Momence vs Mindbody: Real Cost, and Who Each One Suits

Search this and the results tell you something before you read any of them. Momence's page about Mindbody sits at number two. Mindbody's page about Momence sits at number three. And at number one, above both of them, is a Reddit thread of studio owners asking each other.

That ordering is Google saying the vendor pages did not answer the question. So this article tries to, including the parts that are inconvenient for us: we make Corterra Book, which competes with both.

The useful frame is not which platform is better. It is that these two hide their real cost in exactly opposite ways, and once you see that, the decision gets much easier.

In a hurry? Jump to the two pricing tricks, the arithmetic, how to choose, or how Corterra Book approaches this.

The short answer

• Mindbody publishes a low entry price and hides the ladder above it. $79 a month per location gets you a thin Starter tier. Analytics, room management and promo codes are one tier up, quoted. Email and text campaigns are two tiers up, quoted.
• Momence publishes a free tier and hides the arithmetic. Their pricing page is behind a form. The free plan carries a 5% transaction fee and a 4% service fee, and processing is 3.9% + $0.30 on every tier.
• Same trick, opposite direction: the number you can see is not the number you pay.
• Momence if you are class-led at one location with several instructors, and you go straight to the $199 Business tier rather than starting free.
• Mindbody if marketplace discovery brings you countable bookings, or you run multiple locations.
• Neither if a real part of what you sell is a room rather than a person's time, or if customers need to book for more than one person themselves. That is the case we cover at the end, and it is the one that comes up most in the public threads.

How much does Momence cost?

Four tiers, retrieved through their gated form in August 2026:

Processing is 3.9% + $0.30 online, 3.7% + $0.05 in person, 1.8% ACH, on every tier. That is roughly a full percentage point above a standard pass-through rate, and it applies to everything you sell.

The free tier is a trap for anyone who succeeds on it. At $8,000 a month in card volume the fees come to somewhere between $720 and $1,062, against $541 all-in on the $199 plan. Free stops being the cheaper option somewhere around $2,200 to $4,000 a month in card volume. The full arithmetic, including what their page does not specify, is in Momence pricing: what it actually costs.

Eight features are separate paid add-ons with unpublished prices, including email and SMS marketing, leads, reviews, referrals and Spotfiller.

How much does Mindbody cost?

Mindbody advertises Starter at $79 a month per location. Everything above that is quoted. The four tiers are Starter, Accelerate, Ultimate and Enterprise.

Starter covers business management, integrated payments, booking widgets for your own site, a listing in the Mindbody consumer app, and basic reporting. That is the whole of it.

• Accelerate adds real analytics, room and resource management, client pick-a-spot, and promo codes.
• Ultimate adds automated email and text campaigns, marketing list-building, sales pipeline management, and a 24/7 AI front desk.

So a class-led studio that wants clients to pick their own spot is already above the published price, and one that wants to run a win-back campaign is buying the top published tier at a number it cannot look up. We priced Mindbody against the other obvious appointment-led option in Mindbody vs Vagaro.

Two opposite ways of hiding the same thing

This is the section worth keeping.

Mindbody's cost is hidden vertically. The entry price is real and checkable, and it buys a deliberately thin product. What you actually want is one or two tiers up, and those tiers have no published number. You cannot build your own total. You find out what it costs by talking to someone whose job is to tell you.

Momence's cost is hidden horizontally. The tier prices are knowable once you fill in the form, and they are genuinely reasonable. But the cost that matters is a percentage of your revenue, and a percentage does not appear as a line on any page. It arrives as a slightly smaller deposit every week, forever, growing exactly in step with how well you are doing.

The practical consequence is different for each:

• With Mindbody, you can be surprised once, at the point of sale, and then you know. Get every tier quoted in writing before you sign and the problem is solved.
• With Momence, you can be surprised slowly, for two years, and never notice. Nothing prompts you when the free plan stops being the cheap one.

