ProCoach Comparison (Pricing, Features, & Benefits)

Manage and Grow Your Fitness Business Better with Exercise.com. Learn more below.

Choose Exercise.com’s All-In-One Fitness Business Management Software. Review our head-to-head ProCoach software comparison and see for yourself. Get a custom web and smartphone app designed for your brand with additional customization available throughout your custom-built software. Grow your business, turn leads into clients, and increase revenue.

Choosing business management software is one of the most important decisions you can make for your business! With the right software, your business can run smoothly, manage your clients and schedule, and help generate greater profit. But a poor software can be more of a headache than help and place your business in jeopardy.

It’s understandable that this is a stressful decision, so it’s our mission at Exercise.com to help you find the best software for your business!

This in-depth review compares ProCoach to Exercise.com’s All-In-One Business Platform. While ProCoach has some distinguishing features, it’s clear to see at the end of this article how Exercise.com promotes the growth of your business through versatility and customizable features! Interested in learning more? Book a demo today!

Fitness Pros Who Trust Exercise.com

ProCoach Software Review

Founded in 2016, ProCoach is a client management software for certified Precision Nutrition (PN) coaches. ProCoach has a very unique nutrition program. ProCoach reasons that success comes from being consistent with small habits that add up to big changes. So every two weeks, a new healthy habit is introduced for the client to work on every day. One habit example is to de-stress for 20 minutes each day. There are 24 habits in total and the program spans 52 weeks.

Additionally, clients are given daily lessons, assignments, and check-ins via email, with progress assessments every few weeks. Coaches can have as much communication with their clients as they’d like, but ProCoach is built to run on autopilot by delivering the ProCoach curriculum automatically with a daily email.

For an additional fee, coaches can choose to include ProCoach Workouts so clients can see results faster.

ProCoach vs Exercise.com

The biggest difference between ProCoach and Exercise.com is that ProCoach is geared towards independent nutritional coaches and trainers; it is not built to manage a business. There are no business management features like booking and scheduling, reports, or marketing integrations.

While ProCoach offers a unique spin on online coaching, it comes with severe restrictions. ProCoach doesn’t allow any custom branding; all PN coaches must use PN branding and software. Being held under the umbrella of PN reduces your opportunities to celebrate your brand and make a statement in the fitness world.

ProCoach also doesn’t offer any customization or flexibility for its 52-week program. If a client struggles to incorporate a healthy habit, such as eating five servings of colorful veggies and fruits every day, there’s no timeline extension for clients to incorporate this habit consistently. Instead, clients must try to conquer this habit at the same time a new habit is automatically introduced.

But with Exercise.com you have everything you need to watch your business succeed because we offer fully-customizable features. Stand out in a sea of fitness choices with your own custom-branded website and app, and grow your business through tailored reports, marketing integrations, e-commerce opportunities, and more.

Boost customer satisfaction with personalized workout plans, nutrition plans, performance assessments, and reports. Instead of ProCoach’s one-size-fits-all approach, Exercise.com offers endless ways to provide a personalized customer experience that keeps customers coming back for more!

Let’s get started on our in-depth comparison review.

Unless otherwise stated, all images and reviews below are of/about Exercise.com’s All-In-One Fitness Business Management software platform. All information about Precision Nutrition and ProCoach is from Precision Nutrition’s website. 

Fitness Business Management Software

Business management software should make your life easier by running efficiently, performing mundane tasks that eat away at your time, be easy for your staff to use, and encourage business growth through targeted reports, e-commerce, marketing integrations, and more. But ProCoach makes business management a challenge from the very beginning.

First, ProCoach is only available to PN coaches; all of its users must be enrolled in or be a graduate of the Precision Nutrition Level 1 (PN L1) certification program. But–the PN L1 program is only open for enrollment twice a year, takes about five months to complete, and costs $1400. Coaches are also required to re-write their exam every two years to maintain their certification. Precision Nutrition doesn’t state how much the re-written exam costs.

