GymDesk vs Acuity Scheduling in 2026: pricing, fit, and features

GymDesk sets its price by how many active members you have. Acuity Scheduling sets its price by how many calendars you book against. 

GymDesk and Acuity turn up in the same searches, but they are very different solutions.. One is built around a membership roster, the other around a booking slot. Here’s what each actually costs in 2026, where each one breaks for a yoga or Pilates studio, and how to tell when the honest answer is neither.

What’s the real difference between GymDesk and Acuity Scheduling?

GymDesk is a gym and martial arts school management software: memberships, billing, attendance, a website, and marketing tools, priced by how many active members you have. Acuity Scheduling is appointment scheduling software owned by Squarespace: a booking calendar with client forms, reminders, and payment integrations, priced by how many calendars you need.

GymDesk is built around a membership roster while Acuity is built around a booking slot. If you’ve been trying to work out which is “better,” the answer is that it really depends on how your studio is operating today.

How much do GymDesk and Acuity Scheduling cost in 2026?

As of August 2026, Acuity Scheduling costs $16, $27 and $49 per month billed annually ($20, $34 and $61 billed monthly) for Starter, Standard and Premium. GymDesk costs $75, $100, $150 and $200 per month by active member count, plus a custom Enterprise plan.

What would a 75-student studio actually pay on each?

Say you teach group classes for about 75 regulars. On GymDesk, 75 active members puts you on the Small Gym tier at $100 a month, or $1,200 a year. That includes your website, your email and SMS tools, payment processing and a video library.

On Acuity, you’d need Standard at $27 a month to sell class packs or memberships at all, because Starter doesn’t do packages. That’s $324 a year. Then you still need a website and an email tool, and you connect your own Stripe or Square account to take money.

So the gap is $876 a year, about $73 a month. That’s the budget Acuity leaves you to buy the website and the marketing tools GymDesk already includes. Whether that’s a good deal depends entirely on what you’re building.

Can you run a yoga or Pilates studio on Acuity Scheduling?

You can, and plenty of teachers do it for years. It breaks in fairly predictable places once group classes become the main event.

Class packs and memberships live on Standard and up. Ashley Hagen ran her studio on Acuity after leaving Mindbody. In her words, it “was kind of clunky because people had to use these codes to use their packages, and it wasn’t as easy.” She hit the same friction teaching virtual classes through it.

Samantha’s version is gentler and just as telling. She picked Acuity early because it was cheap and covered what she needed then, which she described as adding someone to a calendar, taking a payment, sending a reminder, and letting them cancel. That list is a fair description of what Acuity is very good at. It’s also a list with no class pack, no waitlist, and no video library on it.

Is GymDesk built for yoga studios or for martial arts schools?

GymDesk has a yoga studio page and a Pilates page, and the booking, billing and attendance tools underneath are the same ones every gym gets. Look at what surrounds those pages, though. The affiliations GymDesk lists are jiu jitsu networks, its customer stories lead with dojos, and the testimonials on its own yoga page are mostly from BJJ and martial arts owners.

The product tells you the same story. Progress tracking is built around ranks and skills, which is exactly right for a belt system and roughly meaningless for a Vinyasa schedule. 

Member-count pricing is the other tell. A gym with 90 members has 90 people paying monthly dues. A yoga studio with 90 people on the books has some members, some pack holders, and a drop-in crowd who come in November and vanish in July. When your price is set by headcount, that difference matters.

What does neither one include?

The honest answer is uneven: not much on the GymDesk side, and quite a lot on Acuity’s. GymDesk bundles a website, email and SMS marketing, payment processing and a content library into every plan. Acuity includes none of those, which is why “$16 a month” is rarely what an Acuity studio actually spends.

Neither is always the perfect fit for a wellness business. Acuity starts from the one-to-one appointment. GymDesk starts from the gym membership roster. If you’re teaching six group classes a week, selling five-packs, running a Sunday workshop and keeping a small library of recorded classes, you’ll be bending one tool or the other to fit.

If you want to see how the pieces price out separately, our Acuity alternatives roundup walks through the add-ons studios usually end up buying. We also have the same for GymDesk.

Which should you choose, and when is the answer neither?

Choose Acuity Scheduling if most of your income comes from one-to-one sessions, you already have a website you like, and packages are a nice-to-have rather than the core of your business. At $16 to $27 a month it’s hard to beat for what it does.

Choose GymDesk if you run a martial arts school, a CrossFit box, or a gym where nearly everyone is a dues-paying member, and rank or skill progression is part of how you operate. The 30-day trial with no card is unusually generous, and everything is included at every tier.

Choose neither if your week is group classes, packs, drop-ins, a workshop, and some on-demand video, and you don’t want your bill tied to a headcount that swings with the seasons. That’s the studio OfferingTree is built for: website, scheduling, payments, on-demand content and email marketing in one subscription, with individual plans starting at $26 and studio plans at $100 a month. 

For a feature-by-feature read, we’ve got OfferingTree vs Acuity and OfferingTree vs GymDesk pages that go deeper than this comparison should.

Frequently asked questions about Walla vs Acuity