Most “gym management software comparison” articles are written for gyms. If you run a dojo, the comparison you actually need is a step earlier: should you be buying gym software at all, or something built around rank?
That question decides more than which vendor you pick. We build martial arts software, so we have an obvious bias — this guide is written to be useful even if you conclude general gym software is the right call for your school, which for some schools it genuinely is.
All pricing below was verified against vendor pricing pages in July 2026.
The real dividing line: does it understand rank?
Every platform here manages members, classes, bookings and payments competently. That is table stakes and not worth choosing on. The dividing line is what happens at a grading.
Martial-arts-first platforms treat rank as a core object. Time-in-grade, eligibility, curriculum requirements, grading events and promotion history are built in. When you run a grading, the system already knows who is eligible.
General gym platforms treat rank as metadata. You can record a belt in a custom field, but nothing computes eligibility, nothing tracks time-in-grade, and generating a grading list means exporting to a spreadsheet and filtering by hand.
Clubworx makes the gap unusually visible: it is gym software that sells martial arts grading events as a $10/month add-on on its paid plans. That is an honest reflection of where rank sits in a gym-first product — useful, supported, but an extra.
Comparison table
| Platform | Built for | Rank/grading | Entry price | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kicksite | Martial arts | Core | $49/mo (0–25 students) | No |
| Martialytics | Martial arts | Core | $69/mo (0–50 students) | No |
| MyDojo | Martial arts | Core | Free (until 31 March 2027) | Yes, no cap |
| Clubworx | Gyms/studios | $10/mo add-on | A$0 (≤20 members) | Yes, ≤20 |
| Gymdesk | Gyms/studios | Not rank-first | $75/mo (≤50 members) | No |
| Zen Planner | Fitness businesses | Not rank-first | $99/mo (Studio) | No |
Prices as published July 2026. Clubworx in AUD; others in USD.
Where each one fits
Kicksite — martial arts, cheapest entry
$49/month for up to 25 students, rising to $99 (26–50), $149 (51–100) and $199 (101+). Every feature is available at every tier, which removes the usual trap where growing past a member threshold also unlocks the feature you needed six months ago.
Best for small and mid-size schools that want martial-arts-native grading without negotiating over features. The bands step up faster than competitors, so it becomes comparatively expensive around the 100-student mark.
Martialytics — martial arts, most consistent as you grow
$69/month for up to 50 active students, then $99 (51–100), $129 (101–200) and $199 (200+). Leads and inactive students don’t count toward your tier, which matters if you carry a long tail of lapsed members. States no payment-processing markup beyond standard Stripe rates.
Best for schools planning to grow, because the curve is flatter than Kicksite’s across the mid range.
MyDojo — martial arts, free until 31 March 2027
Free until 31 March 2027: no subscription, no per-student charge, no cap on student numbers, with belt and rank progression built in rather than bolted on.
The honest caveat: we’re newer than everything else here, and the integration ecosystem and body of community documentation are correspondingly smaller. If you need a mature third-party integration library, the established platforms have one and we don’t yet.
Clubworx — gym software with a free tier and a grading add-on
A free plan for up to 20 active members, then A$109 (≤100), A$149 (≤250) and A$169 (unlimited). Includes online booking, payments, SMS, a check-in kiosk and attendance tracking.
Best for very small schools who need something free from an established vendor. Two caveats: prices are in Australian dollars, and grading events cost $10/month extra on paid plans.
Gymdesk — clean general-purpose gym software
$75/month for up to 50 active members, then $100 (51–100), $150 (101–200) and $200 (201–400). Includes a responsive website and unlimited staff accounts, month-to-month with no contracts. Frozen and cancelled members don’t count toward your tier.
Best for mixed academies running fitness programming alongside martial arts, where rank isn’t the organising principle of the timetable.
Zen Planner — the incumbent
$99/month Studio, $198 Essentials, $348 Ultimate. The most recognised product in this space and the most expensive to run at scale. Its Capterra listing shows no free trial and no free version, and records reviewer complaints about payment-processing fees, billing errors and charges tied to cancellation and merchant requirements.
Best for larger multi-instructor operations that need the ecosystem and can absorb the cost. Price the processing fees and exit terms before you sign.
The costs that don’t appear on the pricing page
Payment processing. The subscription is the visible cost; the processing rate is the recurring one. On a school collecting £8,000/month, a one-point difference in processing is £80/month — more than the gap between most of these platforms. Ask for the rate in writing.
Add-on modules. Grading events on Clubworx. Marketing modules, websites and branded apps on the larger platforms. The base price is frequently not the running price.
Currency. Clubworx prices in AUD and the rest in USD. For a UK school, a 10% currency move outweighs the difference between two competing products.
Migration time. Getting student records, payment mandates and grading history into a new system is a week of someone’s attention. Do it in a quiet period, never in the run-up to a grading.
How to decide
Start with grading frequency. If you grade regularly and eligibility rules matter, buy martial-arts-first software. The manual work of maintaining rank in a gym platform recurs forever and grows with your student count.
Then find your band. Every platform prices by active students or members. Locate your number on each pricing page before comparing anything else — it eliminates half the shortlist immediately.
Then price the whole thing. Subscription plus processing plus add-ons. A $49 platform with a rich processing margin can cost more annually than a $99 one without.
Then test with real data. Import twenty real students and run one real grading. Vendor demos are built to look effortless; your school’s edge cases are what actually break software.
Summary
If rank is central to how you run classes, the martial-arts-first platforms — Kicksite, Martialytics, MyDojo — will save you recurring manual work that general gym software will not.
If you run mixed programming and grade infrequently, Gymdesk and Zen Planner are capable and you’re not missing much.
If you have under 20 members and no budget, Clubworx’s free tier and MyDojo’s early access are the two genuinely free routes, and we’ve compared them properly in our guide to free martial arts software.
For the full buying comparison ranked by school size, see best martial arts software 2026.
Try MyDojo
MyDojo is free until 31 March 2027 — no subscription, no per-student fee, no card required. See what it does.
