CoachNow vs. SeamsUp: Coaching Platform & Sports Video Analysis Software Comparison

The use of video analysis to both monitor and fuel athletic development is pretty well accepted these days.

There have now been over 70 years of real science and hundreds of high-profile anecdotes to convince both coaches and parents of its power. 

Former MLB superstar, Tony Gwynn, is an often-cited example. 

Gwynn reportedly asked his wife to start recording his at-bats on their home VRC during a particularly bad hitting slump early in his career so he could watch them when he returned home after playing on the road. 

The man who came to be known as Mr. Padre quickly broke out of that slump and continued employing video analysis all the way to the Hall of Fame. 

With this background in mind, it makes sense that smart coaches and parents would look for the best video analysis tool to empower their athlete’s development–and both CoachNow and SeamsUp certainly seem to fit the bill. 

Both apps also purport to help coaches organize and scale their instructional businesses. 

And with CoachNow and SeamsUp having a few overlapping features that aim to improve feedback, athletic performance, and instructor revenue, it can be challenging to determine which is best suited for an individual coach, parent, or athlete’s needs.  

Despite being a bit partial (check the URL above), we genuinely want help with this decision-making process by comparing both apps’ basic features, pricing, and real benefits.

#TL;DR Summary of CoachNow Versus SeamsUp

Sports coaches and parents are both a busy bunch. If you're short on time, this "too long; didn't read" bullet point section will give you the basic gist.  

#CoachNow For Coaches

• CoachNow can help in-person coaches with pre-existing clients do video technique analysis and organize their client communication away from email or texting for $349 to $499 a year (depending on the membership level).
• CoachNow can work with coaches regardless of device type, meaning on their laptop, phone or tablet–both for Android and iOS. 
  
  But even with this single type of remote lesson, coaches would have to negotiate their own scheduling and prices back and forth with clients, and they’d need to pair CoachNow with other apps to be able to accept payments. 
  
  To be able to conduct all types of online lessons, such coaches would also need to combine the CoachNow app with a few other softwares – such as, again, a payment acceptor (Venmo, Zelle, or Cash App), a live video call tool (Zoom or FaceTime), and potentially a personal scheduling tool to help with time zones and meet up reminders (Calendly or Acuity). 
  

#SeamsUp For Coaches

• SeamsUp offers coaches 100% free, all-in-one business features to manage and scale their in-person or online lessons–such as automated client scheduling and communication, payment acceptance, custom branding, and live video calls.
• SeamsUp lets coaches offer every type of lesson imaginable and get connected to new local or remote clients with a sales and search engine optimized profile page that can act as your website selling your services (or can be embedded onto any pre-existing website you might have). 
• SeamsUp also offers coaches a suite of similar video analysis tools, but it’s completely free and comes with some extra cutting edge features, like in-picture video feedback overlays and AI-powered skeleton (posture and limb) tracking.
  
• SeamsUp’s full features can currently be used only on iPhones or iPads devices. Though your SeamsUp coaching profile is discoverable by anyone with internet access – on phones, tablets, laptops, or desktops. 
  
• And, just in case you’re wondering, SeamsUp also does not charge coaches additional fees for conducting lessons on the platform either.
  

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#Comparing CoachNow and SeamsUp For Parents & Athletes

• CoachNow offers parents a free video analysis suite with 5GB of storage for their footage.
• SeamsUp offers parents and their athletes a free video analysis suite with 30GB of storage for their footage (5x more than CoachNow).
  
  And parents get the same next-level features as SeamsUp coaches, like in-picture video feedback overlays and AI-powered skeleton (posture and limb) tracking.
• As a coaching platform, CoachNow allows parents and athletes to join “spaces” and “groups” with coaches they already know.
  
  These “spaces” act like less noisy iMessage or email channels for coaches and athletes to send each other written messages, images, and videos. And CoachNow “groups” are like group-text threads, but with the ability to organize them into different topic categories. 
• With SeamsUp, parents and athletes get a safe and straightforward process for finding and connecting with pre-vetted professional instructors for every type of in-person and online private lesson imaginable (not only video footage analysis).
  
  This gives athletes a chance to learn 1:1 from that pro player they watch on TV, inspiring creator they follow on social media, or the coach of their dream college.
• And since you’re not paying professional coaches for their clerical admin and text writing acumen – but for their deep sport-specific experience, knowledge, and teaching abilities – SeamsUp automates the scheduling process and payments for both sides.
  
  This means no more wasting your time on and back and forth chatter, and it allows coaches to focus exclusively on your athlete’s actual game and how to get them better.  

Okay, with the TL;DR out of the way, let's dive into the full details. 

#CoachNow App Features

CoachNow has been a valid option for coaches, parents, and players looking to review technique and game film since 2014.

