Practice.do Alternatives 2026: Where Coaches Should Go After the Shutdown

Practice.do Has Shut Down: Where Displaced Coaches Stand in 2026

Practice was a well-liked all-in-one coaching platform - scheduling, client portals with chat and voice memos, intake and check-in forms, contracts, packages and recurring invoicing, all in one clean product. Coaches did not just tolerate it; they recommended it. Then it closed.

Practice shut down permanently on 3 November 2025. Chief executive Julien Smith announced that an acquisition process had fallen through and the team had decided to put the company to rest. Coaches got roughly two weeks of in-app warning, and then client portals, scheduling links, contracts and invoices went dark together. There was no acquirer, no read-only archive and no grace period. We re-checked in July 2026 and practice.do returns a 404.

This guide is for two readers: the coach still piecing a practice back together, and the coach choosing a platform now and quite reasonably asking how to avoid a repeat. It covers what you can still recover, what to look for in a replacement, and an honest comparison of Paperbell and Bizzly - with CoachAccountable, CoachVantage and Simply.Coach named where they are the better answer.

What to Export, and What You Can Still Recover

If you ran the export before November 2025

Practice produced a ZIP export, and it is worth more than it looks. CoachAccountable built an automatic importer for that exact file within days of the shutdown: upload the ZIP and it brings across clients, families as companies, package templates and live package instances, appointments, client notes, worksheets, client and library files, worksheet templates, invoices and - where you connect the same Stripe account it was taken on - saved payment cards. It is not perfect: some form detail, such as multiple-choice question options, is not in the export and has to be retyped. But it is a genuine head start. If that ZIP is sitting in your downloads folder, it is the single most valuable asset in this whole exercise, and it is worth trialling CoachAccountable purely to see what comes through, even if you end up elsewhere.

If you did not export in time

Most of a coaching practice lives outside the platform, which is the quiet good news here. Work through these in order:

• Stripe or PayPal: your complete payment, subscription and invoice history, with client names, emails and amounts. This is yours permanently and does not depend on any platform.
• Your calendar: if the Google or Apple calendar integration was on, every past and upcoming appointment is still there, with attendee emails.
• Your email archive: booking confirmations, receipts, intake form submissions and reminder emails rebuild a client list surprisingly completely. Search by the platform's sending address and by subject line.
• Your own drive: signed contracts, proposals and PDFs you downloaded at the time.
• Your accounting software: if payments synced to Xero, QuickBooks or FreeAgent, the revenue and customer records are intact there.

What is genuinely unrecoverable is the material that only ever lived inside Practice: session notes, completed worksheets, in-portal chat threads and voice memos. If those mattered to your coaching, rebuild what you can from memory and your own notebooks now rather than later, and let it inform how much weight you put on the notes column when you choose a replacement.

What to Look for in a Practice Replacement

Which half of coaching software you actually need

Coaching platforms split into two camps that look similar on a feature list and feel entirely different in use. One camp is documentation-led: notes, worksheets, accountability between sessions, contracts and a shared client record. The other is commerce-led: booking, packages, recurring payments, capacity and getting found in the first place. Practice straddled both, which is part of why its loss stung. Decide which half your revenue actually depends on before you compare anything, because no platform at this price does both to full depth and the ones that claim to are usually thin somewhere.

Whether booking knows what the client has paid for

The question nobody asks and everybody regrets. If you sell a six-session package, does the calendar know when session six has been used? If a monthly retainer fails to collect, does the client still get to book next week? Payment-gated booking quotas tie booking access to the active plan, pack or credit balance, so a lapsed payment removes access automatically instead of becoming a spreadsheet job and an awkward email. Platforms that treat scheduling and payment as separate modules leave that reconciliation with you.

Group programmes as well as one-to-one

Most practices eventually add a cohort, a group programme or a workshop, and that is where one-to-one tools start straining. Check how capacity is enforced, what happens when a cohort fills, whether someone joining in week three pays a pro-rated price automatically, and whether the next intake rolls over without you rebuilding it - recreating a programme by hand every twelve weeks is a job that quietly grows.

Where your website lives

Almost every coaching platform gives you package pages or a simple booking site, and almost every coach ends up paying for Squarespace, Wix or WordPress alongside it - a second subscription, a second login and two places your prices can disagree. Decide deliberately whether your site and your booking system are one product or two. Our website builders versus booking software comparison walks through where that split costs more than it saves.

