Sawyer Reviews - Pros & Cons, Ratings & more

Jumbula

Regpack

WellnessLiving

Acuity Scheduling

Mindbody

Camp & Class Manager

Main Street Sites

Sawyer is a cloud-based class registration tool that helps kids' activity businesses process payments, customize class schedules, and communicate seamlessly with parents.

Sawyer

Android

Web-based

iPad

iPhone

Front Desk Coordinator

Customer service is very responsive and friendly. Color scheme/design of software is nice.

Owner & Director

Love the comprehensive scheduling capabilities and the way it works with my website.

business owner

I love their prompt replies to help requests. They are easy to work with and overall the platform is easy to use.

Owner

The features are intuitive and it integrated seamlessly into my Squarespace website. From the customer point of view, the design is attractive and easy to use.

Management

Whenever I run into something that does not fit or work for us, I do get a reply within a day which is super important.

This software is instructor/ educator friendly. I absolutely love it prior to the training I was able to understand how to navigate the system to create booking and contact customers.

Program Director 

Overall I am satisfied with the program. It’s more affordable than hiring someone to do the enrollment for me and saves me a lot of time.

Owner 

For me I need scheduling to be easy and not complicated but most importantly I want the parents of my students to book a class with ease.

I love that it is easy to use, I am able to run refunds and credits if needed and I get through representatives fast with my issues/concerns/questions.

Artistic Director 

I am confused as to why we have to set up an activity AND a camp or semester.

Growth In-Charge 

Registrations are very simple to make, promotion is effective and also calendar integration is helpful.

The customer service is great- my clients would really appreciate an app to register though.

From the start I have loved using Sawyer because it's complex yet easy to figure out. And, the company has adapted so much to Covid and feedback.

Founder

Sawyer truly changed how my customers see my business, booking on my website is easy, professional, trustworthy, with a beautiful and sleek design.

The reports that you are able to run are useless. Parents should be able to register and select check or homeschool funds.

I love Sawyer has children-activity-specific features such as camps, semesters, drop-ins, sibling discount, caregiver needed in the class, ages for the class, etcetera.

Owner/ instructor

I noticed that, when I added a few more weeks to an existing semester, a few random classes were displayed as cancelled. This happened immediately after I added the weeks.

Executive Director

The activities are all listed in one category, so they are difficult to separate.

Eventbrite

Pike13

Procare Solutions

Sawyer Tools review

It provides me flexibility for accepting payments online from my customers and their families to register when it is convenient for them.

Sawyer has helped me better manage my business

Disappointing Experience with Sawyer – Not Recommended
We were initially excited about Sawyer because it promised that everything we needed could be done easily. Unfortunately, once we started using it, we found that many of the promises were not fulfilled.

One of the biggest frustrations was the inability to change a date on an activity without deleting all enrollments, changing the date, and then re-entering the enrollments manually. This process is incredibly time-consuming and unnecessary.

Another major issue was the transfer to our bank account, which took almost a month to show up. This delay is unacceptable, especially when managing finances.

Setting up discounts was another nightmare. The software doesn't allow the use of decimals, which forced us to lose a few dollars just to match the rates on our flyers. This is a basic feature that should work flawlessly.

Finally, the rosters are terrible. They are overly complicated and don't make sense at all. We encountered many more issues that only added to our frustration.

Overall, I do not recommend Sawyer to anyone. It has too many flaws that make it difficult to use and manage effectively.



Disappointing Experience with Sawyer – Not Recommended

Hi Magdala,

I'm sorry to hear that you've had a less than stellar experience using our software. We value the feedback and would love an opportunity to make this right. I know that you've been in touch with Mollie, our Head of Customer Support to address some of the issues you were experiencing. We do offer daily bank transfers instead of the default of weekly which you originally had and additional flexibility when adjusting activity enrollment dates that we can go through together in more depth. 

Looking forward to turning this experience into a win.

Kind regards,
Dana Browne
VP of Provider Experience 

Sawyer has been great to work with. We have been through a few scheduling sites and this has been the best so far!

Great Registration System

Good! I was one of the early customers and the platform has gotten better over time. Customer service is excellent and we are happy.

Great service

While I appreciate the ability to imbed registration on our website, there is no way to track click rates, their customer service is not at all educated on the software and we've gotten responses on average 3 weeks after the initial question is asked! Poor customer service, micropayouts are not transparent, and the cost for ticket items more than 70 usd is more expensive than eventbrite. Unfortunately I can not recommend this platform!

Accounting and Payouts are not transparent

I am so sorry that you had a less than stellar experience at Sawyer, that is never our intent nor our goal. We continue to evolve our products because of feedback like this and would love to connect on how we can improve if you're open to it.

Overall very positive and I'm glad I found you to work with! A few annoyances but the pros definitely outweigh the cons.

