BJJ Software UK (2026): What Actually Tracks Stripes
A BJJ academy has a tracking problem that a karate dojo does not. Your students spend years at the same belt, and the meaningful progression in between is stripes — four of them, awarded at your discretion off mat time and technical development. Software that stores “blue belt” in a field tells you almost nothing about a room where two thirds of the mat has been blue for eighteen months.
Add the IBJJF time-in-grade minimums on top — roughly four and a half years from blue to black, with two years at blue commonly recommended before progression — and the question you actually need answering is not “what belt is this person”. It is “who has the mat hours and the time in rank to be promoted this term, and who thinks they do but doesn’t”.
Quick Verdict
Zen Planner handles the BJJ-specific job best of the tools we looked at. It tracks class hours, technique milestones, instructor assessments and stripe additions inside the student profile, and flags promotion-ready students once the criteria are met. If stripe-level tracking is your main pain, that is the closest fit — but it prices in dollars and the add-on modules stack.
Martialytics is the better all-round choice for most UK academies: purpose-built for martial arts, priced in pounds from £69/month for 50 students, with a traffic-light grading view driven by attendance and time in rank. Confirm how it handles stripes for your syllabus specifically before committing — its grading model is built around readiness, and you should check that maps onto a four-stripe ladder the way you run it.
What a Jiu-Jitsu Academy Needs That a Gym Platform Misses
Stripe-level granularity. Four stripes per belt means four progression events between promotions. A tool with a single rank field gives you one.
Time in rank as a running calculation. IBJJF minimums are date arithmetic against the last promotion. If the software does not hold the promotion date properly, you are doing that in a spreadsheet.
Gi and no-gi as separate attendance streams. Plenty of academies run both, and plenty of students only do one. If your register cannot distinguish them, your mat-hours figure is wrong in a way that matters at grading time.
Open mat that counts — or deliberately doesn’t. Whether open mat contributes to promotion criteria is your call, but the software has to let you make it.
Competition team as a subset. Comp class, weight tracking and event admin sit over the top of ordinary membership, not instead of it.
Check this before anything else if you are a UK club: how the tool takes money. Most of these platforms are American and route payments through card processors. A great many UK clubs collect monthly fees by Direct Debit, commonly through GoCardless, because it is cheaper than card fees and fails less often on recurring payments. None of the tools in this comparison has confirmed GoCardless support, and Martialytics documentation lists it explicitly as not yet compatible. Confirm the migration path with the vendor before you commit, not after.
How the Tools Compare on the BJJ-Specific Jobs
| Tool | Stripe tracking | Promotion-ready flagging | Entry price | Currency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zen Planner | Yes — stripe additions in the student profile | Yes — auto-flags when criteria met | $99/mo (Studio) | USD |
| Martialytics | Confirm for your syllabus | Yes — traffic-light readiness view | £69/mo (50 students) | GBP |
| Gymdesk | Belt/rank plus skills tracking | Not confirmed | $75/mo (≤50 members) | USD |
| Kicksite | Belt rank promotion | Not confirmed | $49/mo (≤25 students) | USD |
Prices are approximate and change — verify current plans on each vendor’s website. USD-priced tools cost a moving amount in pounds depending on the exchange rate. “Not confirmed” means we could not verify the feature from the vendor’s own published material, not that it is absent.
The Decision Framework
Who This Is NOT For
This page is for people running a BJJ academy or jiu-jitsu club as a business, with a roll and monthly fees. It is not for:
Small hobbyist groups — if you have fifteen people on the mat and take a standing order, a spreadsheet is genuinely the right answer.
Anyone looking for training or syllabus content — this is about the admin software, not technique, curriculum design or affiliation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which BJJ software actually tracks stripes rather than just belts?
Zen Planner is the clearest case — it records stripe additions alongside class hours, technique milestones and instructor assessments in the student profile, and flags students as promotion-ready when the criteria are met. Other tools store rank reliably but we could not confirm four-stripe granularity from their published material, so ask directly and be specific about how many stripes your syllabus uses.
Can software enforce IBJJF time-in-rank minimums?
Partly. What software can do is hold accurate promotion dates and surface elapsed time in rank so you can apply the minimums yourself. The IBJJF framework sets roughly four and a half years from blue to black as a minimum path, with no time minimum at white belt. Treat the software as the record, not the authority — promotion remains an instructor judgement.
Do I need BJJ-specific software, or will general gym software do?
If stripes and mat hours drive your promotions, a tool that tracks them saves you a recurring spreadsheet job. If your academy is small or your promotions are informal, a general platform with better family billing and a lower price may serve you better. The honest test is whether you currently export a register to work out who is eligible.
How do I track gi and no-gi attendance separately?
Run them as distinct classes on the timetable rather than one generic session — every tool here supports separate class types, and it is the cleanest way to keep the two attendance streams apart. Check that your promotion criteria can then draw on one, the other, or both, because that is where tools differ.