Vendor durability and your exit route

2025 was a bad year for coaching software: Practice, Nudge Coach and Profi.io all wound down inside twelve months, Profi retiring its platform at the end of December after an acquisition and leaving coaches to pull their own client records and notes out before the cut-off. You cannot audit a vendor's balance sheet, but you can ask three answerable questions. Does the platform take payments through your own Stripe account, or through a merchant account it controls? Can you export your full client and payment history yourself, today, without asking support? And is the company funded in a way that requires an exit to survive? None of those guarantees anything - but a coach who keeps their Stripe account and tests their export quarterly loses a fortnight to a shutdown, not a business.

Feature Comparison

Pricing Comparison

Platform Reviews

Practice (practice.do) - closed

Status: Shut down 3 November 2025. Not available at any price.

It is worth being clear about what was lost, because it sets the bar for a replacement. Practice combined a genuinely good client portal - chat, voice memos and email threads in one place, with each client seeing their invoices, package inclusions and resource files - with scheduling including recurring appointments, intake, check-in and feedback forms you could drop into landing pages, contracts, and billing that handled recurring invoices, auto-debit subscriptions and custom plans. Reported pricing in its final year was around $45 to $55 a month. The failure was commercial rather than technical: a venture-backed company that could not sustain itself and an acquisition that fell through. That is a lesson to carry into the next choice, not a mark against the software.

• Strengths: Rich client portal with chat and voice memos, forms and worksheets, contracts, recurring invoicing, well-liked interface
• Limitations: Gone. No read-only access, no acquirer, no archive - and the in-portal notes, chat and worksheets were not fully recoverable through the export

Paperbell

Best for: Solo coaches selling one-to-one packages who want to be trading again this week, with contracts and session notes included.

Paperbell is the closest like-for-like replacement, and the shortest path back to normal. It collapses the package page, contract, payment and first booking into a single client flow: the client lands on a clean page, signs, pays and books without being handed three different links. Scheduling handles time zones automatically and syncs with Google and Apple calendars, contracts are signed in-app, session notes sit against each client and can be shared or kept private, group sessions and simple digital products are supported, and payments run through your own Stripe or PayPal account with no cut taken by Paperbell. It is bootstrapped and has been profitable at a modest size for years, which is a different risk profile from the venture-backed platform that just closed under you. Public software directories rate it highly - reported at around 4.7 out of 5 across roughly 150 reviews as of July 2026, though scores move and you should check the profile yourself.

The limits are consistent across reviews. It is a coaching admin tool, not a teaching platform: no course builder, no community, no video hosting beyond file uploads, no in-app messaging. The website side is package pages with basic branding rather than a page builder, and reviewers repeatedly note how little control there is over fonts, layout and blocks. Reporting is simple - income by client and by package. There are no native mobile apps, and payments are Stripe or PayPal only. Some reviewers also report difficulty reaching a person around automatic renewal, worth knowing before you pay annually. Coaches who outgrow Paperbell usually do so in one direction: they wanted courses, cohorts or a real marketing site, and had to add a second platform to get them.

• Pricing: $57/month or $570/year, one plan with everything, unlimited clients. Free plan to build in, public site live for seven days. As of July 2026.
• Strengths: Fastest replacement for a solo one-to-one practice, contracts with e-signature, session notes, clean client flow, no transaction fee, multi-currency pricing, bootstrapped and stable
• Limitations: No real page builder or multi-page site, no course builder or community, no in-app messaging, limited reporting, no native apps, renewal support complaints reported

Bizzly

Best for: Coaches whose business runs on scheduled sessions, packages, group programmes and recurring payments - and who want the website and the booking system to be the same product.

Bizzly comes at this from the commerce side rather than the client-record side. It starts with a fully flexible drag-and-drop website editor, included on every plan: twenty-six components including the booking calendar, timetable, plans, store and cart, testimonials, forms and the entire client portal as a drop-in block; per-element styling down to a raw CSS inspector on top of a global theme in your own colours; multiple pages with per-page SEO and a search-result preview; version snapshots before you experiment; a media library with stock photography; and AI page drafting and refinement. The editor itself is a desktop tool and there is no custom-code injection, but the public site it produces is yours page by page - not a package page inside someone else's template. For a coach currently paying for Squarespace plus a booking tool, that is one subscription instead of two.

