Arketa alternative for studios and solo instructors

Arketa and Workout OS at a glance

From arketa.com and third-party sources as of October 2026. Figures from third parties are marked.

What Arketa does well

Arketa positions itself for small, independent fitness businesses, publishes a clear entry price, and does not tie customers to a long contract. For a solo instructor who wants one place to sell classes and packages and is already comfortable with Stripe, that simplicity is attractive. Stripe is available in many countries, which matters if your business is outside Turkey today.

What to check before choosing

• The commission: Arketa lists 3% plus Stripe fees. On $5,000 a month in sales, 3% is about $150 on top of the subscription.
• What your plan includes at your client count and what moves you to the next plan.
• How your data can leave: formats, fees and the window after cancellation.

A flat subscription with no vendor commission costs more in some months and less in others. Run the numbers on your real sales.

How Workout OS approaches it

Workout OS is a web-based management tool for gyms (Workout OS) and for PT, Pilates and reformer studios (Workout Studio). It runs in the browser, including on a phone, and clients can book through a link without installing an app.

We aim to remove the things owners most often complain about in this category: surprise price rises, commission on payments, hard-to-find cancellation and paid data export. Pricing is flat: studios pay $0, $24, $59 or $99 a month depending on the plan, and Studio Solo has unlimited clients. We do not take a cut of payments, you can cancel in one click effective at period end, and you can download all your data as a ZIP whenever you want.

Day to day, the features that matter most for studios are reformer spot booking, a waitlist that promotes the next person automatically, session packages with a remaining-sessions ledger, and ready-made reminders and drafts by reason, such as package ending or payment due, that staff review and send by SMS or email.

Honest limits: we are a young product. We have no consumer marketplace, no native member app for Studio (clients use the booking link in a browser), and no advanced marketing suite. Online card payment is only available as an optional paid add-on connecting the studio's own payment provider account. Where you need online card payments through an international processor today, we do not offer that.

Keeping members: what happens after the at-risk list

Many tools in this category can show which members or clients are lapsing, and many stop at that list. We have not verified exactly what Arketa offers on its current plans, so ask them what happens after the list: who is told, with what reason, what the next step is, and whether the result is measured.

Workout OS closes that loop. Every night it compares each member's or client's activity with their own history using eight explainable rules (not an AI prediction), shows the reason with numbers such as weekly visits 3.1 to 0.5, and suggests an action: a programme review for the trainer, a neutral message draft that your staff edit and send personally, or a follow-up task. Fourteen and thirty days later it shows who came back, who is active again and who renewed, next to cases nobody followed up. Nothing is sent automatically, members never see a risk label, and it is included in every plan (Member success in the gym product, Client follow-up in Workout Studio).

It is a prompt for a human, not a guarantee: a small gym will see small numbers, and with fewer than 10 cases in a group we show counts rather than percentages.

Moving from Arketa to Workout OS

Workout OS imports from Mindbody, Glofox, Trainerize and Excel. If you use Arketa, the practical route is an Excel/CSV export that you map in the importer. Run a test week alongside your current system before you switch.

Whatever you choose, ask your current vendor in writing what the export includes, what it costs, and how long you have access after you cancel. See our step-by-step guide to switching.