PN is on-par with certification expectations, but because ProCoach isn’t designed to manage a fitness business, these requirements put severe restrictions on your employee pool and when you can sign up to use ProCoach! If you miss the enrollment window, you’re out of luck for another six months. You can also only hire PN coaches (or hire an employee during the PN L1 enrollment period so they can also enroll in ProCoach–but what a timing hassle!) which eliminates countless qualified applicants.

It’s also a big request to require a new employee to pay a $1400 PN L1 enrollment fee before employment begins so they can use the software. Or–in addition to paying usual pre-employment fees like background checks and drug screens–you as the employer will have to incur the $1400 cost. That’s one expensive hiring process!

Second, because ProCoach is built for independent online trainers, there are no standard business management features like booking and scheduling or revenue reports. Trainers have their own dashboard where the trainer can view and track their clients’ progress, but these clients are not pooled into a member database. There’s no way to track all trainers’ clients or the revenue generated. This would result in using multiple programs and platforms to manage other business areas.

This isn’t a knock on ProCoach; many PN coaches and clients are highly pleased with ProCoach. But ProCoach is intended to be used for independent online trainers, not fitness businesses. Attempting to use ProCoach to manage a fitness business would not be effective or efficient and make business management difficult.

But Exercise.com is designed to manage a fitness business–and it’s customized to manage your fitness business! With unlimited customizable features, you have everything you need for your business to succeed! Let’s take a closer look at the restrictions of ProCoach and the flexibility of Exercise.com.

Client/Class Scheduling

ProCoach does not offer a client or class scheduling feature. There’s no need for a scheduling feature since the software is built solely for online client management; coaches and clients both complete tasks on their own time. Again, this isn’t a flaw with ProCoach, but ProCoach doesn’t help your fitness business with booking and scheduling. Using ProCoach for client management means you will have to find another program for these services.

But Exercise.com excels with booking and scheduling services! Our layout is professional and user-friendly, instantly grabbing your customers’ attention while easily guiding them through booking appointments. Both staff and customers can view the schedule by location, trainer, day, time, and other filters, which encourages more booked appointments! Keep everything organized for your staff, even with multiple one-on-one sessions, group sessions, and events!

Gym/Facility Management

Because ProCoach is for online nutrition training, there’s no feature offered for facility management. Instead, ProCoach has a client dashboard where coaches can easily view their client list at a glance. Clicking on a client’s profile brings up in-depth reports of a client’s progress. However, ProCoach doesn’t have any business reports.

On the other hand, Exercise.com streamlines your business with targeted reports so you know exactly how your business is doing at all times. For example, knowing that your 7 AM yoga class is always overbooked but the spinning class at the same time has just a handful of participants enables you to make an informed adjustment to the class schedule to boost revenue.

Additionally, Exercise.com tracks and analyzes revenue, taxes, commission and e-commerce, client and group reports, and so much more. We can even provide your business with customized reports!

Client Automation

If ProCoach does one thing well, it’s automation. But they actually do automation too well.

ProCoach is designed to run on auto-pilot: coaches input client information and let the program do all the work for them. ProCoach delivers the same pre-packaged and automated nutrition services to every customer. This mindset can lead to a worrisome trend for your trainers:

ProCoach’s over-automation encourages trainers to be disengaged from their clients.

As customers grow to expect a personalized experience for every service, ProCoach’s poor customer engagement and lack of personalization can result in attrition.

Instead, Exercise.com personalizes client automation in the form of custom workout and nutrition plans, performance assessments, and reminders. We know the power of targeted, customized, perfectly-timed notifications! The right notification sent at the right time can engage customers and grow your business. Additionally, Exercise.com:

• Sends automatic emails for recurring appointments, classes, or customized messages
• Automatically charges and receives payments
• Delivers workouts and resources automatically
• Customizes and automates reminders, alerts, and notifications to be sent through your app, text, or email

Dedicated Zapier Support

ProCoach does not list any integrations at all, which means it can’t help manage, market, or grow your business.

