Recess vs Virtuagym
Virtuagym is a Dutch company selling across Europe and the United States, and its center of gravity is coaching: workout plans, nutrition, body metrics and a member app people genuinely open. The difference is what each product counts. Virtuagym prices by location and by how many clients you have. Recess prices by neither, and is shaped around programs, terms and households rather than one adult member at a time.
Every Virtuagym figure below was read on Virtuagym's own website and help center on 31 August 2026, including the price file their pricing page loads. Nothing here comes from a review site. Sources are listed at the foot.
Recess has no monthly platform fee, no plans, no add-ons and no setup cost. It earns roughly 5% paid by the member at checkout, with card and bank processing covered out of that.
Recess is not built for chains past about a hundred locations. Virtuagym sells multi-club and franchise products for exactly that, and if you are running twenty-five clubs we would point you at them on the first call.
Both products are good at something the other is not. Virtuagym is built for a member who trains, eats and measures between visits, and it gives a coach real tools for all three. Recess is built for a studio whose week is made of terms, camps, levels and one parent paying for two children. Read the row on coaching before you read the row on cost.
What each one is actually built around.
Virtuagym publishes plan contents, a live price table and a card rate, so most of their column is quoted rather than inferred. Three lines below are statements about what they publish rather than about what their software could be configured to do, and each says so. Check anything that decides your purchase.
Their coaching product is genuinely strong. Workout plans built from a 3D-animated exercise library, nutrition plans against a real food database, a food diary, body metrics, wearables, heart-rate coaching, on-demand video and an AI coach, all of it landing in a member app the coach controls. Recess has nothing that deep, and will not pretend otherwise.
If what you sell is the six days a week your member is not in the room, stay where you are. Nothing further down this page is worth more than that.
Your own app, on the App Store, under your own name, included. Virtuagym builds a real white-label app with your logo and colors in both stores, and it is good. It is also listed under Add-ons on their pricing page, and they publish no price for it. On Recess every studio gets one from day one, published under its own listing on the App Store and Google Play, at no cost, along with Business Analytics, Lead Management, Multi-Club Support and the other eleven things sitting in that add-on row.
And a product that knows what a family and a term are. Virtuagym is built around the individual client: it is the unit they price by and the unit they write about. Recess is built around the household and the season, so one parent holds one balance for two children in two different programs, sibling discounts recalculate when one of them drops, and a twelve week term is a first-class object rather than a run of bookings.
Two dials set their price, and you control neither.
Credit where it is due: Virtuagym publishes almost everything. Three plans, a full price table, a card rate and a fourteen day trial with no card required. That is more than most of this category manages, and it makes an honest comparison possible.
What they publish is a plan fee per location, per month, banded by how many clients you have. Manage covers running the business. Coach covers training and nutrition. All-in-One is both. Paying annually takes 10% off. Their US table has six priced bands, from twenty clients up to twenty-five hundred, and a seventh where the price is replaced with the words Contact us.
Check the currency before you quote a number back at anyone. Their pricing page reads your location and swaps the price file underneath it. The United States file is in dollars; the European files are in euros at different figures for the same plan. Every price on this page is from their United States file, in dollars, and their page adds that prices exclude VAT.
Do the plan fee and the card fee stack? Yes. Their pricing page carries the plan table and, directly beneath it, the line “Card-not-present (Visa, Mastercard) payments are 2.75% + .20 / transaction”, with discounts available at higher volume by arrangement. The plan fee is the software; the card fee is the money moving.
That one line is the only Virtuagym Pay rate they publish. It covers Visa and Mastercard, card not present. For everything else, their own Virtuagym Pay FAQ answers the question “What are the transaction fees for Virtuagym Pay payment methods?” with: you can find that information within your Virtuagym Pay agreement. So if bank debit, American Express, refunds or chargebacks matter to your mix, that is a question for the call rather than something you can read.
Then there is the add-on row. Twelve of them sit under the plans: Webshop, Point of Sale, Access Control, Lead management, Business Analytics, Multi-Club Support, Custom Mobile App, Engage, Virtuagym Touch, Fitzone, Virtuagym Connect and Video Platform. No price is published for any of the twelve, on the pricing page or in their help center. Several are things a studio reaches for early, so ask for those numbers in writing before you sign, and ask which of them multiply per location.
And the term is a year. Their license article says the standard license runs twelve months unless agreed otherwise, renews automatically for another twelve, and can only be ended with a month’s notice before the period closes. The same article says the price of the license is based on the number of members of your club, which is the client band showing up again in the contract. None of that is unusual in this category. It is worth knowing before the trial ends.
One more line to budget for if you take the white-label app: their setup guide has you register your own Apple Developer organization account, obtain a D-U-N-S number for your business and carry Apple’s membership fee, which they quote at €99 a year, over a process they put at one to three weeks. That charge is Apple’s rather than theirs, and publishing any own-brand app to the App Store involves it.
Recess is one thing at one price. No plan, no client band, no seat count, no setup fee, nothing behind a paywall inside the product, and no second bill when you open a second room. Recess earns a service fee of approximately 5% paid by the member at checkout, with processing covered out of it.