Reid Street Studio

Very responsive.  I love the financial reports and the quick turn around when there is a discrepancy or a request for reimbursement.

Review from the Controller

Sawyer works well for our company needs.  There are many features that are offered that we are not using because they are not applicable to our business.
I have personally been working with this product for about 2 years and I think it is great.

Great customer service!

Overall, I like this product. I feel that it was very well thought out to support the users. It saves time which in my case is very important as I have a lot of materials to cover in a very short period of time so anything that helps me in that area is a plus.

Technology at its best

We are solving are registration process by using Sawyer. Originally, we were using about 6 different spreadsheets that were all complicated on their own level. Because of this, the registration process became very lengthy because parents couldn't register on their own but instead, they had to register with me, an individual, and would have to wait for a process to be completed in order to move forward with registration. This became extremely difficult because one individual registering over 500+ students is not an easy task. 

Sawyer Review 

My favorite thing about Sawyer is that I trust that all my registration information is accurate and in one place. It's been incredibly helpful in running my business. In my years using this software, I've also seen how Sawyer is always changing and improving to meet the needs of clients. It has improved my experience and what I can offer my customers.

Easy way to manage class and camp registrations 

I’ve used Sawyer for years for Kids yoga classes, after school program, and day camps

Class management was the biggest thing I needed help with, and it's amazing at that! There are still some bugs or feature requests that haven't happened, but I hope they'll come soon!

Great product! Still working out some bugs

It is an amazing tool for our company. It provides efficient enrollment and online payments.

Friendly platform 

Sawyer Review November 2024

Sawyer Review From the Perspective of a Newbie

Review from Sit Beside

Fantastic program and saved so many hours for me in my business

Fantastic program 

Thankful I switched to Sawyer.

Overall i like sawer it is pretty easy to use but my role in the company only uses the banking transactions so i cannot speak on the system as a whole but for banking purposes id give it an 8/10. The not totaling they payouts is annoying. But thats my only main complaint. The need to wait on emails also isn't preferred but I suppose that helps with security.

Sawyer REVIEW

Exhaustingly Bad! It has made my administrative work FAR MUCH MORE DIFFICULT than doing them myself.    If you client body is small like 20-40s ,  Sawyers is fine. If you are like us with hundreds.. I HIGHLY recommend you to look elsewhere.. I have switched to Amilia, a far more robust software. 

 I was 15+ system level developer,  and my partner  was a Microsoft SQL expert.  Looking at Sawyers report service, we both must regret to say.. it is far from prime time.  It is ok for a shop with 30 some students.   Not for us.  We have over 200 students (still considered being pretty small). 

Very poor and confusing reporting system!

Hi Elizabeth,

We're sorry that Sawyer wasn't able to meet your reporting needs. We work with organizations of all sizes to power their registration including franchises, non-profits, and schools in addition to smaller businesses. We continue to evolve our products because of critical feedback like this and thank you for taking the time to share it with us. 

We loved getting the opportunity to work with Storming Robots and wish you all the best in your future success. 

Sawyer has give us a great base for registering clients for multiple activities that may be repeat or be one off. The fact that it retains family details so that they do. not have to be fully input for each class or camp is amazing.  a parent can just update ages etc.   we also love the fact that classes can be promoted wider than our local community. 

Sawyer is an Amazing Resource - 

I've given up.

Hi Lindsay,

I'm sorry to hear that you've had a negative experience with Sawyer. I know our head of Customer Success is already working with you directly to remedy these issues. Regarding refunds and credit card processing fees, this is unfortunately something controlled by our payment processor Stripe and not in our control. Most payment processors do not return fees on refunded payments but we do understand the frustration. At the moment our default payment option is every 2 business days, but we can adjust payouts to a variety of options that may be better for your business. We are here to support your needs and hope you give us another chance to improve your experience working with Sawyer. 

Good options for summer camps - with a few changes needed

Owner, Managing Operator, Instructor

Sawyer Review: Excited about Sawyer and the Relationship We Have!

Carl G.:                                               My name is Carl. I'm the owner and managing operator of Wisconsin Academy of Sports, a sports training facility in northeast Wisconsin. We primarily focus with young kids in a general sports market. With Sawyer, we have a wonderful rating of five out of five, so we're pretty excited to be involved with [inaudible 00:00:29].
                                                       Prior to Sawyer, we were actually with Wix, and we experienced challenges with Wix. Then when we went with Sawyer, it was just an amazing upward movement, drawing our clients, giving them a better option.
                                                       Because registration is such an important part of what we do, we needed to make sure it was simple. We are able to get as much information over to the potential clients as much as possible and not be caught up in a lot of other challenging situations, which we've experienced with the program we were using previously.
                                                       Well, I'm not tech savvy, and I can tell you what, I'm really happy to have Sawyer, because I was able to get my web-based program. I'm doing everything technology wise, and working with Sawyer, it has become much easier building programs, building classes. I have a few that I have to do today. It's much easier to do, much friendlier to do. And if I need any support, all I have to do is reach out and I get it, and I'm very thankful for that.
                                                       If you are looking for a program that's going to help make everything easier for you when it comes to registration in building online information for potential clients or even your existing clients, I would say with all the ones that I've experienced over the last 20 years, Sawyer has been the one to come through for me. And if you're looking for support, they are the number one at that. Because I get online, we get right to the topic base, and we get things done, and I walk away much more knowledgeable about what I need to do and I'm excited about it. So if I have all the control in my hands, I will be with Sawyer for a while.