But Exercise.com has dozens of popular integrations already built into our software that help with business management. And we don’t stop there! We also partner with Zapier so you have every tool your business needs. Zapier has over 2,000 apps to choose from so your software is completely customized and efficient. Best of all, Zapier guides you through every step of the process!

Dedicated Account Manager

Exercise.com is serious about providing you with exceptional customer service. By partnering with Exercise.com, you receive a dedicated account manager who assists with all your software needs–indefinitely!

This unique service is especially beneficial as you see your business grow! For instance, you may want to add an online fitness store or revamp your website to attract more customers. Don’t worry about trying to figure out software capabilities or confusing coding! Your account manager is happy to not only make every alteration for you but also guide you and your staff through changes.

Customized Software

Customized services are more critical to customer retention than ever before. Recent staggering statistics show 76% of consumers expect companies to know their needs and expectations, 84% of customers say being treated like a person–not a number–is very important to winning their business, and 72% of customers expect companies to personalize engagement to their needs.

These statistics should cause every manager to consider how well they are engaging their customers. Are you anticipating the needs and expectations of your customers and personalizing their customer experience, treating them as people and not reasons for monetary gain?

When it comes to fitness, gyms must provide personalized fitness experiences in order to be successful. And personalized services have to begin with customized business management software. This is because, quite simply, without the software capabilities to personalize, you can’t personalize customer services!

And unfortunately for ProCoach, there are no features for customized software. As stated earlier, the program is designed to run completely automatically by delivering the same program for every client. Further, coaches aren’t required to communicate with clients. ProCoach actually encourages its coaches to use the software this way. Why?

Coaches–and therefore, ProCoach–make a greater profit the more clients coaches take on. In fact, coaches can take up to 100 clients! There’s no way to manage that many clients with care, so coaches are encouraged to view their clients as a number–for monetary gain–instead of genuinely caring about their progress.

ProCoach treats clients like a number, not like a person.

Focusing on the money to be gained hurts you in the long run. Customers quickly sniff out if they’re only valued for their money–and when that happens, you will not only lose customers, but you will likely incur a lot of bad marketing by word-of-mouth that deters future customers.

But with Exercise.com, we make customer satisfaction the priority through personalized services. We know this takes time, but your completely customizable business software makes personalization effortless. You can do just about anything to personalize your customers’ experience, which leads to greater customer retention and revenue!

Let’s look at some of these personalization features below.

Custom-Branded

Exercise.com starts at the very beginning of personalized customer services by celebrating your unique brand! From your custom app, website, e-commerce opportunities, workout software, and performance software, your customers will be strongly connected and engaged with your brand.

iOS & Android Apps

Another huge drawback of ProCoach is that it does not have a coach or client app. Coaches must use a computer to view client information or respond to messages, which kills productivity. Clients receive new habits, habit checks, lessons, and assignments daily via email. When clicking on these assignments on a mobile device, they are routed to a web browser.

While this may get the job done, Exercise.com delivers a much more convenient and professional experience by creating your own custom-branded app! Everything that can be done on a computer can also be done on your app, from viewing the schedule to tracking workouts and nutrient intake! This convenience makes staff and trainers more productive and customers more satisfied!

Websites

Coaches can receive an optional mini-website from ProCoach. After filling out a survey, ProCoach generates a mini-website that is added to ProCoach’s database where potential customers can browse and select their coach. These mini-websites all look identical except the specific coach information; there’s no customization available.

Far from a mini-website that functions more like a profile, Exercise.com gives you a completely customizable website that helps your brand stand out! Choose from unlimited theme changes, custom graphic work, colors, features, custom dev, and let our exceptional dev team create a professional website. Our websites convert visitors to leads through SEO-optimization and engage current customers. We’re also a Google Certified Partner for added website security!

Additionally, we’re always here for tech support–both during initial set-up and for as long as you partner with us. From small wording tweaks to overhauling your theme, your dedicated account manager can take care of every website or app alteration, saving you valuable admin hours.

