One stop shop for managing my business. Automation. And the ability to do a lot with little or no staff.

Pros:

Easy to use, easy to manage. It has a great modern look and they don't try to bundle everything in one app. They have different apps for sing in, staff use, and member. I love the reports, and the face check in. Easy to find athletes by their face. Great for when you have new staff. It truly is a great bundle for workout tracking, integration with current website, and integration with marketing emails. All things other companies charge extra for. I would and have recommended this software to other gym and martial art owners.

Cons:

The apps are great for managing but missing some fuctionality such as being able to schedule privates on the app. They where missing staff clicks in, retail sales but they have recently added those. Hard to find much I dislike and what I do they don't seem to be standing still, adding new function all the time.

Tried the others, using Zen Planner

Comments: Extremely positive.

Pros:

Extremely user friendly. I could figure out how it worked quite easily and i am not a tech Wiz which I found to be quite pleasing.

Cons:

the common problems that happens with all of the software like it. when the whole system goes down. It is not unique to ZP it has happened with others as well.

It's significantly lacking in options for subscription membership software.

Pros:

I went through their entire onboarding process and with each session discovered more and more things that did not work. At best they have nice color schemes to pick from... No one's selecting their software for the color schemes, so that is essentially the biggest pro there is to Zenplanner.

Cons:

Extremely limited in use. You can't have more than one 'drop-in' on an account, you can't take a deposit for an appointment without becoming a member, you can't attach a waiver to an appointment despite the variety of appointments that may exist from a gym to a yoga studio to all the other 'fitness' businesses they boast being able to manage. You can't have a group membership, therefore every single person--children included have to go through a ridiculous process of that is in no way streamlined. It can't differentiate in membership options. The list goes on and on. Basically, they hired a good marketing company and told their sales team to 'make the sale' no matter what... The needs we stated for our business was simple and we were assured that Zenplanner could perform them. Going through the onboarding process was like repeatedly being told "no it can't do that" and "oh sorry, no it can't do that either". We ended up canceling before we even started and then they refused to refund the inital payment AND to the real treat: CHARGED ME FOR AN ADDITIONAL MONTH despite the fact that I had clearly been unhappy with the product. The point being they could care less about your satisfaction and so once you sign up--they've got you...

Solid software, great support.

Comments: Zen Planner takes care of our membership tracking, payments, scheduling. It can be a powerful tool if you know how to use it.

Pros:

We've used Zen Planner in our gym for six years, and it's been pretty uneventful overall - which is what you want with such software. It does its job with a minimum of drama. Any issues we've had have been dealt with in a timely fashion. We do not use the workout programming feature (we went with SugarWOD for that), so I can't comment on that particular feature.

Cons:

Zen Planner is good about making constant improvements, but there have been some things over the years that are a bit clunky and not necessarily intuitive to use. It's likely a function of building incremental improvements into existing software rather than starting with a clean slate.

Best Customer Service

Comments: While there have been a few limitations to booking appointments as well as classes, Zen Planner still makes it possible to juggle and offer both seemlessly. Clients can manage their schedules and payments online which allows me to focus on other important matters.

Pros:

This software is easy to learn, implement and user friendly. Super easy integration and the customer service is outstanding! They are regularly updating and upgrading features and respond positively to feature requests and feedback. Easily have the best software on the market in my industry and I'm not sure why more people do not choose Zen Planner.

Cons:

Some minor limitations such as color typology features on the mobile app have been limited and app functions such as calendar syncing and calendar default settings restricted.

Great Experience!

Comments: I absolutely love Zen Planner Help Desk. They are the most patient and helpful people EVER. Never have I called and hung up without a solution to my issue. I wish I could have them for my daily life!

Pros:

It's simplicity. It's not overly complicated and buttons are easy to find.

Cons:

Reports and the filters within it can be confusing; sometimes I'm not sure what terminology or keyword I need to use to produce a report I need - or if I'm supposed to use a whole number in a text box or spell it out...

