Best Free Martial Arts Software (2026)
There is genuinely free martial arts software, and if your club is small it may be the right answer for a good while. But “free” covers three quite different things in this market, and the difference matters more than the price does.
There is free as a business model, where the tool is free and intends to stay that way. There is free for now, where a product in early access has not started charging yet. And there is free as a funnel, where a free tier exists but the features a dojo actually relies on sit one tier up. The third is the most common, and it is the one that wastes your time.
Quick Verdict
If you want free and working today, Recess and MartialArts.io both offer free access covering core club workflows including attendance, student management and belt promotions. MyDojo is free while in early access with no subscription and no per-student fees, and covers scheduling, student management, belt tracking, attendance and billing — but understand you are using a product that has not set its pricing yet.
If you are a club of any size with fees to collect and gradings to run, be honest about whether free is actually cheaper. The cost of free software is usually paid later, in the migration.
What Is Actually Free
Recess
Free, and includes core martial arts workflows that other platforms charge extra for. A reasonable first stop if you want to run a club without a software line in the budget.
MartialArts.io
Offers a free start covering attendance tracking, student management, billing and belt promotions — the four things a small club actually needs. Also markets discipline-specific handling for BJJ and MMA.
MyDojo
Free during early access with no subscription and no per-student fees, covering class scheduling, student management, belt tracking, attendance and automated billing. Genuinely capable for the price.
The catch: early access means pricing has not been set. Free now is not a commitment to free later, and the moment you have a year of attendance history and your whole roll in a system is the moment migrating becomes painful. Ask directly what happens at general release, and check you can export your data in a usable format before you commit a club to it.
Budo Systems
An open source martial arts studio management system with a storage-agnostic and presentation-agnostic core. The project describes itself as very much in its infancy.
The catch: this is a developer-stage project, not a product you can run a club on today. Worth knowing about if you have the technical capability and want to avoid vendor lock-in permanently. Not worth your time otherwise.
The Trap Worth Naming
Plenty of platforms advertise a free plan and then place the features dojos rely on — grading, automated billing, the student app — behind a paid upgrade. The test is simple: before you move a single student in, confirm that the specific things you need are on the free tier, not just that a free tier exists. Grading and attendance are the two to check, because they are the two a martial arts club cannot work around.
Worth contrasting: Martialytics includes every feature on every plan, so there is no tier where grading is withheld — but it is a paid product from £69/month, with a genuine 30-day free trial that does not ask for a card. That is a free trial, not a free tier, and the distinction is worth keeping straight when comparing.
When Free Is Genuinely the Right Answer
Who This Is NOT For
This page is for club owners weighing free options honestly. It is not for:
Clubs that need reliable Direct Debit collection — payment handling is where free tools are thinnest, and for UK clubs the Direct Debit question is already difficult on paid tools.
Clubs above roughly 100 students — at that size the admin load is real and the subscription is usually the cheaper side of the trade.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there genuinely free martial arts software, or is it all trials?
Both exist and they are different. Recess and MartialArts.io offer genuine free access to core workflows. MyDojo is free specifically because it is in early access. Separately, Martialytics offers a 30-day free trial with no card required — that is a trial of a paid product, not a free tier.
What is the catch with free martial arts software?
Usually one of three. Either core features like grading or automated billing sit behind a paid upgrade; or the product is free because it has not launched properly yet and pricing is still to come; or support and development are thin because nobody is paying for them. None of these is disqualifying for a small club — but check which one applies before you move your roll across.
Can I move to paid software later without losing my records?
That depends entirely on the export function, which is the single thing to check before adopting any free tool. You want attendance history, student details and grading records out in a standard format like CSV. If a tool cannot export cleanly, its free tier is more expensive than it looks — the cost simply arrives later.
At what size should a club stop using free software?
There is no fixed number, but the practical trigger is when admin starts costing you an evening a week or when grading preparation becomes a spreadsheet job. For most clubs that lands somewhere between 40 and 80 students. At that point a £69/month subscription is competing against several hours of your time a month, which is a different comparison entirely.