EZFacility Review 2022

EZFacility is another very established sports facility scheduling software company - with a ton of features. But, similar to our review for eSoft Planner, we found that EZFacility is anything but “ez” because of it being an older, archaic tool.

‍

In this post, we’ll do a complete review of EZ Facility, and at the end - look at why Swift might be a better choice for your facility scheduling software.

What is EZFacility?

EZFacility is a software tool that helps sports facility owners manage scheduling, payments, and bookings for their facility. If you’re not sure why something like that might be useful, take a look at our post from last week to learn about the surprising benefits of a scheduling tool.

EZFacility originally started in 2003, and it caters to gyms, fitness centers, sports facilities, and more.

Features

EZFacility provides a wide range of features for your facility. This includes:

‍

Scheduling

The calendar view is used by both customers (to book online) and your staff to manage bookings for rentals, classes, or lessons. 

‍

Point of Sale

You can also process, track, and inventory of hardware items (like sporting goods), and grab payments from customers in person. 

‍

Marketing

The software also allows you to send emails and SMS to customers for upcoming sales or promotions.

‍

Other Features

There are lots of other features that come with EZFacility - things like waivers, branded mobile apps, etc.

EZFacility Biggest Downsides/Cons (& why Swift might be better)

After having chatted with hundreds of facility owners, here are the biggest downsides with EZFacility - these are things that creep-up in your day-to-day operations. Let’s take a look at a few.

Complex Online Booking

One of the 5 main reasons why facilities need scheduling software is to spend less time on the phone, and lower the number of calls and messages that they get every day. Less phone time, means more time actually trying to grow your business.

EZFacility’s calendar view is very clunky for customers to book online - which means a lot of athletes end up calling in-advance regardless.

Our goal at Swift was to solve for this - making sure that we can give your customers (the player, parent, or athlete) a checkout as fast as Amazon’s.

It’s a win-win for everyone!

Fixing Instructors to Spaces

A minor but important complaint with EZFacility is also that you have to pre-assign instructors to a room/cage/space. This ends up being very annoying, because it’s common for instructors to move between spaces to teach lessons, claess, and camps.

The sports business is very dynamic, and things are constantly changing every day based on schedules, availability, and season. This means that a seemingly small constraint can become a significant roadblock in your day-to-day - especially during peak season.

Multiple Days of Training Required

It’s ironic that one of the biggest concerns we’ve heard from EZFacility customers is that it isn’t easy (“ez”) to use. 

This seems like a trivial detail - but when you’re relying on the software every day to run your business, small complexities can add up to a ton of wasted time.

Complicated software also means that you spend more time training new staff, instructors, and employees, all of which increases the administrative burden. The whole point of these tools is to reduce this burden, not add to it.

Since Swift is designed for the modern day and age, the tool is incredibly easy to use. This means you can spend less time on the computer, and more time actually in your facility - trying to grow your business.

Data Lock-In

One great way to judge software tools is how easy they make it to migrate and export your data. If it’s your facility, you should own the data - right?

This isn't always true with EZFacility. Anecdotally, we’ve heard from many facility owners that they feel “stuck” or “locked in” with the tool because they don’t want to migrate without losing their data, and EZFacility doesn’t make this very “ez”. In fact, exporting certain types of data (like package or credit information) isn’t possible, or leads to extra charges!

We don’t believe in this kind of predatory pricing at Swift. Our entire job is to make sure you love the software that you’re using. And worst case, if it’s not a good fit - we will gladly help you migrate over to another tool. That’s what great customer service looks like! 

Summary: Pros & Cons of EZFacility

Pros:

• Established option in the industry
• Large set of features & capabilities

Cons:

• Complex online booking flow
• Fixing instructors to spaces & rooms
• Multiple days of training required to get setup
• Data lock-in
• Unclear pricing

Try Swift

And that’s it! The candid review is that although EZFacility is a common option for sports software, it’s definitely failing to live up to what we expect in the modern age in terms of sports facility management software.

And that’s why Swift exists. 

It’s the easiest way to run your sports facility, and the quickest way for your customers to book online. We’re obviously biased, but in our opinion - it’s definitely the best sports facility scheduling software in the market today.

 If you’d like to free up your most valuable asset (your time) and stop fighting your software, book a free demo with one of our founders today!