Short list. If a category is not here it is because I do not think it matters enough at your size to have an opinion about.
Some of the links on this page are paid links. If you sign up for a tool through one of them, I earn a commission or a referral fee from that company, at no additional cost to you.
I only list tools I recommend to paying clients, and every paid link below is marked. Links without the paid link tag earn me nothing, and I have marked those too.
Nothing on this page ever appears in a Teardown. I do not name vendors in a document you paid me to write. That is the whole reason the document is worth anything.
Payment processing and point of sale. The switch most gyms put off longest and regret waiting on. (Paid link. I earn a referral fee if you sign up.)
Not for you if you are already deep in a management platform that handles billing natively and switching would break your recurring charges.
If you sell anything online, or invoice for anything over about $600, ACH through Stripe caps at $5 a transaction against roughly 2.9 percent on a card. On a $15,000 invoice that is $5 instead of $435. (Not a paid link. I earn nothing from this.)
Scheduling, memberships, billing, reporting. The default at your size for a reason: the reporting is good enough to run a diagnostic off, which most of the cheaper options are not. (Paid link. I earn a referral fee if you sign up.)
Not for you if you are one location under about $500,000 and the price is real money to you. It is more system than you need.
The alternative. Lighter, cheaper, and genuinely good if your model is class based. (Paid link. I earn a commission if you subscribe.)
Not for you if you are multi location with complex staff pay structures.
CRM, pipelines, text and email follow up in one place. Powerful and genuinely hard to set up. (Paid link. I earn a recurring commission if you subscribe.)
Not for you if nobody in the building is going to own it. This is the single most abandoned piece of software in this industry. If you buy it and nobody configures it, you have bought a monthly bill.
Bookkeeping. Whatever you use, the requirement is the same: a profit and loss you can export by month, with twelve months of columns. If your current setup cannot do that, that is the problem, not the software. (Paid link. I earn a referral fee if you subscribe.)
Payroll. Handles contractors and employees in one place, which matters more in this industry than in most. (Paid link. I earn a referral fee for new customers who run payroll.)
Supplement dispensary. Free for you to run, and the margin goes to the gym rather than to a distributor. Worth looking at only if supplements are already a real line for you, not as something to bolt on. (Not a paid link. I earn nothing from this.)
If you are under a million and your problem is volume, these two are better at that than I am. I was a paying client of both. (Not paid links. I earn nothing from these.)
Software does not fix a business. Every tool on this page is a way of doing something you already decided to do. If you do not know what your show rate is, a better CRM will tell you a number you still will not act on.
Buy the tool after you have decided what it is for. Not before.