Which gym management software do AI answer engines actually recommend?

When an SMB buyer asks an AI assistant which gym management software to buy, a shortlist comes back. We asked 44 different phrasings of that question across 3 engines, 132 answers in total, and counted every product named. This is the result. Nobody paid to be on it, and no vendor list was written in advance — the 68 vendors below are simply everyone the engines named.

Free to read, raw data included.

Two conditions on every number below

The leaderboard

“Answers” is how many of the 132 answers named that product. Share is the same number as a percentage. The three right-hand columns split it by engine. Every row has its own link — the # beside a vendor name gives you something like connexion.me/c/gym/#pushpress. Click a vendor's name to see which of the 44 questions named them, and click one of those to read the answer it was counted from, word for word.

Method

Every claim on this page is reproducible from the files linked at the bottom.

The engines

ChatGPT (gpt-5.5), Gemini (gemini-flash-latest), Perplexity (sonar). Each was called through its public API with a near-empty system prompt — “answer the user's question directly and concisely” — and nothing else. The engines were not asked to produce a list, rank anything, or name vendors. Steering them toward a list would have manufactured the thing being measured.

The questions

44 distinct phrasings of one purchase decision, written before any measurement was run. No vendor name appears in any of them.

1. What is the best gym management software for a small independent gym?
2. Best software for managing memberships and class schedules at a boutique fitness studio
3. We're opening a 5,000 sq ft CrossFit affiliate with 150 members. What management software should we buy?
4. Recommend gym management software for a 24/7 access facility with key fob entry.
5. affordable gym membership software for small fitness clubs
6. What gym management system do boutique yoga and pilates studios use?
7. Best gym billing and member management software for a martial arts dojo
8. We are running a strength and conditioning gym with 200 members on spreadsheets and need proper software. What should we choose?
9. top gym management software for multi-location fitness centers
10. What is the best software for a personal training studio to handle class bookings and monthly recurring billing?
11. Best all-in-one software for a boutique spin studio with spot booking
12. What software should I use to manage gym memberships, waivers, and recurring direct debits?
13. gym management software with door access control integration
14. Recommend a gym management platform for a community recreation center.
15. We are opening a functional fitness gym next month. What member management software should we evaluate?
16. Best fitness studio management software with a branded member mobile app
17. What is the easiest gym software for class scheduling and attendance tracking?
18. software to manage gym check-ins, member contracts, and billing
19. Best gym management platform for a climbing gym with day passes and monthly memberships
20. What software do small commercial gyms use to automate billing and renewals?
21. Recommend a platform for managing member accounts and class capacities at a boxing gym.
22. best software for gym owners to track churn and automate payment collection
23. We run a boutique HIIT studio with 300 active members and need a new management platform. What should we buy?
24. gym CRM and member booking platform recommendations
25. What software is best for an independent health club with 1,000+ members?
26. best fitness facility management software with POS and inventory management
27. Which gym management software has the lowest payment processing fees?
28. We have a 24-hour gym and need automated check-in and membership management software. What are the best options?
29. What is the best platform for selling gym memberships online and booking personal training sessions?
30. gym management software for small business owners
31. Recommend club management software for an athletic and tennis club.
32. Best software to run a boutique barre and dance fitness studio
33. We are tired of our clunky gym software and want something modern for member scheduling and billing. What should we switch to?
34. What software do independent gym owners recommend for member retention and automations?
35. best gym management system with automated text messaging and email reminders
36. Which platform is best for managing both group fitness classes and 1-on-1 personal training packages?
37. cloud-based gym management software comparison
38. What software should a newly opened strength gym buy to handle recurring subscriptions and digital waivers?
39. Recommend an affordable studio management tool for a 50-member microgym.
40. Best member portal and scheduling software for a powerlifting gym
41. What is the industry standard software for boutique fitness studios?
42. gym member management and class reservation software for small studios
43. We manage 3 fitness locations and need centralized gym software for reporting, payroll, and billing. What should we buy?
44. What software should I buy to manage gym memberships, staff scheduling, and point of sale?

