# Gigpie vs My Music Staff: Complete Comparison An honest Gigpie vs My Music Staff comparison for music schools: verified 2026 pricing, an 18-row feature table, break-even math, and verdicts by studio size. Canonical URL: https://gigpie.com/compare/gigpie-vs-mymusicstaff --- [My Music Staff](https://www.mymusicstaff.com) is music-lesson software built around the individual teacher's studio: $16.95 a month for the first teacher, $4.95 for each additional teacher or staff member, a student portal with a practice log, and a built-in website builder, as of August 2026. Gigpie starts from the other end of the same market, the [multi-teacher music school](/solutions/music-schools), where the unit that matters is the household: two kids, two instruments, one shared balance of prepaid hours. Each tool is clearly better for one of those situations, and this page draws the line between them without picking a side. ## Quick Comparison | Feature | Gigpie | [My Music Staff](https://www.mymusicstaff.com) | | --- | --- | --- | | Pricing model | Flat 2% of collections | $16.95/mo + $4.95/teacher | | Cost before you have revenue | Free until you collect revenue | 30-day trial, then paid | | Unlimited students | Yes | Yes | | Online payments | Stripe | Stripe + PayPal | | Installment plan builder | Yes | Not documented | | Google Calendar | Push + conflict check | Two-way sync | | Outlook / Microsoft calendar | Push + conflict check | Partial | | Virtual lesson links | Paste any URL | Zoom, Skype, FaceTime | | Parent/student portal with self-booking | Yes | Yes | | Student practice log | No | Yes | | Built-in website builder | No | Yes | | One hour balance shared across siblings | Yes | Not documented | | Multi-teacher payroll | Pay runs + processor export | Calculated from attendance | | CRM with campaigns and journeys | Yes | Not documented | | AI phone agent for inbound calls | Yes | Not documented | | Post-session feedback and review funnel | Yes | Partial | | Native mobile app | No | No | | Phone support | No | Yes | The My Music Staff column reflects mymusicstaff.com's own pricing, integrations, student-portal, multi-teacher, and contact pages as of August 2026. "Not documented" means their public materials don't confirm the detail either way, so those cells count for neither side. ## Pricing: Flat Fee vs. Flat Percentage ### My Music Staff One plan with everything in it: $16.95 per month for the first teacher, $4.95 per month for each additional teacher or staff member, unlimited students. There's a 30-day free trial with full access and no credit card required, plus a 90-day money-back guarantee on top (mymusicstaff.com/pricing, August 2026). It's a pricing model that's easy to respect: no tiers, no feature gates, no contracts. ### Gigpie A flat 2% of what you collect through the platform. No monthly fee, no per-teacher charge, and nothing at all until you collect revenue. Stripe's processing fees are separate, exactly as they are with My Music Staff's own Stripe integration. > **Break-even at three studio sizes.** A solo teacher collecting $2,500 a month pays My Music Staff $16.95 and Gigpie $50. A six-teacher academy collecting $18,000 pays My Music Staff $41.70 ($16.95 + 5 × $4.95) and Gigpie $360. A fourteen-teacher school collecting $50,000 pays My Music Staff $81.30 and Gigpie $1,000. On subscription price alone, Gigpie is cheaper only below roughly $850 a month in collections for a solo teacher, or about $2,085 for a six-teacher academy. Above that, My Music Staff wins the line item every time. We publish that math because pretending otherwise would waste your afternoon. If you're comparing lesson-scheduling software against lesson-scheduling software, My Music Staff costs less at any healthy revenue level. Gigpie's 2% is priced against a wider bill: the email marketing tool, the payroll spreadsheet, the inquiry calls that ring out during lessons, the review requests nobody remembers to send. If none of that is your problem, don't pay 2% to solve it. ## What My Music Staff Does Well My Music Staff gets several rows right here, all verified on its own pages as of August 2026. The calendar sync is genuinely two-way with Google Calendar and iCalendar: lessons land on a teacher's personal calendar, and personal events flow back so the schedule can't double-book them. The multi-teacher tooling runs deeper than the per-seat price tag suggests. Each teacher gets a login with its own permission level, availability is set per teacher by date range and location, the whole staff shares one central calendar, and payroll entries generate automatically from attendance. The student portal might be the best part. Students self-book lessons and trial lessons against a teacher's availability, cancellations turn into make-up lessons automatically, and a practice log lets a student clock practice time with a built-in timer, leave the teacher questions, and upload a recording of the week's piece. Families view balances, pay invoices online, store payment methods, and opt into Auto-Pay. Add a drag-and-drop website builder with booking widgets and free hosting, bulk email and SMS with a template creator and no extra SMS charge, and phone support Monday to Friday, and the solo-teacher value is hard to argue with. Gigpie concedes several of these rows outright. It has no website builder, no student practice log, and email support rather than a phone line. Its calendar integration pushes sessions to Google and Outlook calendars