Across public reviews on Capterra, G2, Trustpilot, Sitejabber and the Better Business Bureau, complaints about Mindbody cluster into four areas: support reviewers find slow or hard to reach, contracts they say are hard to exit, pricing they report as rising and carrying charges they did not expect, and technical reliability. Those four account for most of the negative sentiment. The rest are about usability, onboarding, integrations, and whether a platform built for the whole wellness industry is the right shape for a gym.
Two things up front. We build VERVE Pulse, which competes with Mindbody. And everything below is what reviewers and switching gym owners have said, not anything we have independently verified. Mindbody is long established, it has a consumer marketplace nobody else in the category has, and plenty of businesses are happy on it. Treat this as the questions worth asking any vendor, not as fact about anyone's current terms, which you should confirm with them directly.
Two of the twenty, and the loudest in the set.
Ask any vendor: who actually answers, what hours, and are they in the same time zone as my gym? Send a real support question during the trial. The reply tells you more than the sales call did.
Pulse: support is the Gold Coast team that builds Pulse, during Australian business hours. No offshore tier one. The person who reads your email can change the code. That is a function of being small, and we would rather say it plainly than dress it up as a service level.
Three complaints, and together they are why most switching conversations start.
Ask any vendor: can I cancel from inside the software without speaking to anyone, and can I download my member list, billing history and class history today, at no charge? Ask them to open the export screen during the demo. If exporting needs a support ticket or a fee, you are not a customer, you are a hostage.
Pulse: no lock-in. The account owner cancels from Settings, it runs to the end of the period you have already paid for, and you can reverse it before it takes effect. Nobody rings to talk you out of it.
On data, Settings has an Export Data screen on every plan at no extra cost: members, plans, invoices, classes, bookings, check-ins, workout logs, leads, staff, conversations, messages, equipment and waivers, as CSV or JSON, or the whole gym as one JSON bundle. Pro also gets a read-only API for pulling the same data on a schedule. Software that holds your data to make leaving painful is telling you what it thinks of its own product.
Three complaints, and the ones that sour a working relationship over time.
Ask any vendor: what is the total monthly cost at my member count, and what is the exact card and direct debit rate as a number I can compare to my bank's? A blended rate with no breakdown almost always hides a margin.
Pulse: the plans are published. Core $199/month +GST for up to 300 active members, Grow $349/month +GST for up to 600, Pro $549/month +GST for up to 1,200. No per-member fees. Over capacity, another 100 members is $49/month. Annual billing gets two months free. Add-on prices sit on the pricing page rather than inside a quote.
On payments you pay Stripe's published rates plus a 0.8% platform fee, shown as two separate numbers. VERVE does not mark up Stripe's processing. No monthly gateway fee, no minimum. Australian direct debit through BECS usually costs less than cards on recurring memberships.
Four complaints.
Ask any vendor: not "is it reliable", because everyone says yes. Ask what happened the last time it went down and how customers found out. Then test it: during the trial, book a class from a phone on mobile data at your busiest hour.
Pulse: we are not going to claim a product this young has no bugs. It has them. What we can tell you is where they go: there is no support company sitting between you and the engineers, so a fault reported in the morning is read the same day by the people who own that code. Pulse runs on AWS in Sydney, so member data sits in Australian data centres.
Two complaints that usually arrive together.
Ask any vendor: can I sign up and use the real product without talking to a salesperson, and who does the migration, me or you? A vendor that will not let you self-serve is one whose product needs a person standing next to it.
Pulse: 30 day free trial, no credit card, on the plan you pick, whole product switched on. No demo required to get it. The import wizard has ready-made presets for exports from Mindbody, Glofox, Zen Planner, PushPress and Hapana, plus generic CSV, and maps the columns and handles duplicates for you. On annual plans the migration concierge means the VERVE team does the import rather than handing you a spreadsheet.
The remaining six are about shape and fit rather than failure.
Ask any vendor: open the integrations page and prove three of the logos on it. Do this to us as well. Our own integrations page was wrong until July 2026 and listed connectors that did not exist. We rewrote it against the code instead of the marketing copy, and the list is now short and true.