That is not automatically cheaper for you, and we would rather say so than let you find out. A member paying about 5% on a $2,000 season is paying more than a plan fee would have cost you that month. If you would rather carry the cost yourself and keep the checkout total clean, a subscription is a defensible trade. Run your own numbers before believing anyone, us included.
Put your client count in and watch their price move.
Their side is their own published United States figure: All-in-One at the band your client count falls into, billed annually, multiplied by locations, plus their published card rate of 2.75% and 20 cents. The only assumption is the average sale used to count transactions, and it is labelled below.
Transaction count assumes an average sale of $60. That assumption is ours, not theirs, and it only affects the 20 cents per transaction, not the 2.75%. Past 2,500 clients Virtuagym stops publishing a price and asks you to contact them. Your members pay a service fee of about 5% at checkout on Recess, which is how the software is free for you, and that is a real trade rather than a free lunch.
The things owners want settled before they move.
Some of them, yes. Recess programs workouts, tracks scores and runs challenges, streaks and leaderboards, but it is not a nutrition product and it does not do meal plans, a food diary or body composition. Virtuagym does all three and does them well. If a real share of your revenue is coaching people between visits, that is the reason to stay, and no amount of saved plan fee outweighs it.
Because publishing a price and having a small one are different things, and because their price moves on two dials you do not control. It rises as you sign clients and it rises again for every location. Twelve add-ons sit under the plans with no published price, and the card fee applies on top of all of it. We are not suggesting they hide anything. They are unusually open for this category. The point is what the total does as you grow.
It depends where you are sitting. Their pricing page detects your location and loads a different price file underneath the same layout, so a visitor in the United States sees dollars and a visitor in Europe sees euros at different figures for the same plan. Every number on this page was read from a United States session, in dollars. Their page also notes that prices exclude VAT. If anyone quotes you a Virtuagym price, ask which country’s table it came from.
On Virtuagym, their own license article says the standard license period is twelve months unless something else is agreed, that it renews automatically for the same period, and that ending it needs a month’s notice before the period closes. On Recess there is no subscription at all, so there is nothing to renew and no notice date to miss.
No. There is one version of Recess and it includes your own branded client app under your own App Store and Google Play listing, reporting, lead capture and follow-up, messaging, sequences and campaigns, staff and payroll, retail, and as many locations as you run. There is nothing to add on and no higher plan to reach.
Recess, and not by a small margin. A term is a real object rather than a run of bookings, a household holds one balance and one card across several children, sibling discounts recalculate when one child pauses, and a class can be closed to anyone who has not reached the level below it. Virtuagym can route one client’s invoices to another so a parent pays, but each child stays a separate client record linked one at a time, and their published material carries no term or camp concept at all. If your business is a room full of adults on rolling memberships, that difference matters far less.
Free, permanently, with every feature in. There is no trial clock, no client band and no plan to outgrow, so a studio with forty members runs exactly the software a studio with fourteen hundred runs. Recess earns a service fee of approximately 5% paid by the member at checkout, and card and bank processing comes out of that rather than being billed to you.
Every Virtuagym claim on this page was read on Virtuagym’s own website and help center on 31 August 2026. Nothing here comes from a review site, a roundup or a summary. Virtuagym can change its plans, prices and packaging at any time, so verify anything that decides your purchase.
Sources. 1: their pricing page, business.virtuagym.com/our-prices/, opened in a browser from a United States session, for the three plans, what each contains, the per location per month model, the six priced client bands and the price in each, the 10% annual discount, the twelve add-ons, the fourteen day trial, the line “Card-not-present (Visa, Mastercard) payments are 2.75% + .20 / transaction”, the volume-discount note and the note that prices exclude VAT. 2: their Virtuagym Pay FAQ in the help center, for the answer that fee information sits in your Virtuagym Pay agreement. 3: business.virtuagym.com/training-plan-software/ for the 3D-animated exercise library. 4: business.virtuagym.com/custom-mobile-app/ and their Get Started With Your Custom Mobile App help article, for the white-label app, the Apple Developer organization account, the D-U-N-S number, Apple’s €99 yearly membership and the one to three week setup. 5: the vocabulary check described below. 6: their help article on invoicing a client on behalf of another client, for financial linking and the family example. 7: their help articles on monitoring client progress and activating a progress tracker metric. 8: business.virtuagym.com/multi-club-management/ and their gym chain and franchise pages. 9: their Virtuagym License help article, for the twelve month period, the automatic renewal, the month’s notice and the statement that license price is based on the number of members of your club.
Three lines on this page are statements about their published material rather than about their software. Their help-center sitemap lists 939 articles, of which 283 are the English originals and the rest are translations. All 283 English articles were retrieved and searched, together with eighteen of their marketing pages. The words semester, camp, season, enrollment, belt, rank, grading, SMS and text message returned no matches in any of them; family and parent appeared only in the one billing article cited above. That tells you what Virtuagym publishes and how it presents itself. It is not a claim that their software cannot be made to do these things, and if it can, they have not written it down. Their industries page returns an empty shell to a plain request, so its contents are not represented here.
The calculator uses their published United States figures on both dials. The one assumption in it is an average sale of $60, used only to count how many 20 cent transaction fees a month of revenue produces, and it is labelled where it appears. Recess earns approximately 5% paid by the member at checkout, with card and bank processing covered out of that.