and checks for conflicts at booking time, but it doesn't watch for edits made directly in your external calendar the way a two-way sync does. ## Where Gigpie Goes Further ### One Family, One Balance Music schools deal in siblings. A parent whose daughter takes piano on Tuesdays and whose son starts guitar in September is one household with one budget, and most lesson software still bills them as two unrelated students. In Gigpie, a package belongs to the family: any student in the household draws from the same balance of hours, so a 20-hour package covers both kids, both instruments, both teachers, and the parent gets one number for how many lessons are left. Packages can also be sold on installment plans, with autopay and pay-by-bank built in. My Music Staff supports family accounts with multiple students and per-student billing entries, but its records are organized around each student-teacher relationship, and its public documentation doesn't say whether one prepaid package can be shared across siblings, so we won't claim it can't. ### From Payroll Math to a Finished Run My Music Staff genuinely calculates what teachers are owed, from attendance, using hourly rates, a percentage of revenue, or per-student rates. What it produces is a tracked number. Gigpie takes the same starting point through to a finished run: pay groups, pay schedules with cutoff rules, payroll runs that move from draft to approved to paid with rates snapshotted at run time, and CSV exports (summary, session data, and a Justworks timecard) your payroll processor can ingest directly. Gigpie doesn't transfer money into a teacher's bank account, and we found no evidence My Music Staff does either; the difference is how much spreadsheet work stands between the calendar and the file you hand your processor. ### A Review Pipeline That Runs Itself After every completed session, Gigpie sends the family a feedback request: a one-to-five star rating and a comment. The reputation report collects the responses and routes your five-star families (a settings dropdown can widen that to four) toward your Google, Trustpilot, or Thumbtack review pages. My Music Staff collects reviews too, through its portal, and the studio owner chooses which to publish. The difference is the trigger: Gigpie asks after every session automatically, so the pipeline keeps filling whether you remember it or not. ### The Front Office Gigpie also carries the acquisition tools a growing school usually improvises. Leads from your web forms and ads land in a pipeline board, a unified inbox threads email, SMS, and calls in one place, and campaigns run as one-off broadcasts or multi-step journey automations. An AI phone agent can answer inbound calls during teaching hours and leave you the recording and transcript, and a text from an unknown number becomes a lead on its own. None of this appears in My Music Staff's public materials as of August 2026, and in fairness, none of it is what My Music Staff is for. ## Verdict by Use Case ### Solo teacher, 30 students, teaching from home My Music Staff. The flat $16.95 covers scheduling, invoicing, the portal, and a website you don't have to build elsewhere, and the practice log is a teaching feature Gigpie simply doesn't have. A single teacher gets nothing back for the 2% that pays for family billing, payroll runs, and a CRM built for a staff, not a soloist. ### Academy with several teachers and sibling enrollments Gigpie. The moment two kids on two instruments share one prepaid balance, family-first billing stops being a nicety and becomes your bookkeeping. Add payroll runs across six teachers, an approval step, and the export your processor actually accepts, and the 2% starts buying back real admin hours every month. ### School that lives on new-student flow Split decision, and it depends on where the pain is. If your website and word of mouth keep the roster full, My Music Staff covers operations cheaply and well. If inquiries leak (calls missed mid-lesson, trial-lesson leads never followed up, reviews never requested), Gigpie's pipeline, journeys, AI phone agent, and feedback funnel are the reason it exists. ## Migrating From My Music Staff Getting out is documented on their side: My Music Staff exports student data to Excel from the Students page. What isn't publicly documented is scope, so before committing in either direction, ask their support exactly what comes out beyond student and contact records. On Gigpie's side, there is still no My Music Staff importer, and no general import tool for any outside platform yet. A My Music Staff migration means re-entering families, packages with remaining hours, and schedules by hand. Setting up each family, its package, and a coach assignment happens on one screen, which keeps the re-entry moving, though old invoices and lesson history stay behind and the time it takes scales with how many families you have. ## Frequently Asked Questions ## FAQ **Q:** Is My Music Staff cheaper than Gigpie? **A:** Usually, yes. My Music Staff costs $16.95 per month plus $4.95 per additional teacher as of August 2026, while Gigpie charges a flat 2% of collections. A six-teacher academy collecting $18,000 a month pays My Music Staff $41.70 and Gigpie $360. Gigpie wins on raw price only below roughly $850 to $2,085 in monthly collections, depending on team size. You choose Gigpie for what the 2% replaces, not for the price. **Q:** Is Gigpie a good fit for a solo music teacher? **A:** Usually