Mindbody grew up serving studios, gyms, spas and salons, and it knows that world well. The friction shows up somewhere specific: when a venue also rents things by the slot — courts, pitches, lanes, bays, jetskis — and needs those to live on the same calendar as the timetable.
You don't need a forty-row feature matrix to work this out. In practice it comes down to these.
Courts, pitches, lanes, bays, boats, studios hired out by the hour. Resource booking has its own rules — buffers between slots, per-resource pricing, part-court splits, minimum durations — and a timetable-shaped system tends to model these as awkward recurring classes.
If settlement has to land in your own merchant account, or you operate in a market where local acquirers matter, this decides it early. Real Sports Bookings runs on your Stripe, Checkout.com or Paymob account rather than processing on your behalf.
Classes in one system and courts in another means two customer records, two payment flows and reconciliation by hand. The value of consolidating is usually measured in staff hours per week, not in software features.
Both cover timetables, memberships and payments competently. This table sticks to the places where the answer genuinely diverges.
Scroll the table sideways to see both columns.
| Real Sports Bookings | Studio platforms (e.g. Mindbody) | |
|---|---|---|
| Core model | Bookable resources and a timetable, on one calendar — courts, pitches, lanes, bays, coaches, classes, equipment. | A class and appointment timetable, with instructors and rooms. |
| Slot-based hire | NativePer-resource rates, buffers, minimum durations and booking windows. | Possible, but modelled through the appointment or class system. |
| Payments | Your gatewayYour own Stripe, Checkout.com or Paymob account; settlement direct to you. | Typically processed through the platform's own payment product. |
| Consumer discovery | None of our own — we don't run a marketplace, and we don't sell your customers a competing venue. | Their strengthA large consumer wellness app and marketplace that brings in new clients. |
| Packages & wallets | Memberships, class packs and credit wallets that spend across courts, classes and coaching alike. | Class packs and memberships, oriented to the timetable. |
| Corporate & block bookings | On-account block bookings, monthly invoicing, broker logins. | Handled through standard client billing. |
| Growth tooling | Real Sports OS — presence audits, ranked growth opportunities and campaign drafts built from your own booking data. Starter includes two audit reports; the full suite is on Pro. | Marketing tools plus reach through the consumer marketplace. |
| Pricing model | Starter free (50 bookings/month). Pro $49/month flat (1,000 bookings/month, 30-day free trial). Custom for multiple branches, higher volume, your own domain and the AI booking assistant. No commission, no setup fee, no lock-in. | Tiered subscription, quoted by market and business size. |
We don't publish competitors' prices or screenshots: their plans change, and yours will be quoted for your market. The right-hand column characterises studio-management platforms generally, from public materials as of August 2026 — verify the specifics with them directly. Mindbody is a trademark of its owner; we are not affiliated with them, and nothing here is a statement about their service quality.
The risky part of leaving a studio platform isn't the data, it's the recurring memberships. This sequence protects them.
Classes, instructors, rooms and every rentable resource get set up with their own rates and rules.
Customers, active memberships, remaining class-pack credits and future bookings are imported and reconciled.
Your team works the new calendar while the old one goes read-only. We check the first renewal cycle before anything is cancelled.
The booking page goes live and payments move to your own gateway. Old links redirect.
No, and running two is where most of the pain comes from. In Real Sports Bookings a class, a coaching block and a court slot are the same kind of object on the same calendar, so a customer's history, packages and wallet balance follow them across all three.
Yes. Recurring memberships, class packs and prepaid credit wallets are core, with auto-renewal, and they can be spent on anything bookable — a class, a court hour or a coaching session — rather than being locked to one type.
Your own Stripe, Checkout.com or Paymob account. The merchant account is yours and settlement goes directly to you. Paymob in particular matters in the Gulf, where several international platforms cannot settle locally.
If you are a single-discipline studio with no courts, pitches or rentable resources, and your business runs entirely on a class timetable with a wellness marketplace bringing in new clients, a dedicated studio platform is a good fit. The case for moving starts when resource booking, multi-sport scheduling or your own payment gateway become part of the job.
Free to start, migration help included, live in about a week.