My Music Staff is the most widely recommended software for private music teachers, and for a solo instructor with a diary full of one-to-one lessons it is hard to beat at $16.95 a month.
The problem starts when a studio becomes a school.
My Music Staff charges $16.95 for the first account and $4.95 for each additional teacher or staff member. That is a fair deal for a teacher working alone. It is a different proposition for a music school, because music schools are unusually teacher-dense. A language school might run 200 students across six teachers. A music school running the same 200 students needs fifteen or twenty instructors, because piano lessons happen one child at a time. Per-seat pricing lands harder on music than on almost any other kind of teaching business.
Quick takeaway: For a solo teacher, My Music Staff is still the right answer. Past a dozen people on the timetable, flat pricing wins: Teach 'n Go charges the same €69 a month whether you have three teachers or twenty. Jackrabbit Music has the most developed class waitlist, and only Teach 'n Go and Classter have apps on both the App Store and Google Play.
What per-teacher pricing costs a music school
| Teaching and admin staff | My Music Staff monthly cost |
|---|---|
| 1 | $16.95 |
| 5 | $36.75 |
| 10 | $61.50 |
| 15 | $86.25 |
| 20 | $111.00 |
| 30 | $160.50 |
Add a part-time Saturday teacher and the bill goes up. Add an office administrator and it goes up again.
If you have outgrown that model, or you need something My Music Staff does not do, here are seven alternatives worth looking at, with what each one is actually good at and where it falls short.
Quick comparison
| Platform | Pricing model | Extra cost per teacher | Native app on both stores | Group classes with capacity limits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| My Music Staff | $16.95/mo | $4.95 each | No | Group lessons supported, capacity limits not documented |
| Teach 'n Go | €69/mo flat, up to 100 live students | None, unlimited teachers | Yes | Yes |
| Jackrabbit Music | From $49/mo, banded by student count | None | Only as a paid branded app | Yes |
| Opus1.io | From $98/mo, banded by active students | None | No | Yes |
| Teachworks | From $16.49/mo plus a fee per student lesson | None | No | Yes |
| DreamClass | From $99/mo billed annually ($149 monthly), banded by student count | None | No | Yes |
| TutorBird | $16.95/mo | $4.95 each | No | Group lessons supported, capacity limits not documented |
Prices checked in September 2026. One caveat worth knowing: My Music Staff and TutorBird print a dollar sign but no currency code anywhere on their pricing pages, and Port 443 Inc. is a Canadian company. If those figures are Canadian dollars they are roughly a quarter lower in US terms than they look. Ask them before you budget on these numbers. Teachworks states explicitly that it bills in US dollars. Teach 'n Go bills in euro.
1. Teach 'n Go
Best for music schools with a lot of teachers and not many admin staff.
Teach 'n Go charges €69 a month for up to 100 live students, and teachers are unlimited. A school with twenty instructors pays the same as a school with three. For a music school that is usually the single biggest difference in running cost, because teacher headcount is the number that keeps growing.
It handles group classes and one-to-one lessons in the same calendar, which matters once you start running theory groups, ensembles or exam preparation alongside individual instrument lessons. There are apps for parents on both the Apple App Store and Google Play. See the music school software page for detail.
Where it falls short. At €69 it is not the cheapest option for a solo teacher, and if you are running a studio on your own you will almost certainly be better off with My Music Staff. Teach 'n Go starts making sense somewhere around the point where you have a dozen or more people on the timetable. The base plan includes three admin users, so a school with a large front-office team should check that limit before committing.
2. Jackrabbit Music
Best for schools that need a real class waitlist.
Jackrabbit came out of dance and gymnastics, where classes fill up and parents queue, and that heritage shows. It has the most complete waitlist we found in this market. Jackrabbit's documentation describes enabling or disabling the waitlist per class and adjusting its size from the class record, ordering the queue by enrolment status, skill level or date added, and receiving an alert on the dashboard when a class has an opening. Staff still decide who gets offered the place, so it is not automatic promotion, but it is a genuine waitlist rather than a note in a spreadsheet.
Pricing is banded by student count starting at $49 a month, the cheapest entry point of the platforms here that charge by student band rather than per seat or per lesson.
Where it falls short. Two things to check carefully. First, Jackrabbit bills on active and inactive students, meaning dormant records in your database count towards your tier. Music schools accumulate those quickly, so it is worth an audit before you sign. Jackrabbit's own answer is that you archive inactive families into its Lead File, which is unlimited and does not count towards your tier, so this is a housekeeping discipline rather than an unavoidable cost. Second, the mobile app is not included. Jackrabbit Plus starts at $93 a month and carries a one-time setup fee of $169 plus app store fees, and the resulting app is published under your school's name rather than Jackrabbit's.
Worth remembering too that the platform grew up serving dance and gymnastics, where the class is the unit. If your school is mostly ongoing one-to-one instrument lessons, test that side of the scheduling carefully.
3. Opus1.io
Best for schools that want music and dance under one roof.
Opus1 is built specifically for music and performing arts schools, and it shows in the class handling: enrolment caps, real-time remaining-slot display when families book themselves in, bulk enrolment across multiple students and dates, and subscription holds that automatically reopen a slot. If group programmes are becoming a bigger part of your business, this is a serious option.
Where it falls short. It is the most expensive starting point on this list at $98 a month, and there is no self-serve trial. The page labelled free trial is a demo booking form, so you will be talking to a salesperson before you see the product. There is no app on either store: their own help documentation tells iPhone users to add a home screen shortcut and Android users to install a third-party URL-to-app converter.
