Looking for a Gladstone Alternative? Why Sailia is the Best Choice

Gladstone has been selling leisure software for 25 years. Councils, trusts, universities. If you run a pool timetable and 40,000 direct debits.

It shows in other ways too. Most operators end up running Plus2 and Gladstone360 at the same time. Booking sheets in one, everything else in the other. Reception hops between them to move one person off a waiting list. Their own reviewers call it inefficient, confusing and time consuming. Development is slow. And there is one way to buy it: an annual licence from about £9,999, whether that suits your trading year or not.

Sailia does the lot on one platform. POS, memberships, Direct Debits, classes, courses, swim school, kiosks, check-in and check-out, turnstiles, barriers, wristbands, concession pricing, reporting. Then the bit Gladstone has no answer for: the experiences. Paddleboard sessions, holiday camps, yoga, saunas, climbing, birthday parties. Kit, instructors, waivers, walk-ups. Same system.

At a Glance: Why Sailia is the Leading Alternative to Gladstone

One platform, not two

The loudest complaint in Gladstone's own reviews is the split. Booking sheets live in Plus2. Everything else lives in 360. Your duty manager needs both open to move someone from a waiting list into a Tuesday class. One reviewer says outright they are waiting for the day they can stop using Plus2.

Sailia is one login. Bookings, memberships, POS, check-in, staffing, comms, reporting. Nothing to reconcile at the end of the day. No argument about which system is telling the truth.

Everything you already do, plus everything you cannot

Gladstone does the leisure centre core well. So does Sailia. All of it.

POS at reception and on the cafe till. Memberships with recurring billing and Direct Debit collection. Classes and courses, swim school progression with skill levels and stage sign-off. Kiosks so the queue moves without a staff member on it. Check-in and check-out. Concession and local authority pricing. Turnstiles, barriers and wristbands, so people get through the gate on their own.

No trade-off. Everything Gladstone runs your centre on, Sailia runs too.

The difference is everything around the session. A booking in Sailia knows which instructor is qualified to take it, which kit it needs and which space it sits in. Sailia staffs it and allocates the gear on its own. Waivers get signed at checkout and land against the booking, so nobody is chasing a parent in the car park with an iPad. Accommodation is native, or links to your PMS if you already run one.

For most venues that is the difference between one system and four.

Pricing Gladstone Cannot Match

Gladstone has one commercial model. Annual licence from around £9,999, up front, again next year. Value for money is their lowest scoring category in independent reviews.

Sailia gives you the model that fits. Usage-based, so you pay when you earn and no invoice lands in February when the centre was half empty. Or an annual licence with enterprise pricing and a proper SLA, which is what most trusts and universities need for procurement.

Either way everything is switched on from day one. No modules. No add-on menu. Nothing you assumed was included turning up as a line item.

Migrate without going dark

We will be straight with you. Single venue, you are live in days. Multi-site group, trust or university with fifteen years of membership history, live direct debits and access hardware on four sites? Months. Anyone quoting you a fortnight has not looked at your data.

What does not happen is downtime. We run alongside your existing system and move site by site. Bookings, memberships and payments stay live the whole way. No weekend cutover. No reception on pen and paper. Nobody stuck at the barrier on a Monday morning.

Gladstone rollouts do not work like that. Their reviewers describe server capacity problems, infrastructure vetting and long deployments before anything ran properly.

Support is live chat, answered in minutes, and one person owns your migration from first call to last site. As Tracey Boyne puts it:

"All of the features are so well thought out. It really is amazing. Just get it."

An API you can actually build on

Gladstone reviewers describe a stack held together with plug-ins, and say those connections get in the way of processes that should be seamless. That is what integration looks like when it is bolted on afterwards.

Sailia is API-first. Whatever the platform does, the API does. Bookings, memberships, customers, availability, payments, access control. Fully documented and open. Councils pull participation data straight out. Universities sync student records. Groups feed a central BI tool without a CSV in sight. If you have a developer, you are not waiting on someone else's roadmap.

Software that ships

Gladstone customers have spent years asking for features and watching development go somewhere else. Their reviews mention slow development, and new products getting attention over the one they actually use every day.

We ship constantly. Automated staffing, dynamic pricing, gift vouchers, 30+ automated comms triggers, multi-lingual checkout, and Lia, our AI agent, handling enquiries and admin. When a customer asks for something it usually lands in weeks.

The bottom line

Gladstone gives you a leisure centre system split across two platforms on a take-it-or-leave-it licence. Sailia gives you the same operational core on one, adds the entire experience side they leave out, and lets you buy it the way that suits your business.

Councils, trusts, universities, independents. If you sell memberships and experiences, the case is the same.

Get in touch here to see how we can transform your daily operations.

Frequently asked questions

Does Sailia handle memberships and recurring payments? Yes. Memberships, recurring billing, Direct Debit collection, member check-in and access control, all native.

Can Sailia run our swim school? Yes. Course progression, skill levels and stage sign-off are native, alongside classes and courses.

Do you support self-service kiosks? Yes. Join, book and check in at the kiosk without a staff member involved.

Can we run concession and local authority pricing? Yes. Both native.

Can Sailia work with our turnstiles and barriers? Yes. Turnstile, barrier and wristband integration, so members get through the gate on their own.

Do we still need a separate booking system for activities? No. That is the whole point. Classes, courses, experiences, hires and memberships all in one place.

How does Sailia price? However suits you. Usage-based so you pay when you earn, or an annual licence with enterprise pricing and an SLA. Gladstone does annual licence only, from around £9,999.

Do you have an API? Yes, extensive and fully documented. Bookings, memberships, customers, availability, payments and access control all exposed.

Can you meet our procurement and SLA requirements? Yes. Formal SLAs and enterprise pricing for multi-site groups, trusts and universities.

How long does it take to switch? Single venue, days. Multi-site group or trust, months, because the data is genuinely complex. Either way, no downtime. We run alongside your current system and move site by site while you keep trading.

Customer Testimonials

"It's an amazing system that streamlines our whole business into one place, and the possibilities seem endless" - Duncan Freshwater, Managing Director

"Switching to Sailia has made all the difference for us. We've had our best year ever, bookings are up by around a third and our customers love how simple the booking flow is" - Rosie Clark, Owner

"We haven't found another booking system that lives up to what Sailia has done" - Hatty Morsley, Events and Pathway Officer

"This booking software is revolutionary. Just get it! All the features are so well thought out, the support is great, and it's so user-friendly for customers." - Tracey Boyne, Director