Security Features

ProCoach doesn’t mention anything about their security features, but one can hope that ProCoach is responsible with clients’ personal and health information.

You can rest assured with Exercise.com because we take security very seriously! We utilize the highest security standards for payment processing and storing clients’ health information. Every website and app created by Exercise.com is SSL Secure. We protect your clients’ information with the internationally-secure Privacy Shield Framework, and we utilize Google Cloud for storing and transferring data. Payments are made and processed through Stripe.

Marketing Integrations

ProCoach doesn’t specify any integrations. While ProCoach itself may not need any integrations because it’s a self-contained and automatic software, fitness businesses must use marketing strategies to gain customers! And the most time-efficient way to market is through integrations. Using ProCoach means you must do time-consuming labor to manually market your business.

But Exercise.com’s software integrates with an abundance of popular integrations such as:

• MailChimp
• ConstantContact
• ConvertKit
• Zapier
• Google Analytics
• Facebook Pixel
• And more!

If you don’t see an integration your business uses, there’s no need to worry! We can integrate with just about every program, making Exercise.com one of the most versatile and valuable fitness management platforms around!

Workout Software

For an additional monthly charge of $69, ProCoach offers 28 different workout tracks through ProCoach Workouts. If a client indicates they would like to include exercise in their program, their coach can select one of these 28 tracks. While ProCoach Workouts adds some much-needed options to the ProCoach software, the 28 tracks are still rigid and lack personalization.

Far better, Exercise.com’s software allows both pre-designed workouts but also completely customizable workouts for that personalized fitness experience your clients desire! Let’s take a closer look below.

Workout Creator/Logger

Clients come to trainers when they want a workout program tailored to them. While ProCoach Workouts offers a workout feature, it’s not customized to their needs.

Exercise.com’s approach is more satisfactory to clients because workouts are designed just for them! Our premium workout creator and logger keeps clients engaged and motivated on their journey towards meeting their fitness goals.

Trainers can quickly select pre-designed workouts or assign individual exercises to each client from your exercise library. Workouts are delivered automatically to your clients where they can view and log their workout anytime, anywhere! Clients and trainers can easily communicate between sessions using your custom-branded app.

Exercise.com adapts to every trainer-client relationship by offering endless possibilities for delivering workouts, tips, and encouragement to every client, including:

1-1 Training

This traditional method of personal training is still a staple in most fitness centers. Exercise.com helps organize, communicate, and creatively manage multiple clients while delivering a quality training experience.

Some of the features for 1-1 training include customized workout and nutrition plans, goals and progress reports, performance and fitness assessments, and more! Trainers can both easily manage their clients and provide a customized personal training experience. Clients have all the tools they need to stay on track and motivated!

Group Training

Exercise.com’s group training feature allows for easy creation, scheduling, and tracking of group classes! Trainers can provide the same resources and support as in 1-1 training but members benefit from the social connections and accountability of the group setting. This boosts customer satisfaction and creates a tight-knit gym community.

Online Training

Trainers can use our premium video and exercise libraries to deliver custom online training workouts to any client! Our app allows easy communication between trainer and client for added client satisfaction. These workouts give greater flexibility for clients to perform their workouts whenever and wherever they choose and allow you to continue growing your business by increasing your client pool.

While ProCoach should only be used for online coaching, Exercise.com offers the flexibility of in-person and online training!

Exercise Library

Exercise.com pushes past a cookie-cutter system of pre-designed workouts (although you can create pre-designed workouts, too!). Trainers can use our extensive library of educational and instructional exercise videos to build custom workouts that suit the specific needs of their clients.

This is a feature unique to Exercise.com and is not included with ProCoach. ProCoach only allows difficulty adjustments to the exercises already provided in the pre-designed exercise tracks. Coaches cannot add, delete, or give specific modifications (such as for an injury) to the tracks.

