Smash Your Tutoring vs TutorCruncher: an honest comparison

TutorCruncher is the elephant in the UK tutoring-agency software room. It's been around since 2014, it's comprehensive, and if you ask any established UK agency what they use you'll hear its name half the time. So if you're sizing up a switch to Smash Your Tutoring (or deciding which to start with), an honest comparison is fair.

I've run an agency on both. This is what I'd tell a friend before they signed up to either.

What TutorCruncher does well

• Coverage. It has nearly every feature a tutoring agency could ever want — multi-agency hierarchies, client credit balances, branch managers, complex commission structures. If you have an established agency with non-standard workflows, the flexibility is genuine.
• Reporting. Their reporting + accounting export options are mature. If your bookkeeper wants a particular CSV layout, TutorCruncher probably already produces it.
• The support team know tutoring. Their CS team isn't outsourced; they actually understand the domain. If you're on an enterprise plan you get someone real.
• Integrations. Xero, Mailchimp, Zapier, Stripe — all in place and battle-tested.

Where TutorCruncher is the wrong fit

• The interface. It's dense. Every screen has ten things on it because every agency for ten years has asked for a slightly different feature. The learning curve for a new admin is real — not insurmountable, but you'll burn a week getting comfortable.
• The pricing model. Cost scales with tutors and students; there's a per-tutor monthly fee and a transaction percentage on top. At 30+ active tutors this adds up. The quote-driven enterprise tier is exactly the kind of opacity you want to avoid when you're forecasting next year's margins.
• It's not designed around your day. It's designed around every agency's day. Which means everything's configurable, and nothing's defaulted to the obvious. We spent the first month turning fields off.
• Mobile is an afterthought. Improved recently but tutors using it on a phone still feel it.

What Smash Your Tutoring does well

• Opinionated defaults. We made the decisions an agency owner would make. Advance-pay billing is the default; you can switch to weekly or end-of-month, but you don't have to. Trial pricing is one click. Settings that don't apply to your agency aren't shown.
• Stripe-first invoicing. Connect a Stripe account, and parents pay through Stripe Checkout directly. Money lands in your account, the platform takes a slim margin, and your tutor payouts run automatically.
• Group lessons that just work. Capacity tracking, trial-to-permanent conversion follow-ups, waitlist offers, drop-in attendance for one-off sessions. Build a group, parents book a spot, you're paid.
• Multi-channel notifications. Email, WhatsApp, in-app — out of the box, with sane defaults you don't have to wire yourself.
• Transparent flat pricing. No per-tutor surprise, no per-student fee, no quote-only enterprise plan. What you see on the pricing page is what your invoice says.
• The team uses it. The agency I run is on the platform. When something is annoying in our day-to-day, it gets fixed inside a week.

Where Smash Your Tutoring is the wrong fit

I'll be straight with you. We're a younger product. If your agency depends on any of the below, TutorCruncher is the sensible choice today and you should pick it:

• You run a multi-branch operation with separate P&L per branch, internal commission splits between branches, and a head-office consolidation view.
• You depend on a Mailchimp-integrated marketing automation that fires off agency-branded sequences segmented by parent attributes.
• You're running 1,000+ active students and need enterprise-tier SLA guarantees from your provider.

For most UK agencies between 5 and 200 active students, we cover what you need + remove the configuration overhead.

Pricing, in plain numbers

TutorCruncher: published tiers start around £79/month for the Solo tier, scaling per-active-tutor on the Agency tier. Plus a small transaction fee on payments. Enterprise is quote-only.

Smash Your Tutoring: see the pricing page. Flat tiers. No per-tutor surprise. No transaction fee on top of Stripe's own.

Migration

If you're moving from TutorCruncher, your tutor list, parent list and active series can be CSV-imported. Historical invoices come with you as PDF archives, current outstanding invoices we'll re-create through Stripe at the new platform rather than mid-flight, so payment routing stays clean.

Get in touch via the contact form and a real person (me, sometimes Paul) will work through it with you.

Verdict

TutorCruncher is the safe choice for an established agency with intricate operational requirements and an existing team comfortable with complex software.

Smash Your Tutoring is the fast choice for an agency that wants the admin invisible from day one and doesn't want to spend the first month configuring screens. We're the platform we wished existed when we were running our own agency on a stack of five different tools.

Try the 14-day free trial and decide for yourself.