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Adminished vs Mindbody (2026)

Quick verdict: Mindbody is heavy wellness software built for established multi-location studios — yoga chains, pilates groups, spas — priced for adult businesses with the budget and staff to match. For a small UK club working with children, its US-origin assumptions miss what you're accountable for: DBS, consent-per-child, UK GDPR, Gift Aid. Adminished is purpose-built for small UK clubs, at a fraction of the cost — with safeguarding and UK charity rules in the core, ready in an afternoon.

Feature comparison

What Mindbody does well

• Marketplace and discoverability. The Mindbody consumer app has millions of users searching for classes to book. For a yoga studio or pilates chain wanting walk-in customers, this is genuinely valuable and hard to replicate elsewhere.
• Comprehensive reporting. Revenue dashboards, staff performance metrics, retention analytics — Mindbody's reporting suite is deep. Businesses with multiple revenue streams and dedicated managers will find real value here.
• Multi-location and staff management. If you run five studios with 20 instructors each, Mindbody's permissions model, shift scheduling, and payroll integrations are built for that complexity.
• POS and retail. Integrated point-of-sale for merchandise, memberships, and drop-in bookings makes sense for a reception desk handling walk-up customers throughout the day.

What Adminished does well

• Purpose-built for small UK clubs, at a fraction of the cost. Every Adminished feature — DBS tracking, consent capture, Gift Aid, e-signing — is on every plan, including Free. Plans differ only in how big your club can be: Free covers 20 students, Essential £19/mo covers 75, Pro £49/mo covers 200. A club paying £105–£420/month for Mindbody to manage 60 members is paying enterprise-studio prices for features it will never touch.
• Safeguarding built in, not bolted on. Record and track DBS expiry per person, capture consent forms, emergency contacts and medical notes before a child's first session, and keep a communication audit trail. The things a UK club working with children is personally accountable for — standard on every plan, not a higher-tier add-on.
• A register that knows the difference between absent and away. Mark each child present, late, excused or no-show in one tap on any phone or tablet — and excused and no-show are recorded without charging a fee, so a sick child never lands on a parent's bill by mistake. Your safeguarding record and your billing both stay honest.
• Gift Aid in the core. If you're a charity or Scout group, Adminished captures Gift Aid declarations the moment a parent signs up, tracks who's eligible, and produces the report you hand to HMRC. There's a free Gift Aid calculator too. Mindbody, built for US wellness businesses, has nothing for UK charity claims.
• Coach payroll worked out for you. Adminished totals the sessions and hours each coach actually taught, multiplies by their rate, and exports a clean CSV for whoever does your books. It does the maths and the export — it is not PAYE/NI/RTI filing.
• Parent self-onboarding via join code. Parents register themselves with a code — no app download, no re-keying their data. Co-parents and grandparents can all be linked so every message reaches them.
• UK-first compliance you can show a parent. Built and hosted in the UK, ICO registered, UK GDPR in from the ground up — not retrofitted onto a US product. Our public Security page lists our UK GDPR basis, data residency, named sub-processors, bcrypt password storage, per-club data isolation and a 30-day deletion guarantee — the page you can forward to a parent or a council without a second thought.

Who should use Mindbody

Mindbody makes sense for established multi-location wellness businesses — yoga studios, pilates chains, gym franchises, or spa groups — that rely on walk-in and drop-in customers finding them through the Mindbody marketplace. It suits organisations with dedicated administrative staff who can handle the setup process, ongoing configuration, and the monthly cost. If discoverability through a consumer booking app is core to your growth strategy and your budget reflects that, Mindbody is a credible choice.

Adminished is built for small UK clubs and activity providers that work with children: martial arts schools, dance academies, gymnastics clubs, swimming lessons, Scout groups, football academies, tuition centres. If you are one or two people running classes for 20 to 150 students — tracking DBS, collecting consent, taking the register, collecting monthly fees and (for charities) claiming Gift Aid — Adminished covers what you're accountable for, at a fraction of an enterprise studio price, and runs the same whether you add a second activity or change discipline. The free plan has no time limit: run a club of up to 20 students and pay nothing.

Frequently asked questions

Is Mindbody suitable for a small UK sports club?

Rarely. Mindbody is designed for adult wellness businesses with multiple locations, dedicated staff, and a strategy built around consumer discoverability through the Mindbody app marketplace. A 60-member karate club or dance school does not need multi-location management or retail POS — and will pay at least £105/month for the privilege of unused features. What it does need, and Mindbody's US-origin product doesn't centre, is DBS tracking, consent-per-child, UK GDPR and Gift Aid. For small UK clubs working with children, Adminished covers those requirements at a fraction of the cost.

How much does Mindbody cost in the UK?

Mindbody's pricing starts at around $129/month (roughly £105/month at current rates) for the Starter tier, which has significant feature restrictions. The more functional plans run $249–$499/month (approximately £200–£400/month). Full feature access, including advanced reporting and multi-location tools, typically requires the higher tiers. Prices are quoted in US dollars and fluctuate with the exchange rate. There is no free plan and no month-by-month trial without a sales call.

Does Adminished have a marketplace like Mindbody?

No — and that is a deliberate choice. Adminished is an administration tool for clubs that already have their members. It is not a consumer booking marketplace. If your club depends on walk-in customers discovering you through a platform app, Mindbody's marketplace is a genuine differentiator. If your club grows through word-of-mouth, school partnerships, or local advertising — as most small UK clubs do — the marketplace is not something you need or would pay for.

Which is better for a dance school with 60 students?

Adminished. A dance school with 60 students needs recurring class schedules, digital consent forms for under-18s, an attendance register, and a way to collect monthly fees. Adminished handles all of that on the Essential plan at £19/month. Mindbody would cost at least ten times as much, require days of setup, and deliver dozens of features irrelevant to a single-location school. The only scenario where Mindbody becomes worth considering is if the school is actively expanding to multiple venues and wants consumer discovery through the Mindbody app.