Custom Exercises

Our quality videos give clear instructions on proper exercise form, as well as modifications for injuries or difficulty levels. You can also link your YouTube or Vimeo accounts to incorporate your own videos in the workout creator! Having your own trainers perform exercises is an excellent way to build trainer familiarity, promote your business, and add value to your brand.

TV Workouts

Videos can be viewed on a computer or mobile device and also cast onto a TV screen during a group training session. This offers a different presentation style and adds a personal touch to a group workout.

E-Commerce Software

ProCoach doesn’t offer any e-commerce capabilities. In a world where purchases are increasingly made online, ProCoach causes you to miss out on significant revenue gain by restricting online purchases and subscriptions.

However, Exercise.com excels in e-commerce! Using our customized software, you can offer unique and endless e-commerce opportunities that engage your customers and boost revenue. Since ProCoach doesn’t offer any e-commerce opportunities, let’s check out just a few popular ways Exercise.com grows your business through e-commerce!

Payment Processing

ProCoach does not state how they process payments. This ambiguity should give pause to potential users, as not all payment processors are created equal. From security assurance to additional fees per invoice, it’s important to know upfront how you will receive payments!

But Exercise.com is transparent about our payment processing! We use the ease and security of Stripe for all payments.

Sell Products

Advertise your brand and boost your revenue with a quick set up of an e-commerce store! Exercise.com’s store allows you to sell just about anything you’d like, from personalized apparel, bumper stickers, and water bottles, to headbands, exercise gear, and more! As customers use these products in their community, your business gets free and creative advertising! (Not to mention, using custom-branded apparel reinforces customer commitment to your fitness center!)

Sell Workout Plans

Selling pre-built workout plans retains members and gives them the experience of a personalized trainer in the comfort of their own home. Unlike trendy workout plans (or ProCoach Workouts) that are overly generalized to apply to as many clients as possible, these workouts can be completely customized to fit the needs of your clientele.

There’s no limit to how many workout plans you can sell, so the more you offer, the greater your profit! Include a variety of plan lengths, difficulties, fitness focuses, and more, to fully engage your customers. The options are endless!

Offer Online Workout Memberships

Customers are increasingly willing to pay a premium price for customized workout plans they can do independently. While the premium price boosts your revenue, it’s often offset by the extensive time needed to create personalized plans.

Exercise.com’s software lets you capitalize on this trend without killing your trainers’ productivity! Trainers create the entire plan in one sitting, program the workouts to be delivered at automatic intervals, and then track client progress through their program. While this might sound similar to ProCoach, Exercise.com is superior because it is custom-made for clients, not the generalized program of ProCoach.

Sell Workout Challenges

Further promote your brand by providing fun and engaging workout challenges! As gym members come together around the common goal of better fitness, they can channel their competitive spirit, encourage and cheer on other members to push themselves, and have fun at the same time.

With Exercise.com’s software, running workout challenges couldn’t be simpler. Our challenges are completely customizable and run automatically so they increase your revenue without increasing your workload.

Performance Health Software

Initial and periodic performance assessments help trainers know appropriate fitness approaches and goals, plus help clients observe progress as they continue training.

ProCoach does a thorough job with assessments. Every day, clients are to complete habits, lessons, and assignments. Every one or two weeks, clients are to submit objective measurements such as body weight, girths, photos, and other markers of progress, as well as subjective reports. All of these assessments are intensely tracked in ProCoach’s software.

ProCoach promotes this assessment tracking as its form of customization, something they call “Building Your Owner’s Manual.” This “Owner’s Manual” is a collection of the data clients input into ProCoach’s system to help them better understand their lives, bodies, needs, and wants so they can thrive after ProCoach training.

While this is a unique spin on customization, ProCoach’s extensive assessments still have no true customizable features. There are no personalized assessments, and coaches can’t make any alterations to the client’s program based upon assessment findings. The program will continue on its automated design regardless of data input. This is potentially very frustrating to clients!

But with Exercise.com’s platform, trainers can customize every aspect of assessments to fit the needs of their business and clientele. Let’s examine these below.

