PowerCoach vs. TrueCoach: an honest comparison

Let’s be upfront: this is the PowerCoach blog, so we’re hardly a neutral referee. But TrueCoach is the tool most coaches compare us to, and the worst thing we could do is misrepresent it — a comparison that overreaches is the easiest one to ignore. So everything below about TrueCoach is sourced from their own pages and public records — or checked first-hand in the app — every difference is one we’d happily defend to your face, and where we couldn’t verify something, we say so.

TrueCoach is a capable, well-established platform. If you want a generalist personal-training tool with built-in nutrition and payments, it’s a reasonable pick. Here’s where we differ.

At a glance

Now the detail, section by section.

No more tracking results in a spreadsheet

If you coach more than a handful of athletes, you know the hidden tax: every week, results get copied out of the app into a spreadsheet so you can actually see them — last block’s numbers re-typed next to this week’s, the same charts rebuilt by hand, a tab per athlete. It quietly eats hours. Deleting that chore is one of the biggest reasons PowerCoach exists, and it comes down to one thing — your training log is structured data from the moment it’s entered.

In TrueCoach, the log is text on both sides. The workout you write is an open text field — the exercise description “is an open text field and will display to your client exactly how it’s entered here”, as their docs put it — and what a client logs back is text (or a photo/video) attached to each exercise, not per-set fields. That’s fine for a quick note, but “5×5 @ 100kg, last set tough” isn’t something the software can sum, chart or compare on its own. So where do TrueCoach’s graphs come from? A separate Metrics feature — a tracker kept alongside the log. You can link a metric to an exercise, but even then the chart doesn’t read the result your client logged: the client gets a prompt to type the number in again, and a result entered by the coach won’t update the metric at all — “the metric must be updated by the client.” The charts aren’t drawn from your session-by-session logging; they’re numbers re-entered into a tracker on the side. Which is exactly how coaches end up back in a spreadsheet.

PowerCoach treats the training log itself as data. Sets, reps, load and RPE go into structured fields, so your analytics, per-exercise history and PRs are drawn straight from what you programmed and logged — no second tracker, no re-typing, no Excel. The hours you’d have spent shuffling numbers between places, you simply keep. And when you do want the data out, the full history exports as Excel or a SQLite database — structured and queryable — where TrueCoach exports a client’s workouts as a plain .txt file and the client list as a 15-field CSV (and clients can’t export at all). Structured data in, structured data out.

Why this matters more than it sounds

A text box is fine for a one-line note. But the format you log in quietly decides what you can ever do with your training history:

• Logging is faster and cleaner. Tapping numbers into fields — with last session’s load already in front of you — beats retyping “5×5 @ 100kg” every time. And every athlete’s data lands in the same shape, instead of a dozen personal shorthands the software (and the next coach) can’t read.
• Progress shows itself. When sets, reps and load are data, your charts and per-exercise history are simply there, drawn from what you logged — no second tracker to keep in sync. A stall, an RPE creeping up week over week, a rep target quietly being missed — that’s the kind of thing structured data can surface for you instead of you re-reading every note.
• You can ask questions of it. Total tonnage this block, every session a lift went above RPE 9, prescribed sets versus the sets actually completed — those are a quick query away when the data is structured, and effectively impossible against a wall of free text.
• It scales, and it lasts. Reading every athlete’s text log by hand doesn’t scale past a handful of clients. And years from now, your athletes’ history is still a real dataset you can export, analyse, or take elsewhere — not a .txt dump nobody can parse.

None of this is exotic. It’s just the difference between a logbook you read and a database you can actually use — and once a few years of training have gone in, that difference compounds.

Functionality

TrueCoach is a broad, generalist PT platform. It gives coaches a free-form workout and program builder with full control over sets, reps, tempo and rest, reusable programs you can assign to many clients, a library of 3,000+ exercise demo videos (plus your own uploads), and in-app messaging with media and group chats. Around that sit habit and nutrition tracking (macros, weight, sleep, steps, energy, hunger, stress) with a MyFitnessPal sync, wearable integrations (Garmin, OURA, Apple Health, WHOOP and more), Stripe-based client billing, and a newer AI program builder that drafts a program from a client’s goals.

PowerCoach is narrower on purpose. We’re built around strength sport — powerlifting, weightlifting, bodybuilding and general strength — rather than as a one-size-fits-all PT suite. So we’ll be honest: if nutrition macros, wearable syncing or built-in client payments are core to your business today, TrueCoach covers ground we currently don’t. But narrow doesn’t mean barbell-only, and what we focus on we try to do better:

• Programming built for the barbell — sets, reps, RPE, and a feed of completed sessions with every set, note and video to review, acknowledge and comment on.
• Every sport your athlete trains, not just the lifts. Strength is the core, but a session can be logged as cardio, climbing and bouldering, isometrics, plyometrics or mobility — each with the fields that actually fit it, like duration and distance for cardio or grades for a boulder problem. And athletes can log unscheduled workouts too, so what they do outside your programming still shows up — giving you their whole training load for smarter load management, and a transparency the prescribed plan alone can’t offer.
• Truly native apps for Android and iOS, plus a full-featured web app — the same data synced everywhere.
• Every feature included — no tiers, nothing locked behind an upgrade (more on pricing below).
• Offline-first. Logging a set never waits on a signal — everything’s stored locally and synced in the background, so a dead spot in the gym never costs you a workout. (TrueCoach documents no offline mode; its own advice for a spotty signal is to save the workout as a PDF and print it.)

