What Yoga Studio by Gaiam does well
Yoga Studio has been a top-rated consumer yoga app for years, and the fundamentals are strong. The ready-made classes are professionally filmed and cover a wide range of levels, lengths, and focuses, so a student can open the app and practice immediately. The interface is polished and calm, the pose library inside the builder is illustrated clearly, and the "create your own class" feature is genuinely nice for assembling a personal practice you can then follow with guidance.
For a home practitioner who wants both a class catalog and a bit of build-your-own flexibility in one app, it is an easy recommendation. Everything lives in one place and just works.
Where Yoga Studio falls short for teachers
The builder is designed so you can follow the class inside the app — not so you can teach it to a room. There is no print-friendly PDF handout to give a sub, no public web link you can text to students, and no desktop authoring experience for planning at a laptop. The pose set, while clear, is smaller and more practice-oriented than a teaching reference, and it does not carry the alignment cues and contraindications a teacher relies on when planning for a mixed-ability class.
It is also a closed consumer app: your custom classes live inside your account for your own follow-along use, not as portable teaching assets you can export, organize, and hand off. Again — not a flaw for its audience, but a real limit if you teach.
How FLOW compares
FLOW is built for the teaching workflow Yoga Studio's builder is not aimed at. In the [builder](/builder) you drag poses from a 420+ [pose library](/poses) into an ordered flow, set duration, side, breath count, and notes per pose, then export a clean PDF or share a public link. Every pose page carries imagery, alignment cues, benefits, and contraindications, so the class you plan is ready to teach and safe to hand to a sub.
[Pricing](/pricing) is transparent — $7.99/mo or $59.99/yr after a 7-day trial — with a free 5-pose preview builder. Pro adds unlimited saved flows, PDF export, shareable links, and AI suggestions. What FLOW does not include is a catalog of pre-filmed guided classes to practice along to — for that, Yoga Studio is the better buy.
Who should pick each
**Pick Yoga Studio by Gaiam if:** you want a polished library of guided classes to follow, plus a simple in-app builder for your own home practice, all in one consumer app.
**Pick FLOW if:** you teach and need to author sequences, print handouts, share class links, use AI suggestions, and keep an organized library of the classes you lead.
**Consider both if:** you teach and also want a follow-along practice catalog — Yoga Studio for practicing, FLOW for planning what you teach.
Honest closer: the dividing line is whether your class needs to leave the app. If it stays on your own screen as a follow-along, Yoga Studio is enough. If it becomes a handout, a link, or a class you lead live, that is FLOW's job.