#Video Analysis

The CoachNow app allows you to record your players and instantly show them how to improve–right from the in-game (or practice) field or court. It also allows players to share pre-recorded footage with their sports instructor to receive one type of personal feedback. 

This video analysis portion of the app offers tools such as instant playback and slow motion for further study of each clip, along with allowing its users to zoom in or out and draw lines, shapes, angles, and timers directly onto their videos to call attention to particular points or areas of focus. 

The CoachNow app also lets coaches or parents compare different footage to highlight key points found in experts’ techniques or track an athlete’s progress with videos from their past. 

In CoachNow’s premium paid tiers, coaches can now use its new picture-in-picture feature. This allows clients to see their coach’s face while they are recording video analysis of their footage.

#Organization

Moreover, it gives coaches and parents the ability to manage their imported and analyzed files and share them wherever they wish via text, email, and even directly onto social media. 

CoachNow supports all device types–laptops, phones, or tablets–both for Android and iOS.

#Communication

CoachNow helps sports coaches avoid using their personal text messages or email apps to communicate, negotiate, and schedule lessons with clients. 

Each line of communication brought onto the app between coach and client is called a “Space.” And CoachNow allows coaches to combine spaces together into “Groups,” which allows them to mass-send broadcasts.

These “spaces” act like less noisy iMessage or email channels for coaches and athletes to send each other written messages, images, and videos. 

And CoachNow “groups” are like group-text threads but with the ability to organize them into different topic categories. 

Bringing text-message-like communication under one app has been useful for many coaches looking to start organizing their private instruction businesses.

#The Problems with CoachNow Coaching?

But there are (at least) two problems for coaches looking to grow their online business with CoachNow:

1. They’ll still need to negotiate scheduling and lesson prices with each client, which takes time and energy away from what they love to do–teach.
2. They’ll have to combine CoachNow with other software applications in order to receive and track those lesson payments, which means jumping back-and-forth. 
   

And all that extra work (and awkwardness) would just be for giving a basic video analysis lesson. Other types of online lesson interactions–like live video calls–that parents and athletes crave cannot be done at all with the app. 

Coaches who wanted to create such offerings would also need to combine the CoachNow app with a few other pieces of software, such, once again, a payment acceptor (Venmo, Zelle, or Cash App), a live video tool (Zoom or FaceTime), and possibly a personal scheduling program to deal with time zones and meet-up reminders (Calendly or Acuity).

#SeamsUp App Features

As of 2022, the SeamsUp app has become an industry-leading sports analysis option and continues to push the envelope of what’s possible with private instruction.

#Video Analysis

Sports analysis tools are just one facet of what SeamsUp offers to coaches and players – but it’s a facet that we take very seriously. 

We first put together a comprehensive suite of video analysis features that includes everything apps like CoachUp offer, like frame-by-frame video play-back, slow-motion, zooming in and out, flipping footage to right or left handedness, comparing two different footages, voiceover, and numerous drawing annotation tools – angles, lines, circles, squares, arrows, free hand, etc.

But then, we added in-picture personal feedback and technique demonstrations that you can overlay onto a player’s footage – which can be moved at will or expanded to full-screen – during your analysis sessions.

This allows your lesson clients to see your face speaking directly to them or your body demonstrating the proper movements overlaid on their sent footage.

Next, we also added our own AI-powered skeleton tracking so that you can see your athlete’s posture and their limbs’ movement patterns even more clearly. 

This skeleton tracking makes comparing your athlete’s clips side-by-side with those of elite professional athletes or their own footage from the past significantly easier.

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#Organization

Then, SeamsUp revamped how you upload videos from your device’s camera roll and how you film them directly from within our app – along with re-imagining our entire file management system with a more intuitive and modern look and feel than anything else out there.

On SeamsUp, coaches can create folders in their Gallery for different footage types, like “Drills” or “Pro Player Examples.”

But you can also create folders named after each in-person player you work with from before you started using SeamsUp or any that you acquired outside of our app’s auto-pilot client acquisition efforts – and store all of their progress in one convenient place.

And, of course, our SeamsUp client management system stores every In Person, Analysis, Full Remote, or Live Call lesson that you accept within the app into their own searchable categories.

But, not only that, each lesson request you accept or feedback you record is saved in a robust player profile forever.

These player profiles include their name, profile picture, their parent’s name, their age, and every instructional interaction you and the client have ever had.

This allows you to track all of your SeamsUp connected clients’ progresses, and which drills or concepts you’ve previously introduced along their developmental journeys.

It’s like having an easily viewable and navigable receipt of everything high and low of the ballplayer’s mindset, technique, and in-game results – and all the knowledge and mentorship you’ve contributed to these along the way.

And, of course, it’s also a literal receipt of their lesson payments (which go directly into your bank account).

#Video Capture

SeamsUp lets users choose their camera resolution up to 4k and their frame rate to optimize both quality and speed.