Billing is the second differentiator, because subscriptions and programme billing run side by side rather than one being an afterthought. Monthly retainer plans carry booking quotas; session packs carry an expiry date; one-off programme and intensive blocks pro-rate automatically for someone joining part-way through and can be sold whole or day by day; and season subscriptions bill natively through Stripe and auto-roll a cohort into the next intake, with the cancellation policy you choose - billing-period end, a notice period, or the end of the programme. Capacity is held while a client is in checkout, so a popular cohort cannot oversell. In practice that means a twelve-week group programme, a six-session one-to-one pack, a one-day intensive and a rolling monthly retainer can all sell from the same calendar.

Third, billing and booking are one system, which makes booking quotas payment-gated: a client can only book what their active plan, pack or credits cover, and lapsed payment blocks new bookings automatically rather than becoming somebody's Monday morning job. Booking rules are set per plan - how far ahead clients can book, the cutoff before a session, and the notice required to cancel. Fourth is the WhatsApp AI assistant on Standard and above, with 500 messages a month on Standard and 2,000 on Pro: it books and cancels sessions, searches availability including recurring slots, suggests alternatives when a slot has gone, joins and checks waitlists, answers account, subscription and invoice questions, raises support tickets and answers business questions from a knowledge base you write - around the clock, with clients verified by one-time passcode. For a coach who does not want to be the person answering “can we move Thursday?” at ten at night, that is the feature that pays for the plan.

The day-to-day is covered too: a client portal handling pause and resume, plan changes, policy-driven cancellation with a live refund quote, credits, purchase history, receipts and GDPR export and erasure self-serve; clients reschedule by cancelling and rebooking from the portal within the cancellation window, with the credit returning automatically, while staff can move a booking or drag a whole session to a new time; per-session registers with Present, Late and Absent marking and a note against each mark for group programmes; FIFO waitlists on Standard and above that auto-offer a freed place with a time-limited claim link; free trial and discovery sessions as a per-service toggle; registration forms and custom profile fields that gate who is eligible for which slot; automated confirmations, 24-hour email and SMS reminders, dunning on failed payments and credit-expiry warnings; review requests by SMS magic link that you moderate and publish straight to your site; online sessions via native Google Meet with links generated per booking; calendars synced with Google Calendar; discount codes through Stripe promotion codes; and HubSpot CRM for the enquiry side. Pricing is flat and published - Base £19, Standard £29, Pro £49 a month - with no platform or transaction fee taken by Bizzly, a 14-day free trial with no card, and billing in your own currency wherever you operate.

The gaps matter here more than in most comparisons, because they are exactly the things Practice did well. Bizzly has no per-client session-notes or coaching journal - a note saves against each attendance mark, and custom profile fields hold standing information, but there is no running written record per client. There are no contracts with e-signature, no client worksheets or between-session check-ins, and no per-client file library. There is no in-app human chat or voice memo thread either - clients can raise a support ticket from the portal or over WhatsApp, but the assistant is an AI booking and account agent, not a relationship channel. There is no course builder and no native mobile apps - it is a responsive web app. Payments run through your own Stripe account, so the methods clients see are the ones you enable there: cards and wallets by default, with Bacs Direct Debit available to UK businesses who turn it on. And there is no managed migration service - you set it up yourself, with the free trial to do it in.

• Pricing: Base £19, Standard £29, Pro £49/month. No platform or transaction fees from Bizzly. 14-day free trial, no card required. Multi-currency.
• Strengths: Fully flexible website editor on every plan, packages plus retainers plus auto-rolling programme billing, payment-gated booking quotas, WhatsApp AI assistant, waitlists and registers and trial sessions, payments in your own Stripe account, flat pricing
• Limitations: No session-notes journal, no contracts or e-signature, no client worksheets or file library, no in-app human chat, no course builder, no native mobile apps, no managed migration

Also worth a look

CoachAccountable is the specialist for documentation-led coaching - worksheets, metrics, accountability between sessions - and the only platform we have found with an automated importer for the Practice export ZIP. It prices by active client, from around $20 a month for two clients up to $400 for a hundred, so it is cheap for a small book and material for a large one. CoachVantage published a dedicated Practice migration workflow with hands-on help, from around $26 per user a month. Simply.Coach aims at corporate and enterprise coaching, with multi-coach teams, progress tracking and the compliance posture that corporate buyers ask for, starting around $9 a month at the entry tier. All figures as of July 2026 - confirm directly.

