Remind 101 vs GoReminders – Remind for Business 

Keep everyone in the loop with the right scheduled text message software.

If you work in education or have children in school, then chances are that you have heard of the Remind app. You might even be using it to correspond with your children’s teachers yourself.

Previously known as Remind 101, Remind is a well-known platform for helping schools and teachers connect with parents and students. However, its popularity doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best communication option for users in the education industry.

In the same vein, Remind might not be the optimal choice for sending appointment reminders if you are thinking of using it for your hair salon, fitness or other service business.

As you’ll see in this guide, the main selling point of Remind is its messaging service. However, this is something that our GoReminders platform also offers—but with significantly more functions, and other powerful features to meet the needs of users in all industries.

Regardless of your trade, you’ll find GoReminders is a strong option for your appointment-booking and scheduled text message needs. Here’s why.

Get a Bird’s Eye View of Your Appointments

Remembering one appointment is probably easy enough to do. If you have multiple appointments, however, keeping all of them in your head can be quite the challenge. You might just find yourself mixing up your event dates and times, preparing inadequately for your appointment, or even showing up at the wrong location altogether.

The risk of these scenarios occurring is a cause for concern and should be avoided, no matter whether you are an educator or service business owner in another industry.

Instead of mentally visualizing your schedule, invest in an appointment scheduling software that lays out your appointments in an appealing calendar interface.

The GoReminders platform provides an easy-to-use appointment form for creating new appointments, which then show up in a built-in appointment calendar. You’ll be able to view your appointments by the day, week or even month, and stay on top of your responsibilities.

We also integrate with popular third-party calendar platforms, such as Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar, so you can view your appointments in the calendar app of your choice.

However, this essential calendar feature, which users in any industry will likely need, isn’t available in Remind. As a result, you’ll have to record your appointments on a separate platform, potentially complicating your workflow.

Mass-Messaging Made Convenient—for Both You and Your Recipients

Effortlessly send a text message blast or email blast to all of your recipients at once using GoReminders.

Want to mass-inform students of new assignments, or announce promotions to all your customers at once? With GoReminders’ Message Blasts feature, you can. Compose your message once, then send it to all selected recipients via a text message blast or email blast. The whole process will take only a few clicks.

For a personalized touch, you’ll also be able to customize Message Blasts using “template tags.” These are placeholders that dynamically insert your recipients’ information into your messages. Use Template Tags to address your recipients by name, or even send them video conferencing links for online classes.

Remind offers a similar mass-messaging feature. However, it is rather inconvenient: recipients will have to create a Remind account to start getting your messages.

When you use GoReminders, your recipients won’t have to sign up for anything before being able to receive Message Blasts. We believe that you shouldn’t have to make people—especially people who will be paying you for services—jump through extra hoops just so you can message them. After all, you will have no way of contacting them if they don’t.

Powerful, Fully Automated Reminders

A key part of getting people to show up (or meet school deadlines) is sending them reminders. In GoReminders, you can set up a maximum of three automated text reminders and/or email reminders for upcoming appointments and events.

Schedule these reminders to be sent as early as 30 days in advance, or as soon as one hour before the event. You’ll also get full access to our handy template tags for customizing your reminders. With GoReminders, our users in various industries have cut no-show rates to as low as one to two per year.

However, Remind’s scheduling feature is less sophisticated. For one, you won’t be able to personalize your reminders. More crucially, however, is that your messages have to be individually scheduled on an ad hoc basis.

As a result, you can’t implement an automated reminder schedule once and run it for all subsequent events. Instead, you’ll have to manually schedule your messages every time you need to send them (in other words: all the time). This is simply not a workable solution for service businesses, which rely on appointment reminders to ensure that customers turn up.

Do More With GoReminders Using Zapier

With our Zapier integration, you’ll be able to get GoReminders to work seamlessly with all the other apps that you use—be these Google Drive, Outlook, Quickbooks Online or any other of the 3,000+ apps that Zapier supports.

Simply create your workflows in Zapier’s beginner-friendly interface, then connect your GoReminders account to it. You’ll be ready to automate your busywork in no time.

As an example, you can set up workflows to add new GoReminders appointments to Google Sheets, or to the Mailchimp email platform. If you find yourself needing a custom solution, we include API integration in our Premium plan at no extra charge.

In contrast, Remind isn’t available on Zapier. As a result, if you’re looking for Remind integrations, you’ll be limited to only the handful of apps that the platform has direct integrations with. These integrations are largely education-focused, such as Google Classroom or Schoology, and may not be so helpful if you operate in a different industry.

Sophisticated Features at Affordable Prices

GoReminders offers affordable pricing plans for users in all industries.

We know that pricing is a major factor in choosing the right scheduled text message app, so we’ve transparently listed our affordable prices on our website. For convenience, however, here’s a rundown of what you can expect.

Our GoReminders plans start at $25 per month. At this budget-friendly price, you unlock access to:

• A dedicated calendar
• Message Blasts
• Client reminder scheduling, and other essential features for getting others to turn up for appointments.

For users with more sophisticated needs, we offer advanced plans with features such as client self-scheduling, removal of the GoReminders branding and Zapier and API integration.

To take a test-drive of our features, sign up for a 14-day free trial.

Remind provides a free plan known as Remind Chat. While it sounds attractive to get things for free, you’ll have to contend with more basic features—including having to manually schedule your messages, for one.

This is not to mention that you’ll also be missing out on a lot of the features discussed above, such as appointment calendars and template tags.

If you decide to opt for the paid Remind Hub plan, then you’ll have to submit a request for a custom quote. That’s because the Remind website doesn’t state the prices for Remind Hub.

From what we’ve heard, though, Remind Hub can be very expensive. Schools have been quoted as high as between $4,000 to $15,000 for a single year’s subscription!

Compare this with the low prices of our GoReminders plans, and it’s easy to see that our scheduled text message solution is the more affordable solution for all industries.

Remind vs GoReminders: The Verdict

Looking at Remind, it’s clear that it’s an app designed solely for classroom communications. It helps users:

• Mass-message others (such as teachers informing their classes of assignment deadlines), or
• Message others individually (such as a teacher asking a parent about their child’s attendance), on an ad hoc basis.

However, the limited functionality of Remind’s messaging service quickly becomes apparent when you have more pressing matters on your plate, and don’t have time to manually type and send your messages.

The solution is to invest in a more convenient, automated solution for managing your appointments and scheduling messages. GoReminders is built to provide users in all industries—and not just education—with advanced messaging and reminder features, appointment calendars and more, at an affordable price. All these make it the right solution for you, regardless of your industry or business size.

Sign up for a 14-day free trial of GoReminders here (credit card not required).