This is a higher resolution quality than what’s offered by any other video analysis app, including CoachNow.

SeamsUp also allows slow motion capture up to 240 frames per second (fps).

And we have no time limit on how long you'd like to record your videos within our app. 

#Communication and Other Coaching Platform Features

But, the differences between CoachNow and SeamsUp are even more evident when comparing them both as coaching instructional platforms – and not just because one is completely free. 

These differences are more due to the fact that SeamsUp is primarily a marketplace created to bring athletes and coaches together for every type of private lesson imaginable. 

Players get one-on-one remote or in-person access to the world’s best coaches – finally breaking free of all geographic limitations.

Parents interested in coaching services can search and request private lessons from instructors in a couple clicks after looking over an instructor's full background and coaching philosophy.

Parents can also check out the reviews of other parents who have already worked with each of our platform-vetted professionals.

And coaches?

Well, they get connected with new local clients, along with the world’s first dedicated platform built to give, manage and grow their online lessons business.

A dedicated coaching platform goes well-beyond moving client communication away from emails and text messages and into a place that essentially does the same thing in a different app. 

Coaches want to focus on teaching the game and automate all the clerical admin back and forths.

But our automated lesson sales processes, like all the best set-it-and-forget-it tools, still gives you, as coaches, room to personalize the client messaging and reminders as much or as little as you like.

Coaches using SeamsUp get all of the following features 100% free:

• A robust sales landing page. This profile page showcases your instructional services, qualifications, client reviews, and lesson offerings in a way that’s fully optimized to grow and scale your coaching business. And it takes less than 5 minutes to set up.
  
  This page can act as your website by itself, as its customizable URL is shareable on social media (or any other way you see fit) and searchable in Google (and every other search engine). But you can also simply add your SeamsUp sales page to your existing website or social media links.  
• Accept one-off or recurring package payments from clients. And you create your own prices and lesson offerings (like live video calls)–it’s total freedom to run your business your way.
  
• Manage lesson clients. Easily keep track of your client’s information, including their bookings, payments, and personal progress.
  
• Easy booking processes. No more back-and-forth scheduling or price discussions for live-streamed lessons. You set availability and rates. Players choose their slots. We handle time zones and everything in between.
  
• Automated sales processes. Push notifications and emails are sent automatically to verify client purchases and remind them when it’s time to meet for live lessons–so you can focus on teaching the game.
  
• Customizable message communication for new students (onboarding templates) and for each subsequent lesson you give. 
• Custom branding. You and your coaching business are one-of-a-kind. A SeamsUp profile allows you to showcase the logo, coaching philosophy, content, and specific brand colors that set you apart. 
• No additional fees on lesson transactions. You’ll just find the same 3% processing fees (which goes to the banks) as you’d get charging your clients with Venmo or Cash App. 
• The Coaching Upgrade Program. An online video course teaching coaches how to create a brand, grow your social media presence, and how to use and optimize SeamsUp to make you more revenue. It also comes with a step-by-step coaching content creation template to follow.

So, our free suite of sports video analysis tools is part of a larger ecosystem of software solutions.

But our powerful analysis features can and are used completely separately, AKA on their own, by hundreds of coaches and parents for all sorts of uses in sport. 

And we encourage it–as you can tell by this article.

#CoachNow vs. SeamsUp Pricing

CoachNow and SeamsUp go about pricing their video analysis products very differently.

Here’s a breakdown of each option.

#CoachNow Pricing

#CoachNow Pricing For Parents and Athletes

The CoachNow video and analysis tool suite is free for parents and athletes. And this free tier provides 5GB of video storage to use (before having to upgrade to a coaching plan), along with customer support.

#CoachNow for Pricing for Coaches

CoachNow+

This is their intro membership for coaches, trainers, and academies. It costs $39.99 each month or $349 for the year.

And it comes with all their basic features, including:

• Unlimited Spaces and Groups
• Cloud Library with 150GB of Storage
• Use of the Video/Image Analysis Suite
• Use of the Picture-in-Picture feature inside the Analysis Suite
• Templates (allow you to onboard new clients in the same way)
• Lists (allow you to bulk invite any new clients you’ve gotten from social media or marketplace apps)

CoachNow PRO

This is their premium membership. It costs $49.99 each month or $499 for the year.

It includes all the features of CoachNow+, in addition to:

• Post Scheduling (Pre-scheduling your messages to clients)
• Cloud Library with 300GB Storage
• Advanced Group Controls
• ConnectedCoach Blueprint Course. This is an online video course teaching coaches how to use the app and pair it with other processes and apps in order to grow their revenue.

#SeamsUp Pricing

#SeamsUp Pricing For Coaches, Parents, and Athletes

SeamsUp’s video and analysis tool suite and top-notch customer service are also 100% free for parents and athletes.

But it’s also free for our coaches.

