AllSquads vs ClubSpark
Venue booking, gate access and programme management used by national tennis bodies, including Tennis Australia's Book a Court
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TL;DR
ClubSpark vs AllSquads, the short version
- ClubSpark is venue software: online court booking with gate and light access, run at national scale for sport bodies including Tennis Australia.
- AllSquads is club software: term enrolments that also take drop-ins, camps, private lessons, memberships and court hire on one roster.
- ClubSpark publishes no price. Its pricing page returns a not-found, there is no Australian figure on its site, and the route to a number is a demo or a sales conversation.
- AllSquads publishes its rates on one public page and bills in Australian dollars with GST inside the published rate.
- AllSquads pays the club every Monday for the previous week, with every booking itemised on the report the treasurer reconciles.
- Pick ClubSpark for federation-linked venue access; pick AllSquads for a club whose calendar runs on terms, camps and coaching.
ClubSpark is the platform behind Book a Court, so for a great many Australian tennis venues it is not a product they chose, it is the system that arrived with their affiliation. It does one very hard thing genuinely well: it puts courts online and opens the gate and the lights when somebody has paid for them. This page is about the rest of a club's week. The Tuesday squad that runs for ten weeks and takes two casual players on the end of the roster, the July camp, the private lessons, the memberships that change what people pay, and the treasurer who wants one figure to reconcile on Monday morning. Everything either product is said to do here comes from its own public pages, linked and dated, and where ClubSpark is the better answer this page says so plainly.
What is ClubSpark?
ClubSpark is club and venue management software from Clubspark Group Limited, a London company with offices in Orlando and in Richmond, Victoria. Its public site is organised around three audiences, clubs and venues, coaches, and sport bodies, and it names tennis, padel, pickleball, football, cricket and basketball as the sports it serves. The product most Australians have met is the booking layer: a venue publishes its courts, a player books and pays online, and the booking itself is what grants access.
That access piece is the part competitors generally cannot match. ClubSpark's SmartAccess joins the booking system to physical gate and light hardware, so an unstaffed court can be sold at nine at night and the person who paid for it is the person who can get in and turn the lights on. For a municipal site with one part-time employee, that is not a convenience feature, it is the difference between a court that earns money after hours and a padlock.
It also works at a scale most club software never touches. Its own Tennis Australia case study describes Book a Court being piloted in Victoria in 2015/16 and then installed in 56 venues and 486 courts nationwide, and records the programme taking the Excellence in Innovation award at the Australian Sports Commission Participation Awards in 2017. Those figures are from that case study and are now some years old, so they are quoted here as history rather than as today's numbers.
The question this page answers is narrower than whether ClubSpark is good software. It is: once the courts are online and the gate opens by itself, what still happens in a spreadsheet, and is that the part your club is actually spending its evenings on?
Why clubs look for a ClubSpark alternative
None of these are complaints about reliability or support. They are what shows up when a venue-and-access product is asked to run the coaching business that lives on top of those courts.
A term is not a series of court bookings
A ten-week junior squad is one commitment with one fee, one roster, a known capacity, public holidays taken out, and a parent who wants to pay once and be done. Modelling that as ten separate bookings changes what the parent sees, what the coach plans against and what the club can count on, and it is the single most common reason an Australian club ends up collecting term fees by bank transfer beside a system that is otherwise working.
The casual player gets a second system
Clubs almost never want term or drop-in. They want the same Tuesday class to hold eight enrolled juniors and sell two casual places to whoever turns up, at a different price, into the same roster the coach marks off. When that is not one object in the software, it becomes two lists, and the coach standing on court is the one reconciling them.
Nobody is paying the coach
Court revenue landing in the club's account is only half of a coaching business. The other half is what the coach is owed for the sessions they ran, and whether an independent coach can be paid directly at all. Paying people is a different problem from taking payments, and a club that has solved the second by itself still has the first sitting in a spreadsheet at the end of every month.
Cancellations become a favour, not a policy
Rain stops a session, a child is sick, a squad is called off. What the club owes those people should be decided once as a policy and then applied by the system, so the credit exists, the parent can see it, and it comes off their next booking automatically. Left to goodwill it becomes a running list in somebody's head, and the club's most reliable volunteer becomes the only person who knows who is owed what.
No published price to budget against
ClubSpark publishes no pricing page at all: the pricing URL returns a not-found, and there is no Australian figure anywhere on the site. For a committee that has to put a number in next year's budget, or compare two options honestly, that means a demo and a sales conversation before the comparison can even start. Whatever the eventual number is, the process itself is friction a volunteer treasurer feels.
Affiliation decides the software, not the club
When the booking platform arrives as part of a national programme, the club did not weigh it against anything, and it may not be able to leave the parts that work. That is fine for the courts. It becomes a problem when the same constraint is assumed to cover terms, camps, memberships and payouts, and the club never asks whether those could be run somewhere better.
Which setup fits your club
Your courts are on Book a Court and the gate and lights open for a paid booking
Worth knowingThen keep that. Nothing on this page is an argument for unplugging access hardware that works, and AllSquads does not open gates. The honest question is what sits on top: if the term fees, the camps, the coach payments and the credits are being run by hand beside it, that is the half worth moving, and the two can coexist while you find out.
You run a ten-week term that also needs to sell casual places
Good fitThis is what AllSquads is built around. Set the term dates, the weekly time, the excluded public holidays, the capacity and both prices, publish it, and the class offers the term fee and the casual fee side by side. One roster, one attendance mark-off, one list of who has paid, and the empty spots visible to anyone deciding whether to come.