Ok but not great

Comments: I can do a lot with this software. Apparently does everything that Front Desk offers in their middle tier of pricing - for half the cost. I manage staff payroll and reserving classes, too. I can do analytics and reports. They have always been very nice on the phone (if unable to help.) On the down side, it's buggy and painfully slow. Plus it doesn't work very well on mobile, either for clients, coaches, or the business owner. My athletes often say they can't reserve class on their phones. Everyone wants to do everything on their phones but ZP does not accommodate this! The workout tracking was painful to use - they keep adding features like this but I wish they would just make the ones they have work better. Their much vaunted software improvements were a disappointing thin skin over the same stuff. Despite my annoyance I have learned to work around the bugs and stuck with them for many years. I will probably continue to wait for software improvements. Not a ringing endorsement by any means, but the software is functional and the price is right.

Way less complaints than other owners

Comments: It’s been positive. It’s better than previous software, I’d like more, but from other conversations I’ve had and things I hear about other apps I am not sure that there is much better.

Pros:

It’s makes a lot of sense to use. Some things aren’t obvious necessarily at first, but once you get there it all makes sense.

Cons:

It feels pretty limited in reporting. Not because it actually is, but more because the options for them are too specific. Workout tracking is kind of a joke. It hasn’t been updated since it premiered and it’s not “fun” for members to use at all. We’ve since switched workout tracking to sugar WoD.

Brilliant, from the first meeting, to 4 years later, just outstanding every day.

Comments: Too many to mention. We couldn't run out business without it. No other software can compare with Zen planners functionality.

Pros:

the customer service. You ask anything and they will ALWAYS get back to you. They ALWAYS sort out your concern. There is so much you can do with the software, from accounting, to wod planning, to staffing, appointments everything. The back end functionality is brilliant. The automations available that free up so much time for other things are outstanding. Its just so versatile and can be customised to exactly what you need it to be.

Library and a Benchmark

Comments: Our gym uses this App to track our work outs. A friend and I were using the custom result fields to track our daily 1 minute Bike Sprint. We found, though, that when we went to the library we couldn't track our results. I contacted Zen Planner and was helped quickly; initially, it appeared to be a simple issue but turned out that there were some "corrupted" files. After getting our gym owner involved, ZenPlanner was able to resolve the issue.

Pros:

Ease of use; simple to find information

Cons:

I wish the same type of exercises would always come up together in the library. Occasionally when I go to the library to look up a specific exercise multiple of the same come up and I have to click in and out of them to see the results.

Payroll is terrible - that's a HUGE part of my job that I am now doing manually!!!

Comments: Switched from MindBody in October and I wish I hadn't. Mind body was unwieldy and cumbersome, but I could do everything I needed. Mind body is easier to use by my clients and it's great for collecting money, but it's TERRIBLE for doing payroll. I have a martial arts school and fitness center. We also do private training. I am now having to figure out private training by hand and I am still struggling to accurately pay my fitness people from NOVEMBER because I can't run the reports I would like. I don't pay out on pre-purchased packages until the classes are used, and we pay our staff on a per person rate, and there is literally NO WAY I can get an accurate report for this. So it's great for managing clients, and the client portal is good, and I can easily collect money, but after that, it's absolutely useless. I've called them about it and I've basically been told that yes, payroll is awful, no, there are no immediate changes to this, but hopefully if enough people complain they'll make it a programming priority.

Spoke to a real person when their servers went down in the middle of the day.

Comments: Over all it has been very good.

Pros:

Software is simple to use and has a couple of good tools for running the business. As a health coach I can check my phone to see much of the information that I need. The real issue that I am leaving a review about is this... When I was in the middle of a busy work day, I all of a sudden could not see my schedule or sign in. I called a number and spoke to a real person who gave me the situation and told me worse case scenario of when it might be up. I would have been very aggravated had I not spoken to a real person in such a bad situation. It was very comforting.

Cons:

The calendar is a little simplistic as well as some of the features with seeing the clients apts.