Messaging

Coaching is a running conversation, so the chat matters more than it looks. Give TrueCoach credit here: it has real-time, back-and-forth messaging with media, and it’s still being improved — voice notes arrived in February 2026, and push notifications are there too.

But two things hold it back day to day. First, your communication is split in two: a direct-message inbox on one side and comments attached to individual workouts on the other — two places to look, and neither is the whole conversation (there’s even a separate companion app, TrueCoach Connect, for coaches to keep up with both). Second, the everyday niceties your athletes are used to everywhere else — reactions, threaded replies, read receipts — simply aren’t there (we checked the app; their docs don’t mention them either), and a message can’t point to a specific workout, exercise or set.

PowerCoach folds all of that into one modern conversation. Threaded replies, reactions, read state and instant push notifications, the way WhatsApp or Telegram already work — no lag, no clunky refresh. And because the chat lives inside the platform, you can drop a reference to a specific workout, exercise or set straight into the thread, so feedback always carries its context. It even keeps working offline, delivering the moment a signal comes back.

Pricing

This is the starkest difference.

TrueCoach charges per active client, in brackets: a Starter tier for up to 5 clients, Standard for up to 20, and Pro for up to 50, billed monthly or annually, with a 14-day free trial that needs no credit card. At the time of writing those tiers list at roughly $30, $70 and $165 per month (USD) billed monthly; committing to a year brings them down to about $26, $58 and $137 — check their pricing page for current numbers (it shows the annual-billing prices by default). Because it’s bracketed, a coach with 6 clients pays the same as one with 20. And if you use TrueCoach’s built-in payments to bill your clients, each transaction carries a flat 5% fee (processed via Stripe) — though that feature is only available to coaches based in the US, UK, Australia and Canada, so EU coaches can’t use it at all.

PowerCoach is a flat €2.50 per athlete, per month — and right now, during early access, it’s free. No Plus/Premium/Titanium tiers, no features locked behind an upgrade, and you pay for the exact number of athletes you coach rather than jumping a price bracket every time you grow. The subscription is meant to cover what it costs to run — hosting, backups, keeping it fast — not to be maximised. We also don’t sit in the middle of your billing or skim a percentage of your income; if you use PowerCoach’s payment tools they simply track who’s paid and issue clean, numbered PDF receipts.

A worked example. Coach 25 athletes and PowerCoach is €62.50/month (25 × €2.50) — every feature included. On TrueCoach, 25 clients is one past the 20-client Standard plan, so you’re bumped up to the Pro tier (up to 50 clients) at roughly $165/month billed monthly, or about $137 on an annual commitment — either way, paying for 50 seats to coach 25. The brackets pinch at the small end too: a coach with just 6 athletes pays €15 here, but lands on the ~$70 Standard tier there. And the per-athlete gap only widens as your roster grows.

Support

TrueCoach is the larger operation and leans on an extensive self-serve Help Center. We didn’t find enough verifiable, current data on their live support channels or review scores to quote any, so we won’t put words in their mouth.

What we can speak to is our side. Reach us by email, book a call, or meet in person, and your feature request or bug report reaches the people writing the code directly — no support tiers to escalate through. If something’s broken or missing, you’re talking to someone who can actually fix it, and often will. Staying close to the coaches who use PowerCoach is the entire point.

Where it’s built, and who owns it

TrueCoach is a US company — TrueCoach, Inc. It was acquired in 2020 by Transaction Services Group, one of the two payments businesses whose private-equity-backed (Advent International) merger formed Xplor Technologies in 2021 — a global software-and-payments group headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. The product is now marketed as “TrueCoach by Xplor.”

PowerCoach is built and operated independently in Finland (kuchta.dev) — not a division of a payments conglomerate answering to a boardroom’s quarterly targets. For a lot of coaches that’s a footnote; for some, who owns the company holding their athletes’ data matters.

Your data

Let’s be careful and fair here: we found no evidence of any TrueCoach data breach or misuse of customer data, and we’re not going to imply otherwise. Their billing runs through Stripe, a PCI Level 1 processor. This isn’t about anyone being careless.

It’s about jurisdiction and design. TrueCoach operates under US ownership, which means your athletes’ training and (in TrueCoach’s case) health and nutrition data ultimately sits with a large US payments company under US law; its parent’s privacy notice spells out that data from the EU and UK can be transferred to other countries, including the USA, relying on “a variety of legal mechanisms, including contracts where appropriate.” PowerCoach is the opposite by design:

• Hosted in Finland, under EU GDPR — among the strictest data-protection regimes in the world.
• No lock-in. Your full history exports to Excel or SQLite whenever you want (as covered above) — we’d rather earn your stay than trap it.

We’d encourage you to read any provider’s privacy policy and terms before you commit — including ours.

The bottom line

TrueCoach is a mature generalist with breadth we don’t match in nutrition, wearables and payments. PowerCoach is the focused, EU-based alternative for strength coaches who want their training log to be the data — not a spreadsheet to keep alive — with every feature included, predictable per-athlete pricing, a chat that feels like this decade, and their data kept close.

And switching is easy: you can import your TrueCoach clients and their full training history in a few clicks — every workout, set and PR comes along. See the pricing or book a demo and we’ll get your roster up and running.

Sources: TrueCoach features, program builder, workout builder basics, exercise video library, product updates, Metrics, linking metrics to workouts, habit & nutrition tracking, AI workout builder, voice notes announcement, pricing, processing fees, exporting workouts, client exporting, exporting clients and about pages; the TSG/Clearent–Xplor merger announcement and the Xplor privacy notice. Prices are USD list figures at the time of writing (monthly billing unless noted) and may change.