The second failure is the one to guard against, because it does not feel like anything. The recurring theme in public reviews of Momence on Capterra and Trustpilot is billing surprises rather than missing features, which is what you would expect from a model priced this way.

What a working setup actually costs

Price the configuration you would genuinely run. Take a class-led studio with three instructors doing $15,000 a month in card volume across roughly 150 transactions, wanting real reporting and the ability to text its clients.

Three things fall out of that table.

Mindbody's row cannot be completed. Not because we did not try, but because two of its four lines are quote-only. That is the honest state of the comparison, and it is itself a finding: you cannot budget Mindbody from public information at the tier a real studio needs.

Momence's free plan costs this studio more than double its $199 plan. A studio at $15,000 a month that started free two years ago and never revisited it is paying roughly $12,000 a year for the privilege of being on the free tier.

The processing line is bigger than the subscription line on both platforms. Everyone argues about $199 versus $79. The $630 sitting underneath it decides more.

What you actually get for it

The same information as a capability grid. A feature you have to move up two tiers or buy separately for is not really included.

"Not published" means the vendor does not state it, so we are not going to guess on your behalf. Ask about any row that matters to you.

Read down the columns and the shape is clear. Momence's operational tier is good value at $199 and its growth tools are all metered on top. Mindbody's entry tier is thin and nearly everything is a quoted tier above it. Ours is flatter with a shorter menu, which cuts both ways: no reviews, referrals, lead capture, substitutions or on-demand video at all.

Where Mindbody genuinely wins

• Marketplace discovery. The Mindbody consumer app puts you in front of people who are not looking for you specifically. In dense urban markets it produces real, countable bookings. Nothing in this comparison replaces it, ours included, and Momence's client app is not the same thing.
• Multi-location operations. Cross-location reporting, staff and inventory at a chain is what the product is built around now. Momence's Business tier is explicitly one physical location.
• Brand familiarity. Clients recognise it and many already have the app installed. For a studio whose members skew toward people who already do three other studios, that is a genuine retention factor.
• Depth at the top end. If you genuinely run segmented campaigns and automated retention flows, Ultimate is doing real work.

If two or more of those describe you, the rest of this is academic. The wider list of Mindbody replacements is in Mindbody alternatives for small wellness studios.

Where Momence genuinely wins

• Seat count at $199. Unlimited teacher accounts and no customer cap on a flat tier is aggressive. If you have eight instructors, per-seat platforms get expensive fast and this one does not.
• A real free tier for a real beginner. Below roughly $2,000 a month in card volume, a percentage of very little is very little, and the free plan is far more capable than most free plans in this category.
• Spotfiller. Last-minute discounted offers pushed to fill empty class spots is a well-targeted product for a recurring, expensive problem. If your timetable has chronic gaps it may pay for itself, and the manual version of the same job is in how to fill empty class spots at your studio.
• Instructor substitutions. Text sub requests with dashboard approvals and pay rate updates is a problem most platforms in this category ignore entirely.
• On-demand video, which most booking platforms do not attempt.
• Studio owners actually moving. The public threads are full of people who left Mindbody after many years and are happy. That is worth more than any feature grid.

Two things to watch. The processing rate applies to everything forever, and the growth add-ons are individually unpriced and collectively not free. Price both at the volume you expect in two years, not the one you have now.

The question neither vendor page asks

What gets consumed when somebody books? Two things decide how a booking has to be modelled: whether a person's time or a room is reserved, and how many people fit at once. That gives four boxes, and both platforms in this comparison live in the top row.

The bottom row is where both get awkward, because the thing being reserved is a room and the staff member is incidental or absent. A wellness studio needs both of those boxes, and ordinary class or appointment software fails them differently.

A shared room cannot be faked. A staff calendar takes one booking at a time, so a sauna that seats eight is not expressible as a person at any price. What operators do instead is create eight fake staff members, or eight duplicate appointments per session, or list the room as a fitness class so a seat limit exists at all. The failure mode is a room with more people booked than seats.

