Comparison
Google Forms is a genuinely good free form builder and a fine place to start, while CoachCheckIns is what you buy when the sending, chasing, and scoring around that form have become your Sunday.
Almost every coach starts with a form and a spreadsheet, and for a first ten clients that is the right call. It costs nothing and you learn which questions matter. What it does not do is send itself per client, chase the people who ignore it, score the answers the same way each week, or tell you who is sliding. Below roughly twenty clients you can carry that by hand. Above it, the manual work grows faster than the roster and the check-in quietly stops happening.
| What you are deciding | CoachCheckIns | Google Forms |
|---|---|---|
| Building the questions | Start from question sets built for strength, fat loss, and habit clients, then edit freely. | A general purpose form builder. You write every question and structure from scratch. |
| Sending on a schedule | Each client has a send day and time. The form goes out and reminds without you touching it. | You send the link yourself, or wire up scheduling with outside automation. |
| Chasing non-responders | Reminders run until the answer lands or the at-risk flag fires. | You compare the response sheet against your client list and message the gaps. |
| Scoring and trends | Adherence scored on submission, plotted week over week for each client. | Whatever formulas and charts you build and maintain in the sheet yourself. |
| Ranking the roster | One ranked list every Monday, most at-risk first, with the reason attached. | Rows in submission order. Ranking is a manual sort each week. |
| Client health data | Built for coaching intake and progress data, with photo and data consent handled in the flow. | A general tool. You are responsible for how client health information is stored and shared. |
| Cost | $29, $59, or $129 a month by roster size. | Free to use. The real cost is the hours you spend running it each week. |
| Best fit | Coaches past about twenty clients who want the routine to survive a busy month. | New coaches, small rosters, or anyone still working out which questions matter. |
Everything in the right hand column describes the general shape and intent of Google Forms as a product category, not a priced feature list. Software shifts month to month, so read their own pages before you commit. CoachCheckIns is published by MLJ, SASU and this page is written by Jimenez Julien.
Count what the free stack actually asks of you each week: send the link to everyone, wait, open the response sheet, work out who is missing, message those people, read the replies, decide who needs a program change, and write it down somewhere you will find it. At 12 clients that is under an hour. At 35 it is most of an evening, every single week.
The failure mode is not that the work is hard. It is that the work is skippable. Miss the chase one week because you covered a class, then miss it again during a holiday, and by week four the habit is gone and so is the early warning it gave you. Automation matters here because it survives your bad weeks, which are exactly the weeks your clients also have.
Keep the questions that earned their place. Usually that is sessions completed out of sessions planned, a protein or calorie adherence read, average steps, sleep hours, a one to ten soreness or stress rating, bodyweight average rather than a single morning, and one open text box asking what got in the way.
Drop the questions nobody answers honestly, and drop anything you have never once acted on. If a field has not changed a program in three months, it is friction with no payoff. Shorter forms get answered by the clients you most need to hear from, which is the whole reason the form exists.
Weekly check-ins accumulate real information about people: bodyweight, sleep, stress, injuries, sometimes medication changes and progress photos. A spreadsheet that gets shared around, copied to a laptop, or left open on a gym tablet is a bigger exposure than most trainers think about until something goes wrong.
Whatever you choose, decide who can see the data, where photos live, and what happens to a record when a client leaves. Our intake flow captures photo and data consent alongside the answers so the permission and the record sit together, which is also a much easier thing to explain if a client ever asks what you hold on them.
Yes. Paste your current questions in and keep the wording your clients already recognize. Most coaches also import past responses as a spreadsheet so the adherence trend starts with real history instead of a blank first week.
Often, yes. With a small roster you remember who has not replied and you notice a client going quiet without a system telling you. The point where coaches usually switch is somewhere between twenty and thirty clients, when the chasing turns into a job of its own.
That is usually a length and timing problem, not a tool problem. Cut the form to eight questions or fewer, send it at a time the client is not training or working, and remind twice. Fix that first, because no software rescues a form nobody wants to open.
Comparison
CoachCheckIns suits a trainer who already programs somewhere they like and needs the weekly check-in to run itself, while Trainerize suits a coach who wants programming, client app delivery, and messaging under one roof.
Comparison
TrueCoach is built for coaches delivering written training to remote clients and reviewing their lifts, while CoachCheckIns is built to catch the client who has stopped doing the training at all.
A comparison table only takes you so far, because the answer turns on how many of your clients train with you in person and how many silent weeks your book can absorb. Give us your roster size and your honest reply rate and we will walk through where the weekly check-in and the at-risk flag would have caught your last three cancellations. Twenty minutes, and nothing about your programming has to move.