DaySmart Software

Thank you so much for your kind words. We're grateful to have you as a member of the Sawyer community and are happy to help save you time and grow your business! 

General Manager 

Sawyer has made my life easier!

Michelle F.:                                           My name is Michelle. I am the general manager at a nonprofit, and I rate Sawyer a five. We were using Pike13. There was a couple of reasons it didn't work. One, it was really geared more towards gyms which were more for adults, and most of our students are kids and families. So it wouldn't let people sign up for more than one kid at a time. We could offer some sorts of coupons and discounts, but not really to the level we needed to. Things like automatic discounts, people would have to call me to get a coupon code, which we're very small organization so that was just a big administrative burden. We weren't able to do things like payment plans. So, again, we had to keep a lot of that manually, which just, again, we're a small organization and we wanted to be able to do that, and we couldn't do that. There was just a lot of pieces that didn't fit for the people that we were trying to serve. So those were some of the main reasons. There were some other ones, but those were the big ones.
                                                       One, it was geared more towards kids, and they were a relatively new software so we knew we could grow with them and be able to give some input into things that we needed. And the things that it offered at the time that we signed up were that we could do payment plans, and we were immediately able to get families that we weren't able to before. Sometimes families just didn't want to ask for that, and here they were able to just do that immediately and it took away the administrative burden of us having to keep track of that and call people and ask for their payment, and that sort of thing. Families were able to sign up more than one student at a time, which sounds like something maybe silly, but that was just difficult for people. To navigate through a system and have to sign one up and another one up, it made giving discounts for that much easier, because we were able to just put it in on a discount, which we offered if you signed up more than one student, you got a discount. And that was just automatically there.
                                                       People didn't have to call and ask, "What is that coupon code again?" or, "Have you changed it or anything like that?" We were able to do things just to have photos for the classes, which added a little bit of oomph to the thing, but showed a little bit of what was going on in the class. It gave us more of a platform. So especially when COVID-19 hit, we were able to put our virtual classes up on a national platform and people could find us there, which was really nice. They pivoted really fast, which was great. So those are some of the big ones. Another thing is that the customer service is great. Customer service was a little bit more difficult with our last thing, and this time, you email, you can call, if you really need to, but email and they get back to you really fast.
                                                       The other huge one, this is a huge one for me, I do a lot of things at our organization, but a big one is the financials. Getting the specifics of how we were paid was terrible at our last provider. And this, it's all there in a tab on Sawyer and I can just see it as it happens, which is a big deal. As a nonprofit, we have different funding streams. We have to keep very detailed finances. So that's a big deal for me. Getting started with Sawyer was very easy. When I was looking at new class registration software providers, I actually took about six months. That might not have been easy for them. And I did two demos with a couple of different places and I had someone else do the demo with Sawyer too once I was pretty sure that this was what I wanted. So they actually did three demos with us. And so once we signed on, they were very helpful upfront making sure that we got everything set up.
                                                       They were very available in that first month, and then they're still very available as well as we change things. They got all of our classes up in the beginning, loaded that widget onto our webpage so we had everything ready. We did it I think right around a class start obviously so that we could just start right away, and then they were with us every step of the way. Their help articles are really helpful. They do ongoing webinars and trainings. They have a Facebook page for providers if you want to go on there and just ask questions to other people using the software. So it's really user-friendly and you have a network of providers there to back you up if you just want to bounce ideas or get a question answered really quick. So it's, I thought, really incredibly easy.
                                                       For anyone that's considering Sawyer, I would say book a demo and see if it fits what you need. Make a list of what it is that you need, what it is you like or don't like about your current software. Know that they are still relatively new so some stuff it has and some stuff it doesn't have. But they are really open to hearing suggestions and they make product updates all the time. Just the last couple of weeks, I did a call with them about one of the newer things and what I liked about it, what I didn't like about it, and they're open to hearing suggestions. So know that it's like anything, it's not perfect, but they are really open to hearing that. So book the demo and know what it is. But I would recommend using them. It's been really helpful for us, and I know some other places around me that it's been really helpful for as well. So I would say give it a try.

Sawyer Reviews

Suggested alternatives

Pros and cons

321 reviews