Compared with Tap Leagues
Tap Leagues is free and there is more in it than there is in Clayside. The difference is what your members have to do: a Tap Leagues player makes an account, a Clayside player taps a link.
No card, no password · One box is free for good
In one paragraph
Tap Leagues runs box leagues, challenge ladders and knockout tournaments across thirteen sports, on the web and in apps for iOS and Android, and its own site says it is free for players and clubs with no card required.
Clayside runs box leagues and one rated club ladder across five racket sports, has no app and no tournaments, and charges from £75 a year. What it does instead is ask your players for nothing: no account, no email address, no password.
Checked on . Where every fact here came from.
Both of them, fairly
League, ladder and tournament management for clubs, free to players and clubs, with native apps for iOS and Android that their site says do everything the web does.
Thirteen sports, including tennis, padel, squash, badminton, pickleball, table tennis, bowls, darts, pool and snooker. A player makes one account and carries it, with their match history, across every club they play at.
Box leagues and one all-year rated club ladder for five racket sports, on a web address of your club's own. It is a web page that installs to a home screen, not an app in a store.
A player is a name in a box. There is no account, because there is nothing to hold: no email, no phone number, no password, no date of birth.
Row by row
| What | Clayside | Tap Leagues |
|---|---|---|
| What it costs the club | Free for one box of 12. Paid plans from £75 a year | Free for players and clubs, no card required [1] |
| What a player needs | A link. No account, no password, nothing to install | An account: an email address and a password, or a Google or Apple sign-in [2] |
| How a player joins | You add them to a box, and they tap their name | An invite link to join the club, with optional approval by an admin [1] |
| Apps | No. It is a web page that installs to the home screen | Yes, iOS and Android, with the same features as the web [1] |
| Box leagues | Yes | Yes, with automatic promotion and relegation and bonus points for finishing [1] |
| Promotion and relegation | Drafted from the final standings, with the tie-breaks and anomalies written out, and you can move anyone before it commits | Yes, automatic [1] |
| Challenge ladder | No | Yes, with position freezing and configurable penalties for ignoring a challenge [1] |
| Rated club ladder | Yes. Elo-style, recomputed from every match ever played, on Premier and above | Yes, the Tap Leagues Rating [1] |
| Tournaments | No | Yes. Knockout, optionally fed from round-robin groups, with automatic byes [1] |
| Notifications | No | Yes, challenge notifications in the app [1] |
| Emailing your members | No. We hold no addresses to email | Yes, from the club admin area [1] |
| Sports | Tennis, padel, squash, badminton and pickleball | 13, including bowls, darts, pool and snooker [3] |
| Exports | One click, all of it, as one file | PDF exports of tables, ladders and results [1] |
| Public club directory | No | Yes, searchable by name or by where you are [4] |
| What the club holds about a player | A name | A member record and a player account [2] |
Straight answer
You want tournaments. Clayside has none, and there is no plan to add them.
You want a challenge ladder, where a player calls out somebody above them and the loser drops. Clayside's ladder is rated rather than positional, and there are no challenges in it.
You want an app your members install from a store, with notifications. Clayside is a web page that installs to a home screen, and it sends nobody anything.
You want to email your members from the same place you run the league. We hold no addresses, so we cannot, and that cuts both ways: we also cannot remind the member who still owes three matches. Tap Leagues can.
Your club plays something we do not: bowls, darts, pool, snooker, fencing, foosball or table tennis are all on their list and none is on ours.
The other side of it
A Tap Leagues player signs up with an email address and a password, or with Google or Apple, and that account is theirs across every club they play at. It is a real advantage for a player who plays at three clubs, and a real cost at the club where some of the members will not make one.
A Clayside player is a name in a box. They tap the link in the group chat, tap their name, and enter the score. Their opponent confirms it, and if nobody does it confirms itself after three days.
Because there is nothing held about a player, there is nothing to lose, nothing to ask a junior for and nothing for a club to keep in step with its membership list.
Compared with
Spreadsheet · ClubSpark · LTA Box League Manager · Tap Leagues
Questions
League, ladder and tournament management software for clubs, with a web app and native apps for iOS and Android. It covers thirteen sports, runs box leagues, challenge ladders and knockout tournaments, and its site says it is free for players and clubs with no card required.
Their own site says so, on every page: free for players and clubs, no card required. Their about page goes further and says players never pay to compete and that they will not put a club night, a ladder or a local league behind a paywall.
Yes. Their register page asks a player to create an account to join their club's leagues, ladders and tournaments, with Google, Apple or an email address and password. Clayside players have no account at all.
No. It is a web page that works on whatever phone your members already have, and it can be added to a home screen so it opens like an app. There is nothing to install from a store and nothing to update.
No. Boxes and one all-year club ladder, and that is the whole product. If your club wants a knockout draw with seedings and byes, Clayside will not do it and Tap Leagues will.
Tap Leagues has more in it and costs nothing. Clayside asks your players for nothing: no account, no email address, no password. If the thing stopping your league from filling is that members will not sign up for another app, that is the difference that matters. If it is not, Tap Leagues does more.
Clayside does tennis, padel, squash, badminton and pickleball, with the scoring formats each sport actually uses. Tap Leagues lists thirteen, including all five of those plus table tennis, racketball, fencing, foosball, bowls, darts, pool and snooker.
Sources
Everything above about Tap Leagues was read on , on these pages:
Where Tap Leagues holds player data and what it retains was not checked, so no data-handling row appears beyond what their own sign-up pages state. Their App Store lineage and the number of clubs using them are not published and are not on the page.
Product and company names on this page belong to their owners. Clayside is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any of them. We check these pages three times a year. If we have got something wrong about your product, tell us at hello@clayside.app and we will fix it.
Have a look
The demo is a full season with real fixtures, real standings and a doubles box in it, and nobody has to make an account to read it.