A single-occupancy room can be faked, which is its own trap. A float tank booking looks exactly like a massage booking, so the software carries it and nothing appears wrong. The cost turns up elsewhere: the tank's filtration time belongs to the room rather than a person, nobody staffs it so its hours should follow the front desk and not a shift, a second tank needs a second fake person, and maintenance downtime has to be entered as somebody's day off.

There is a related question that comes up constantly in the threads where people compare these two: can a customer book for more than one person, themselves, and pay once? It is one of the most cited reasons people give for switching platforms, and it is not a feature-grid row on either vendor's site.

There is a fast test, and it works on any platform including ours. During the trial, open the customer-facing booking page rather than the staff dashboard, and try two things: reserve three seats in one session and check out once, and book something with no staff member attached to it at all. Most tools will let a staff member assemble a group by hand. Far fewer let the customer do it alone, and a group that has to phone you is a group that often books nothing.

What switching actually costs

The pricing table is the easy part. Having run these migrations, this is what eats the time:

• Saved cards do not transfer. Card details are tokenized against your current platform's processor and those tokens are not portable to a different vendor. Every client with a card on file has to re-enter it. Plan a campaign and a deadline for it, because this is what quietly breaks a membership program mid-move.
• Memberships do not resume billing on their own. An imported member is a record, not a live subscription. Work your member list in renewal-date order, nearest first, or the ones that come due during the migration lapse silently.
• Client list and appointment history usually export cleanly. The part people worry about is generally the easy part. Pull a fresh export on the day, not one from three weeks earlier.
• Waivers and notes usually archive rather than import. Keep the old records readable and re-sign clients on their first visit.
• Services, durations and buffers are re-entered by hand. An afternoon, and the step where a rushed migration ships wrong buffer times that cause double bookings for a month.
• Check the contract you are leaving. Momence's Custom tier requires an annual commitment and Mindbody's higher tiers are negotiated. Find your notice period before you fall in love with anything.

Which leads to the only migration rule that matters: switch for a structural reason, not a small monthly saving. A $20 difference does not survive a weekend of work plus a card re-collection campaign. A percentage fee that grows forever does. A scheduling model that cannot represent what you sell does.

How to choose

• Brand new, very low volume, class-led: Momence free, with a calendar reminder to re-run the arithmetic every quarter.
• Established class studio, one location, several instructors: Momence Business at $199. Do not start on free and drift.
• Marketplace bookings are a real share of your revenue: Mindbody, and check your own attribution before assuming either way.
• Multiple locations: Mindbody, and get the per-location number in writing.
• You need campaigns and retention tooling on a budget: price both properly first. This is where Momence's add-ons and Mindbody's Ultimate tier both become real money, and neither will tell you how much until you ask.
• Appointment-led rather than class-led: look past both. We covered the cheaper appointment platforms in Mindbody vs Vagaro, and the wider field in spa scheduling software: what to look for and what it costs.
• Any real part of your revenue comes from a room: neither, and test the customer-facing flow for a shared session and for a booking with no staff member attached.

That last case is ours. See how Corterra Book approaches it.

How Corterra Book approaches this

Two deliberate positions from Corterra Book, offered so you can argue with them.

We never take a percentage of a booking. Processing is Stripe's standard card rates paid directly by you, plus a flat 15 cents per transaction from us. Fifteen cents does not grow when your average ticket does. Plans are $40 Basic and $80 Pro, and every add-on price is published rather than quoted, which is the direct answer to both of the pricing patterns described above.

The bottom row of that grid is first-class. A shared room is a real thing rather than a class with the timetable ignored: set a seat count and every slot shows how many places are left, counting down as people book, with no timetable required. A single-occupancy room is a real thing too, with its own hours and turnaround, rather than a staff member who does not exist. The calendar belongs to the service, not to a person, so nothing has to be invented or relabelled.