How the vendor list was built

Each of the 132 answers was read back and every named product extracted. The vendor list is discovered: a product appears here if and only if an engine named it. Counted are gym management platforms, fitness studio management tools, health club management systems, and broader wellness business suites whose gym or studio management features were named. Excluded, even when named: personal trainer workout-programming apps, standalone calendar booking widgets, generic POS and payment hardware, standalone physical access control and door security systems, generic marketing and CRM tools, accounting packages, on-demand video hosting platforms, fitness hardware and wearables, salon-only software, and companies named only as an example gym.

Spelling variants of one product are folded together, and a trailing “by company” is dropped. This run collapsed 20 spellings onto 10 of the rows below: “PushPress” and “PushPress (Free Tier)” are one row — the one the table prints as PushPress. An edition name is folded into its product when it is that product’s name followed by a further word, and the plain name is at least three times as common. This run folded 9 such names, among them “PushPress Free” counts as PushPress and “Mindbody Enterprise” counts as Mindbody. A name that merely begins with the same letters is a different product and keeps its own row. No pair was merged by hand in this category: every fold above is the rule applied mechanically, with no human judgement about who is who.

Beyond those folds a product is counted as the engines spelled it, and two rows in the table are never merged into one. When a product has been renamed or acquired and the engines still answer with both names, both names keep their own row: this page carries no hand-maintained list of who is now who, because that list would be a human claim about a mechanical count and nothing here could check it. What it has instead is the answers. Where an answer itself writes two of the rows below as one product renamed — the construction “X (formerly Y)” — the line beside those rows quotes that sentence and gives the overlap and the total, so the union is on the page. Nothing else produces that line. Two rows being named in the same answers does not, however often: the engines answer in shortlists, so the leaders of a category are named together whatever they are called. One pair of rows below carries that line in this run: ABC Ignite and ABC Financial. What each one quotes is what an engine wrote, not a judgement of ours about who owns what.

A product is counted once per answer, however many times that answer mentions it.

Is this stable, or is it noise?

A leaderboard whose top ten reshuffles between runs would not be worth publishing, so this check was run before the page was, and the page ships only because it passed.

What this is not

This measures what three answer engines said on 14 August 2026, in response to these questions, through their APIs. It is not a quality ranking, not a review, and not advice on which gym management software to buy. A product can be excellent and rank low here — that gap is the point.

The raw data

All 132 answers, verbatim, one JSON object per line: run A · run B. The per-answer extracted product names: run A · run B. Machine-readable ranking: ranking.json.

What Perplexity was reading. It is the only one of these engines that returns a source list, and the markers in its answers above — [1], [2] — point into it. Every URL it cited, with the title, date and the excerpt it actually retrieved, one JSON object per answer: run A · run B. Join on index to the answers file, and read [n] as citations[n-1]. Perplexity returned a source list on 44 of its 44 answers. ChatGPT and Gemini returned no sources at all — no citation, grounding or search-result field of any kind appears anywhere in their API responses, on any of the 44 answers each gave. That is a fact about the engines, not a gap in this page.

The sources behind the answers

Run A's 44 Perplexity answers cited 858 URLs across 178 distinct domains. Below are the 57 that were cited in three or more separate answers. Citations counts every URL from that domain, so a domain cited three times in one answer counts three times; Answers is how many of the 44 answers cited it at all.

A domain missing from this table was cited in fewer than three answers, or was never cited at all — the run A file linked above is the complete list either way, and it is the only way to tell those two apart. Cited is not endorsed: a page the engine retrieved is not a page that recommended anyone, and this counts what was read, not what it said.

The answer a vendor panel shows you is read straight out of the run A file linked above — the page fetches the one line it needs and displays it unaltered, so what you read there and what you get by downloading the file are the same bytes.

What one line of each file holds, and the terms you may re-use them under — the raw answers may be re-used in any medium, commercially and inside open-source software, with attribution.

Who runs this

Connexion is run by Lana — one person, reachable at lana@connexion.me, and mail sent there is answered by hand. It started on 2 August 2026, so it is early: there is no office, no sales team and no history to point at other than the runs published on these pages.

Anything sold here is sold by dplouffe Analytics Inc., a company registered in Canada. Stripe takes the card and the checkout page it opens is headed dplouffe Analytics; the charge on your statement starts with CONNEXION.

What this page is: a count of which products were named, in answers we publish in full. What it is not: a judgement of whether any of them is good, and not advice on which to buy. No vendor paid to be listed here, no vendor can pay to move, and no vendor sees a board before you do. — who runs this · terms · privacy · refunds