not. My Music Staff's flat $16.95 covers scheduling, invoicing, a portal, a practice log, and a website builder for one teacher. Gigpie's family billing, payroll runs, and CRM start paying off once you run several teachers and bill by household. **Q:** Can siblings share one package of hours in Gigpie? **A:** Yes, by architecture. Every package in Gigpie belongs to the family, so any student in the household draws from the same hour balance with nothing to configure. My Music Staff supports family accounts with per-student billing entries, but its public documentation doesn't confirm whether one prepaid package's lessons can be shared across siblings. **Q:** Does My Music Staff have calendar sync? **A:** Yes, and it's strong: two-way sync with Google Calendar and iCalendar, so lessons appear on a teacher's personal calendar and personal events flow back to prevent double-booking. Gigpie pushes sessions to Google and Outlook calendars and checks for conflicts at booking time, but it doesn't monitor edits made directly in the external calendar. If two-way sync is your deciding feature, that row goes to My Music Staff. **Q:** Can I attach Zoom links to lessons on each platform? **A:** Yes on both, and on neither is it a calendar sync. My Music Staff stores a Zoom, Skype, or FaceTime link on a lesson and includes it in reminders. In Gigpie a coach can paste any meeting URL onto a session, and Google Meet or Teams links can be created automatically as part of the calendar event Gigpie pushes. **Q:** Does Gigpie have a website builder like My Music Staff? **A:** No. My Music Staff includes a drag-and-drop website builder with templates, booking widgets, and free hosting, a real saving for a teacher without a site. Gigpie assumes your school already has a web presence and focuses on the operations behind it. **Q:** Does Gigpie have a student practice log? **A:** No. My Music Staff's portal includes a practice log where students track practice time with a built-in timer, leave the teacher questions, and upload files. The closest Gigpie equivalents are the coach's progress note, which the family sees in full after each session, and the automatic post-session feedback request. If daily practice tracking is central to your teaching, that is a genuine My Music Staff advantage. **Q:** How do I migrate from My Music Staff to Gigpie? **A:** Plan on manual re-entry today. My Music Staff can export your student data to Excel, but Gigpie has no My Music Staff importer. You would re-create families, packages with remaining balances, and schedules by hand, and lesson history plus old invoices stay behind. **Q:** What free trial does each platform offer? **A:** My Music Staff offers a 30-day free trial with full access and no credit card required, plus a 90-day money-back guarantee, as of August 2026. Gigpie doesn't run a timed trial: it's free until you collect revenue, and after that the only charge is the flat 2% of what you collect. **Q:** How is payroll different between the two? **A:** My Music Staff calculates what each teacher is owed from attendance, using hourly rates, a percentage of revenue, or per-student rates. Gigpie adds the run itself: pay groups, pay schedules, payroll runs with a draft-approve-paid workflow, and CSV exports including a Justworks timecard for your payroll processor. Gigpie doesn't transfer money to teachers, and we found no evidence My Music Staff does either. **Q:** What does Gigpie include that My Music Staff doesn't? **A:** A CRM with lead capture from forms and ads, a pipeline board, a unified inbox for email, SMS, and calls, broadcast and multi-step journey campaigns, an AI phone agent for inbound calls, an installment plan builder with autopay, and a post-session feedback funnel that routes happy families to Google, Trustpilot, and Thumbtack. None of these appear in My Music Staff's public materials as of August 2026. **Q:** Does either platform have a native mobile app? **A:** No. Both are responsive web apps. My Music Staff's own guidance is to add the web app to your phone's home screen, and Gigpie works the same way in any mobile browser. **Q:** What support does each company offer? **A:** My Music Staff offers phone support in the US and Canada, the UK, and internationally, Monday to Friday 9am to 4:30pm ET, plus email and a help center, as of August 2026. Gigpie offers email support. My Music Staff has the edge here. **Q:** Can Gigpie handle group classes and different lesson lengths? **A:** Yes. Group sessions support open, invitation-only, and package-only enrollment with capacity limits and drop-in pricing, and lesson durations are configurable company-wide with per-coach overrides. A family with one child in a group theory class and another in private lessons is still billed as one household. **Free until your school collects revenue Family billing, payroll runs, and a CRM for a flat 2% of collections. If it doesn't replace more than it costs, keep My Music Staff.** [Get started free](/register) ## Related Resources - [Music School Solutions](/solutions/music-schools) - What running a multi-teacher music academy on Gigpie actually looks like, week by week. - [Family Management](/features/family-management) - The shared-balance architecture underneath this whole comparison, shown on real screens. - [My Music Staff Alternatives](/alternatives/mymusicstaff-alternatives) - Four more studio-management tools, for schools where a shared family balance isn't the deciding factor.