Group bookings are done by the customer. One booking holds several seats rather than several separate bookings, so the room's capacity is right and the calendar shows one block. The customer does it themselves on the public booking page, pays once, and forwards a claim link so each guest fills in their own details. That is the specific gap the threads keep pointing at.

Where we fit badly, plainly:

• No consumer marketplace. If discovery is your actual problem, Mindbody is a better answer than we are.
• No review requests, referral program, lead capture, instructor substitutions or on-demand video. Momence has all five and we have none of them.
• No standalone resource booked independently of a service, and no smart-lock integration for unstaffed hours.
• Below roughly $700 a month in card volume, Momence's free plan is cheaper than our $40 plan. You should hear that from us.
• Single location per plan. Multi-location is a conversation rather than a self-serve tier.

The full checklist for shared-room studios is in sauna booking software: what studio owners actually need, the multi-service version is in wellness center software: booking rooms and equipment, not just staff, and the full Momence fee arithmetic is in Momence pricing: what it actually costs.

FAQ

Is Momence cheaper than Mindbody? On subscription alone it depends on the tier. Mindbody's entry price is $79 a month per location against Momence's $199 Business tier, but Mindbody's $79 tier gates reporting, room management and promo codes behind Accelerate and gates campaigns behind Ultimate, both quoted. Momence's $199 includes full reporting, segmentation, gift cards, retail and unlimited teacher accounts. Once processing is included, Momence's 3.9% + $0.30 on every transaction is usually the larger number than either subscription.

How much does Momence cost per month? Basic is free with a 5% transaction fee and 4% service fee, Individual is $60 a month, Business is $199 a month, and Custom is quoted with an annual contract. Card processing is 3.9% + $0.30 online on every tier.

What is included in Mindbody's $79 plan? Business management, integrated payments, booking widgets for your own website, a listing in the Mindbody consumer app, and basic reporting. Advanced reporting, room and resource management and promo codes require Accelerate; automated email and text campaigns require Ultimate. Both are quote-based.

Is Momence the same as Mindbody? No. They are competing platforms, and Momence markets itself directly as a Mindbody alternative. Both are built around a class timetable, but they price very differently: Mindbody publishes a low entry tier and quotes everything above it, while Momence publishes tier prices behind a form and charges a percentage of revenue on its free plan plus an above-market processing rate on every plan.

Why are studio owners switching from Mindbody to Momence? The reasons given most often in public threads are cost at the tier they actually needed, a leaner interface, and marketing automation that comes bundled rather than quoted. The tradeoffs raised just as often are the higher processing rate, add-on pricing that is not published, and a client app that studio owners describe as weaker than Mindbody's branded app.

Does Momence or Mindbody handle sauna and shared rooms? Neither models a shared room directly. Both are built around a class timetable or a practitioner's time, so a room that holds several unrelated customers at once has to be approximated by listing it as a class, or by duplicating bookings. Test it as a customer during the trial: open the public booking page and try to reserve several seats in one session and check out once.

Can customers book for more than one person on Momence or Mindbody? Both allow a staff member to build a multi-person booking from the dashboard. The question worth testing is whether a customer can do it themselves on the public booking page and pay once, without phoning you, because that is where these platforms differ most and neither publishes a clear answer.

Does Momence include data migration from Mindbody? Onboarding and data migration are listed under Momence's Custom tier, which is quoted and requires an annual contract. The free, $60 and $199 tiers do not list migration support. Note that saved card details cannot be migrated between platforms regardless of vendor, since they are tokenized against the old processor.

Prices are what each vendor advertised at the time of writing, with Momence's retrieved through their gated pricing form in August 2026. Check both directly before deciding, because tiers and add-on line-ups change. If the shared-room or mixed-model case is yours, start a 15 day free trial of Corterra Book, or walk a live booking flow first and try booking three seats as a customer before you talk to anyone.