Another difference is that SeamsUp’s free tier gives coaches, parents, and athletes 30GB of cloud storage to use for videos (that’s 5x more than CoachNow).  

#Additional Benefits for Parents Choosing SeamsUp

With SeamsUp, parents also have the ability to find traditionally inaccessible instructors and examine their complete résumés as well as the opinions of other parents who have already worked with these platform-vetted experts. 

Before testing out a new coach, SeamsUp's marketplace enables parents and athletes to be fully informed. 

Finally, SeamsUp enables parents to quickly obtain an elite (and discreet) second opinion on technique, mindset, or college recruiting in literally a couple of clicks. 

As you can see, the free version of SeamsUp already offers parents and athletes everything they need to track and improve their game.

But, for coaches, we threw in even more for free. 

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#Additional Free Benefits for Coaches Choosing SeamsUp

To briefly reiterate from earlier, after creating their coaching profile, private instructors, former pros, and online sports creators also–aside from access to our industry-leading video analysis tools–also get the following:

• A robust and searchable sales landing page.
• The ability to accept one-off or recurring package payments via credit or debit card.
  
• The ability to manage lesson clients. Keep track of your clients' information including their bookings, payments, and personal progress.
  
• Worry-free booking processes. No more back and forth scheduling or price discussions for live streamed lessons. We handle time zones and everything in-between. 
  
• Automated sales processes. Push notifications and emails are sent automatically–so you can focus on teaching the game.
  
• Customizable message communication for new students (onboarding templates) and for each subsequent lesson. 
• Fully custom branding. 
• No additional processing fees for coaches on lesson transactions.
• The Coaching Upgrade Program. A complete online video course teaching coaches everything you need to grow and scale your business.  
  

Yes, everything above is seriously free for coaches. 

And it’s plenty to run just about any in-person or online coaching business imaginable. 

But, for former pro athletes and serious social media creators (or those who wish to become one), we do offer even more capabilities with our SeamsUp Pro offer. 

#SeamsUp Pro

This tier is $29.99 per month or $359.88 a year.

This is right on par every with CoachNow’s least expensive, feature-constained coaching tier and $139 cheaper each year than their Pro tier.
And it’s month-to-month and you can, of course, cancel anytime.  

SeamsUp Pro includes all the features included in our free tier, in addition to:

• The ability to export and share up to 4k quality videos. Again, this is for creators looking to generate next-level social media content with our video analysis tools.
• A whopping 1,000GB of Gallery storage (almost 3x more than CoachNow’s most expensive tier).
  
  This is a near-lifetime amount of video storage that can be used instead of DropBox, GoogleDrive, or Google Photos, and it will definitely free up tons of space in your device’s camera roll. 
  
• The ability to add an unlimited amount of fully customizable storage folders to your video Gallery. 
  
• No watermarks on exported or shared videos. 
  
• A full coaching business analytics suite. 
  
  This gives you advanced metrics to track the trends and progress of your public profile, your top lesson clients, trends, and compare your lesson offerings, prices, and revenue with similar coach competitors.   
  

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#SeamsUp: The Ultimate CoachNow Alternative

#For Parents and Athletes

Both CoachNow and SeamsUp give parents and athletes free analysis tools to analyze what’s working and what isn’t while tracking progress over time.

With CoachNow, parents can save up to 5GB of their athletes’ historical footage data, and with SeamsUp, these same parents can save up to 30GB. This is a 5x difference for the same free price. 

But these same parents, with SeamsUp, again, also get the ability to search for coaches well beyond their geographic area and see the full resumes and fellow parent reviews of these SeamsUp platform vetted experts. 

The SeamsUp marketplace empowers parents and athletes to have all the facts before trying out a new coach. 

And it allows them to get a professional second opinion on technique, mentality, or college recruiting in just a few clicks, without any of the awkwardness or organizational politics that this very smart move might have traditionally caused.

#For Coaches

CoachNow has also been a great intermediary tool for helping coaches transition from running in-person-only private lessons the old-fashioned way. 

The old way often meant managing client names and their scheduled times with a pen and paper or the Notes app on your phone and communicating with these clients via texts that were awkwardly mixed into the personal messages of friends and loved ones. 

But to truly scale a coaching business with CoachNow, you’d still need to pair it with multiple apps–jumping back and forth–and potentially pay for some of these additional apps on top of CoachNow’s $39.99 or $49.99 monthly payments. 

We’ve built SeamsUp for coaches looking to take the next leap in private instruction’s evolution.

We help you automate all the clerical work of scheduling, payments, and time-sucking (but non-essential) parent communications that once came with managing an instructional business–so you can focus your time and energy on teaching the game. 

Due to SeamsUp’s comprehensive and cutting-edge features and free pricing model, we hope you will take this leap with us. 

Interested in giving us a shot?

Download SeamsUp here, and let us know what you think.