Pulse: built for gyms, not for gyms and spas and salons and clinics at once. That is why the equipment register is in every plan and why the entry price is somewhere a single site can reach. What connects today: Stripe including Stripe Terminal, Kisi for door access, Xero on Pro, Google Calendar and Mailchimp on Grow, Slack, outbound webhooks, and the read-only API on Pro. Full list on the integrations page.
| What owners say they are escaping | Ask every vendor | Pulse |
|---|---|---|
| Support slow, hard to reach, no continuity | Who answers, what hours, what time zone? | The Gold Coast team that builds it |
| Long contract, exit refused | Can I cancel without a phone call? | No lock-in, cancel from Settings |
| Billed after cancelling | Show me the cancel button | Runs to period end, reversible |
| Data hard or costly to export | Show me the export screen | 13 datasets, CSV or JSON, no fee |
| Price rises, costly at small scale | What is the published price at my size? | $199 / $349 / $549 +GST, no per-member fees |
| Hidden fees | List every charge that is not the plan fee | Add-ons priced publicly |
| Payment problems, opaque rates | What is the exact card and debit rate? | Stripe rates plus 0.8%, shown separately |
| Bugs, outages, slow, flaky member app | What broke last, and how did I find out? | Faults go straight to the engineers |
| Pushy sales, overpromised features | Can I sign up without a salesperson? | 30 day trial, no card |
| Broken onboarding and migration | Who does the import? | Five presets, concierge on annual |
| Clunky, stagnant, weak integrations | Prove three logos on the integrations page | Short verified list |
| Marketplace ahead of studio tools | Whose customer is my member? | No marketplace, your members are yours |
A comparison you can trust has to include where the other platform wins.
Pulse is also a much younger product, with a smaller feature surface and a far smaller company behind it. For some buyers that is the point. For others it is a reason to wait.
Do the boring version. Export your data first, before you cancel anything, while the account is still fully active. Run a 30 day trial alongside your live system rather than instead of it. Move billing last, and tell members a week before. Most of the horror stories in the review sites are not really about software, they are about a migration that started at the billing end instead of finishing there.
For the feature by feature version, the Pulse and Mindbody comparison puts the two side by side, and the switching guide covers the migration in order. Earlier than that, start with the buyer's guide.
In public reviews on Capterra, G2, Trustpilot, Sitejabber and the Better Business Bureau, the most frequent complaints are support described as slow or unreachable, difficulty cancelling long contracts, pricing that reviewers say rises and includes charges they did not expect, and technical problems including bugs, outages and a booking app members find unreliable. Usability, onboarding errors and broken integrations follow behind those four.
It depends entirely on the vendor, and it is the question most owners forget to ask before signing. Ask to see the export screen during the demo, and check whether exporting costs anything. VERVE Pulse includes a data export on every plan at no extra charge, covering members, plans, invoices, classes, bookings, check-ins, workout logs, leads, staff, conversations, messages, equipment and waivers, as CSV or JSON, or the whole gym as a single JSON file.
No. Pulse is month to month with no lock-in, and the account owner can cancel from inside Settings without a phone call. The cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for and can be reversed before then. Annual billing is available and gets two months free, but it is a choice rather than a condition.
Yes. The import wizard has a ready-made preset for Mindbody exports, along with Glofox, Zen Planner, PushPress, Hapana and generic CSV, and it maps the columns and handles existing records for you. On annual plans the VERVE migration concierge does the import for you. Export from your current platform before you cancel it, while the account is still active.
No, and that is deliberate. Mindbody's marketplace puts your classes in front of consumers browsing the app, which is genuinely useful for businesses that rely on discovery by strangers. Pulse has no marketplace, so every member you get is one you acquired yourself and your member list never appears in a shared booking app. Which of those you want depends on where your new members actually come from.
Try VERVE Pulse free for 30 days. Full access to the CRM, AI lead scoring, and the whole gym platform underneath it. No card required.