Assessments

Every client hires a personal trainer for a different reason, such as weight loss, athletic performance, or chronic disease management. Further, each client has a unique motivation for their training commitment. ProCoach treats all clients the same by giving one-size-fits-all assessments that don’t take into consideration the specific goals, motivation, or limitations of clients.

But Exercise.com prioritizes customer personalization by enabling trainers to customize performance assessments for every client. Our targeted assessments also produce the most accurate results so trainers can push clients to their maximum potential.

Performance & Measurement Reports

Exercise.com goes beyond personalized assessments; we include personalized interactions, too! Increase customer engagement without adding extra managerial tasks through our automatic delivery of workout reminders, goal achievements, recurring assessments, progress photos, measurements, and more!

Nutrition

Although ProCoach does offer workouts, it’s mostly known for its nutritional training. ProCoach states they are “nutritionally agnostic”–meaning, they don’t promote one specific diet or meal plan and focus on encouraging healthy eating habits, such as putting down your fork between each bite of food to allow more time for chewing. ProCoach claims this makes their program flexible for any diet.

While this might be true, ProCoach uses the same training approach and timeline for every customer. No matter how clients answer the initial survey, every client will get the same habits delivered at the same automatic intervals as everyone else. There’s no ability to extend a timeline or adapt to client needs or restrictions; everyone is expected to conquer the same assigned habits at the same pace.

But Exercise.com’s nutrition tracker allows client customization and training tailored to the client’s needs, goals, and mindset towards food. Clients can easily log and track their daily dietary intake, keeping clients focused on their goals through accountability.

Software ProCoach Pricing

ProCoach pricing is according to how many active clients a coach has:

• 0-20 Active Clients: $149/month
• 21-50 Active Clients: $199/month
• 51-100 Active Clients: $249/month

If you wish to add ProCoach Workouts, that’s an extra $69/month. Since fitness centers would need the workout feature, each employee’s account would cost you at least $220 a month!

For a fitness business, this is an extremely steep price point, especially if you have a handful (or more) of trainers. Further, there’s no way to link accounts into one database for member management, and there are no reports, marketing integrations, or scheduling services. This means you must find and pay for other software to fill in the gaps left by ProCoach.

ProCoach Software Competitors

After extensive research, we were unable to find any competitors to ProCoach. While there were competitors to Precision Nutrition, these were competitors to their nutritionist certification, not their software.

While this initially sounds like an advantage to ProCoach, it actually confirms that ProCoach shouldn’t be used for fitness business management. Between missing crucial features and a rigid, non-customizable system, there are too many gaps to fill to make ProCoach feasible for managing a fitness business.

The Bottom Line: Pros and Cons

Choosing the right business software is a big decision! Let’s take a final look at ProCoach and Exercise.com:

ProCoach Cons

Although we’ve discussed many shortfalls of ProCoach, it’s important to remember these shortfalls arise when using ProCoach for fitness business management. ProCoach isn’t bad software, but it should only be used for independent online nutrition training. Just because ProCoach works in one fitness genre doesn’t mean it should be used in another. Using ProCoach to manage your fitness business would leave you with countless hurdles to overcome.

ProCoach delivers a rigidly-automatic nutrition and/or workout program at an unfeasible price point for fitness businesses. There is no customization or personalization. It’s also only available to PN L1 enrollees or graduates, which significantly limits your employee pool and subscription enrollment period. The bottom line: ProCoach doesn’t deliver the personalized, user-friendly customer service experience for your fitness business that you get with Exercise.com.

Exercise.com Pros

Exercise.com prioritizes every customer’s personalized fitness experience and thereby sets your business up for success. Your dedicated account manager completely customizes and updates your branded website and app to fully engage your customers. Clients can view your gym’s schedule and easily book appointments. Our personalized workout software and performance assessments set up your trainers and clients for success! And our endless e-commerce capabilities round out our comprehensive software by promoting your business both in-house and around your community.

Exercise.com makes your business platform decision easy! We’re here to help your business grow. Are you ready to get started? Book a demo today!