The Top Booking Software for Personal Trainers

You might need to use booking software in your personal training business to book appointments with face to face clients, or calls with prospects who are potentially interested in your personal training services. ​But how can you decide which is the best?

As a personal trainer or fitness studio owner, managing your clients' bookings and appointments can be a daunting task. It's essential to have a reliable booking system in place that can handle the demands of a busy gym or studio schedule.

Fortunately, there are several gym booking software and online scheduling apps available that can help streamline your business and improve the client experience. In this article, we will explore some of the best fitness studio scheduling software options, including online booking systems for fitness classes, gym appointment apps, and more. Whether you're looking to automate your booking process or provide your clients with a more convenient way to schedule their workouts, there's a scheduling software option on this list that will fit your needs.

Good sports booking software should integrate into the business management systems you already use (your calendar, your payment systems and your website). This is an overview of the five most popular software options.

iPT Platform

The iPT Platform is our very own booking app. When it comes to managing appointments and scheduling sessions with clients, personal trainers need a reliable and efficient booking software.

That's where the iPT all-in-one marketing platform comes in. This platform offers a powerful booking feature that enables personal trainers to schedule sessions, manage appointments, and even take payments online.

With a simple and intuitive interface, the iPT booking feature makes it easy for personal trainers to stay organized and manage their schedule, all while providing a seamless experience for their clients.

Setmore

Setmore is a cloud-based appointment scheduling software that is popularly used by fitness businesses or as a small group pt software to manage their class schedules and appointments.

It offers features such as online booking, calendar management, automatic reminders, class management, staff scheduling, and payment processing. It also integrates with popular apps like Zoom, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp. Setmore can be accessed via its web app or mobile app for Android and iOS devices.

Calendly

Calendly is the industry leader in automated scheduling tools that integrate with your online calendar. It allows people to book calls or meetings with you around your other commitments you added to your schedule.

Calendly is smart enough not to double book you when things are already in your calendar, and so it takes a lot of the back-and-forth out of scheduling with your clients. You just have to block off times when you don’t want to be available, and they can fit in around the rest of your schedule.

A bonus of Calendly is that it integrates well with other software such as Zapier and Stripe. It has a Basic version for free and costs just $8 per month if you need a additional features and unlimited event types.

YouCanBook.me

YouCanBook.me is an automated scheduling tool that can be set up and working in minutes. It’s extremely similar to Calendly, but works in something of a reverse order - where you tell the software when you’re available and it allows people to book appointments in that time (rather than fitting things in around when you’re already busy).

People who are fans of the software rate this as a “silver bullet feature” as it means you don’t have to block your calendar off to protect your time. Highly customisable emails and texts can be personalised and scheduled to remind the person that they have an appointment with you. This is a great feature as it reduces the number of missed appointments you get and since it handles the reminders for you, it’s something else that you don’t have to think about.

Integrations are available for many of the main software including Stripe and Zapier. There’s a free forever version for small businesses, and once you outgrow that you can get their paid version for just $8 a month. YouCanBook.me supports a massive range of languages so if you work with personal training clients online, and you need a range of diverse languages supported, this could be worth exploring in more detail.

WeStrive

WeStrive an online booking software that doubles as a course booking software and enables PT's to run their business from one platform.

Westrive is ideal for you whether you need to schedule appointments or an online booking system to systemise your business Some of their other features include a program builder, automatons, billing, habit coaching, group message, all of which work on their 5 start app with custom branding.

Doodle

Doodle is a great app for personal trainers around the world that offer small group sessions and need scheduling software that can find time to train for multiple people.

Users of doodle appreciate the easy to use interface that allows scheduling among teams. There’s a website and an app available, with fantastic online support. However, some people report that the mobile version can be difficult to navigate with a lot of clunky scrolling.

​If used in connection with the team scheduling feature, the volume of emails generated for the person who is trying to schedule the meeting is substantial and may be offputting for some people. The pro version of doodle is available at just $6 a month.

Acuity Scheduling

Acuity Scheduling allows your personal training clients to view your real-time availability, select the date and time that works best for them, pay in advance via Square, Stripe, or Paypal, and even cancel or reschedule all on their own.

The features include the option to sell fixed-term or a fixed number of sessions as a package. You can set up a basic printable gift certificate which could be a brilliant feature for a personal trainer who wanted to incentivise buying on behalf of someone else or had a robust referral system in place.

You can also schedule and provide a way for people to sign up for a one-off workshop which could be a fantastic way to generate leads in your personal training business if you had a particular skill that you wanted to offer.

​The scheduling options are very similar to the other software options in this top 5, but the language support is limited to English. Users consider it highly intuitive and highly customisable if a little bit more expensive to use than comparable platforms. 

Conclusion

The best booking software for your personal training business will be dependant on the way you choose to run things.
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• Whether you book one to one sessions or need to accommodate group bookings. 
• Whether you see clients face to face, or you’re arranging zoom calls to check-in.
• Whether you use the booking software to speak to prospects or keep in touch with existing clients.
• If you need the software to generate an automated email or text reminder (which almost all of them will) to cut down on the number of missed appointments that you get. 
• How much email back and forth you can tolerate - given that this is one of the main things this software is supposed to cut down on.
• How much business branding customisation you need.

There is software available to suit every budget, and almost all of it is extremely easy to use and set up. Most of these sites have either a limited function free version of the software, or you can have a limited-time trial of the paid features to test what works best for your needs.