How to Move Your Clients

The software migration is the easy half. Moving people is the half that decides whether you keep your revenue, and it runs on the same sequence whichever platform you pick.

1. Rebuild the offers before you tell anyone. Set up packages, session lengths, prices and availability on the new platform, then book a test session through the whole client flow yourself. Nothing damages confidence like a broken link in the “we've moved” email.
2. Reconnect the same Stripe account. Your payment history, customer records and past invoices live in Stripe, not in the platform. Connecting the same account keeps the financial trail continuous, and your accountant never has to care that anything changed.
3. Rebook every confirmed session from your calendar. Work forward through every appointment you have already agreed and recreate it, so confirmations and reminders come from the right place.
4. Re-authorise recurring payments. Saved cards rarely move between platforms - unless the new one reads them from the Stripe account they were taken on - so assume every client on a retainer or payment plan has to re-authorise. Treat it as a communications job: one clear email covering what happened, what stays the same, what they need to do and by when - then a personal nudge to anyone who has not acted within a week.
5. Replace every booking link you have published. Email signature, website, social profiles, lead magnets, PDF proposals, that guest article from two years ago. Keep a list as you go - the ones you forget surface as a prospect telling you your calendar is broken.
6. Rebuild the client record you can. Standing information - goals, context, preferences, accessibility notes - can be re-entered into whatever the new platform offers, whether that is a notes field, custom profile fields or a document per client. Do it while you still remember.
7. Export from the new platform in week one, then diarise it quarterly. This is the step that makes the next shutdown an inconvenience instead of a crisis.

How to Choose

Choose Paperbell if:

• You coach one-to-one, sell packages, and want to be trading again within a day or two
• Contracts with e-signature and session notes are non-negotiable parts of how you work
• You want one flat price with every feature in it and no tier to think about
• A simple package page is enough, and you are content to run your marketing site elsewhere
• Vendor stability matters and you would rather buy from a bootstrapped, profitable company

Choose CoachAccountable if:

• You still have the Practice export ZIP and want the most of it back automatically
• Your coaching is documentation-led - worksheets, metrics, accountability between sessions
• Your active client count is small enough that per-client pricing works in your favour

Choose Bizzly if:

• You want your website and your booking system to be one product, with a fully flexible editor rather than a package page in someone else's template
• You sell more than one way - session packs, monthly retainers, group programmes and intensives - and want cohorts to roll into the next intake on their own
• You want booking access tied automatically to what each client has actually paid for, with lapsed payment blocking new bookings
• You run group programmes where capacity, waitlists and registers matter
• You want client enquiries, availability checks and bookings handled over WhatsApp by an AI assistant at any hour
• You want to try the product properly, for free, before paying anything
• You coach outside the UK - Bizzly is a global product and your client payments run in your own currency through your own Stripe account

Look wider if:

You coach inside organisations, in which case Simply.Coach and the enterprise vendors are the right conversation - ask about SOC 2, data residency and multi-coach reporting. If your practice is really a course business with coaching attached, a course platform with a booking add-on will fit better than any of these. And if you run several kinds of service business at once, our service business software comparison covers the wider field. New to this entirely? Start with how to start a coaching business.

Summary

Practice closed on 3 November 2025 and is not coming back. If you have not yet recovered your records, start with Stripe, your calendar and your email archive - between them they rebuild most of a client list - and if you still hold the export ZIP, CoachAccountable will read it automatically, which is reason enough to trial it whatever you choose in the end.

For a solo one-to-one practice, Paperbell is the closest replacement and the fastest route back to normal, with contracts, session notes and a clean client flow at one flat price. Bizzly is the option if your business has grown past that shape: packages, retainers and auto-rolling group programmes billed side by side, booking gated automatically by payment, waitlists and registers for cohorts, a WhatsApp AI assistant taking bookings out of hours, and a fully flexible website editor that replaces the separate Squarespace subscription - though it does not do session notes, contracts, worksheets or client file libraries, and if those are the heart of your coaching, choose Paperbell or CoachAccountable instead.

Whichever you pick, take one lesson from 2025 with you: keep payments in your own Stripe account, run the data export in your first week, and open the file. Practice's coaches did not lose weeks because the software was bad. They lost them because nobody expects the export to matter until the morning it does.