Their marketing lists "smart waitlists and auto-fill", but the only waitlist documentation we could find covers appointment waitlists, and describes email notifications containing a self-booking link, which means whoever clicks first gets the place. Whether that extends to group classes is not documented. Worth asking directly if waitlists matter to you.
4. Teachworks
Best for schools already running mostly one-to-one lessons who want deep customisation.
Teachworks is one of the most configurable platforms in this space and has an unusually wide set of integrations. If your school has awkward billing rules or wants to automate around the edges, it will bend further than most.
Where it falls short. The pricing model is the thing to understand before anything else. Teachworks charges a subscription plus a fee for every student lesson, which is per student lesson pricing. Their pricing page is explicit: a lesson with one student is one student lesson, a lesson with two students is two student lessons. On the $16.49 Starter plan that fee is $0.320 per student lesson.
A music school running a weekly theory group of eight students therefore generates eight student lessons for one hour of one teacher's time: $2.56 before Teachworks' group discount, which applies when your classes average more than three students, and about $1.76 after it. The same hour taught one to one costs $0.32. So the fee follows the number of students in the room rather than the teacher's time, and putting children into groups reduces your Teachworks bill by less than a third, which is backwards for a school running ensembles or group theory alongside instrument lessons. Run your own numbers on a typical month before you commit, because the subscription figure on the pricing page is not what you will pay. Our school software cost calculator does this for you.
5. DreamClass
Best for schools that want simple banded pricing and nothing complicated.
DreamClass starts at $99 a month on an annual plan for up to 100 students, rising by band. Teachers are included. It is straightforward, the interface is clean, and there is no per-seat arithmetic to do.
Where it falls short. It is a general school platform rather than a music-specific one, so there is nothing built around instruments, practice logs or recitals. The parent experience is a mobile web portal rather than a store-installed app, and on iPhone it can only be added to the home screen from Safari.
6. Classter
Best for larger or multi-site schools with formal reporting requirements.
Classter is the most institutional option here. It is priced per student per year, it handles multiple campuses properly, and alongside Teach 'n Go it is one of the few platforms in this comparison with genuine apps on both stores.
Where it falls short. There is no published entry price, so you are in a quote process from the first conversation. It is also considerably more system than a twelve-teacher music school needs, and the setup effort reflects that.
7. TutorBird, with one important caveat
TutorBird appears on most lists of My Music Staff alternatives, so it is worth being straight about what it is.
TutorBird and My Music Staff are sister products from the same company, Port 443 Inc. Both sites carry the same copyright line, both cost $16.95 a month plus $4.95 per additional staff member, and TutorBird's own pricing page points music teachers towards My Music Staff. The feature sets are not identical, and Port 443 presents them as separate products for separate markets, with My Music Staff carrying the music-specific pieces.
What matters for this list is that the commercial model is the same one. If you are leaving My Music Staff because of the per-seat pricing or the missing store app, TutorBird is priced the same way and has no store app either, so it solves neither problem. We cover the wider field in TutorBird alternatives.
What My Music Staff still does better than most
It would be dishonest to write this without saying so. My Music Staff holds a 4.8 rating across 767 reviews on Capterra, matched on score only by DreamClass and across roughly ten times the review volume of anything else on this list. For a solo teacher or a two-person studio, the combination of price, simplicity and support is hard to beat, and switching away from it for the sake of switching would be a mistake.
The recurring complaints in those same reviews are consistent and worth weighing: there is no app on either store, and reporting is thin and awkward to extract. There is no public developer API either, so bespoke integrations are out, though an official Zapier integration covers most of the common automation cases.
How to choose
Three questions settle most of these decisions.
How many people are on your timetable? Under about ten, per-seat pricing is cheap and My Music Staff or TutorBird will be the lowest cost by a wide margin. Past a dozen, flat pricing changes the maths, and it keeps changing every time you hire.
Do parents need an app? Only Teach 'n Go and Classter have apps published on both stores. Jackrabbit can give you one, branded as your school, for a setup fee and a higher tier. Everyone else offers a mobile website, which works, but does not sit on a parent's home screen and cannot send a push notification about tomorrow's lesson.
Do your classes fill up? If you regularly turn students away from a full group, Jackrabbit's waitlist is the most developed in this market and may be worth the tier arithmetic on its own. If your school is mostly one-to-one, it is irrelevant and you should ignore it.
Frequently asked questions
Is My Music Staff the same as TutorBird?
No, but they are close relatives. Both are Port 443 Inc. products, both are priced at $16.95 a month plus $4.95 per additional staff member, and TutorBird's website directs music teachers to My Music Staff. If you are leaving My Music Staff over per-seat pricing or the missing store app, TutorBird is priced the same way and has no store app either.
Does My Music Staff have a mobile app?
There is no My Music Staff app on the Apple App Store or Google Play. The platform works in a mobile browser, and some reviewers refer to that as the app, but nothing installs from either store.
Which of these has a proper class waitlist?
Jackrabbit Music has the most complete one. Its documentation describes per-class waitlists with priority ordering and dashboard alerts when a place opens, though promotion is a staff decision rather than automatic. Opus1 advertises waitlists, but the documentation we could find covers appointment waitlists and describes notification emails containing a self-booking link, so the place goes to whoever responds first. Ask them directly about group classes.
How much does My Music Staff cost for a school with fifteen teachers?
$16.95 for the first account plus $4.95 for each of the other fourteen, so $86.25 a month at current prices. There is no cap on staff numbers, and no volume discount that we could find.
What should I check before migrating?
Ask any vendor two questions in writing: can you import students from a spreadsheet, and can you export all your data if you leave. Then ask how the platform handles a group class with a capacity limit, because that is where music school software most often turns out to be thinner than the marketing suggests.
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