Your club employs coaches, or works with independent ones who invoice you
Good fitAllSquads pays out. A club receives one payment every Monday for the previous week with every booking itemised, and an independent coach can be paid directly for their own sessions rather than waiting on a club transfer. Employed coaches stay on the club's payroll and simply get the roster and the attendance without an invoice cycle attached.
You need memberships that change what people pay
Good fitSet the membership, set what it entitles someone to, and the price a member sees at checkout follows from it without anyone applying a discount by hand. Expiries are tracked, renewals are visible, and a lapsed member pays the public rate the moment their membership ends rather than whenever somebody notices.
Your venue is unstaffed and the booking must physically let somebody in
Worth knowingThen ClubSpark is the better purchase for that job and this page says so. Access hardware joined to the booking is a genuinely hard problem and it is theirs, not ours. Plenty of clubs run the access layer where it is and move the coaching business, so treat this as a question about which half you are solving rather than an either-or.
AllSquads vs ClubSpark
| AllSquads | ClubSpark | |
|---|---|---|
| Getting paid | Players pay at checkout when they book or enrol, card processing is handled inside the platform, and the place is only held once the payment has cleared. | Players pay online when they book a court, on the venue's own ClubSpark page. Its public pages describe the booking and payment flow for venue bookings. |
| The roster | The roster is built from the payments: who enrolled, who paid, who is on the waitlist and who turned up, marked off on a phone beside the court. | Bookings produce the list of who holds each court slot. A term roster that is one enrolment across ten weeks is not something we could find on its public pages. |
| Term and drop-in on one class | One object, not two: the enrolled term with drop-in switched on, so the remaining places sell at their own price into the same capacity and the same roster the coach marks off. | Not something we could find on its public pages. Programmes and court bookings are described separately rather than as one object selling two ways. |
| Cancellations | The club sets the policy once. A cancelled session resolves itself into a credit that the member can see and that comes off their next booking automatically. | Cancellation handling for venue bookings is not documented in detail on its public pages, so this page does not characterise it. |
| Reminders | Automatic reminders before a session and an immediate notification when something is called off, by email, in-app and SMS where the club has enabled it. | Booking confirmations and venue communication are part of the product; the specific reminder schedule is not published on its public pages. |
| Member pricing | Memberships set what a member pays, with entitlements, expiry and renewal tracked, and the member rate applied at checkout rather than by hand. | Membership management is offered, and its sport-body pages describe federation membership as part of the platform. What a member is charged is set per venue. |
| Waitlists | A full session opens its waitlist by itself and offers the place to the next person in order when somebody drops out, with their contact details already saved. | A waitlist that offers a released place in order is not something we could find on its public pages. |
| Payouts | One payment into the club account every Monday for the previous week, itemised booking by booking, and independent coaches can be paid directly for their own sessions. | Paying a club or an individual coach out on a schedule is not something we could find described on its public pages. |
| Court hire | Courts sit on the same roster as the classes, bookable in the same place, so a club sells both from one calendar. | This is its strongest area: online court booking at venue scale, joined to gate and light access through SmartAccess so an unstaffed court can be sold and entered. |
| Comms | A chat on every session for the coach and the people booked in, plus announcements and broadcasts that can be filtered by tag or membership. | Venue and programme communication is part of the platform; a per-session chat between a coach and the people booked in is not something we could find published. |
| Records | Attendance, payments, credits, memberships and payouts all queryable, with exports for the treasurer and the auditor. | Member data can be exported to CSV or PDF, documented in its support centre. |
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How AllSquads compares
Six dimensions where the two products are genuinely different, rather than a feature list where everything scores a tick.
What the software thinks a club is
ClubSpark's centre of gravity is the venue: courts, access, and a national programme that many venues join at once. AllSquads' centre of gravity is the season: a term that repeats weekly, a camp in the holidays, private lessons, memberships and the courts out the back, all on one roster. Neither view is wrong, but they lead to very different software, and a club feels the difference in whichever half is missing.
How you find out what it costs
AllSquads publishes its rates on one public page, in Australian dollars, with GST inside the published figure, and the platform bills from that same data. ClubSpark publishes no price: the pricing URL returns a not-found and the site routes a buyer to a demo or to sales. This page quotes no figure for either product, because the only ClubSpark numbers that exist publicly are United Kingdom ones on a support article, and reading those as an Australian cost is precisely the mistake this page refuses to make.
Paying people, not just charging them
AllSquads pays out. The club receives one transfer every Monday for the week just gone, itemised booking by booking so it reconciles against the bank statement without detective work, and an independent coach can be paid directly for the sessions they ran. On ClubSpark's public pages we could find no equivalent, which is consistent with a product built for venues that bank their own court revenue.
One class, two ways to buy it
The thing Australian clubs ask for most often is the least common feature in this category: the same Tuesday session holding enrolled juniors and selling its remaining places casually, at a different price, into one roster with one capacity. AllSquads treats that as a single object. Everywhere it is not one object, the club runs two lists and reconciles them by hand, usually on court, usually in a hurry.
Access hardware
ClubSpark wins this outright and it is worth stating without hedging. SmartAccess ties the booking to gates and lights, so a court with nobody on site can be sold at night and entered only by the person who paid. AllSquads does not do this and has no plan on this page to pretend otherwise. A club whose problem is physical entry should keep whatever solves it.
Who the software answers to
A platform deployed through a national programme serves the federation as well as the club, which brings real benefits, consistent branding, integrated membership, a support line the governing body maintains, and real constraints on what a single venue can change. AllSquads answers to the club that signed up: the tiers, the policies, the pricing and the cancellation rules are the club's to set, and the club can leave with its data.
Where ClubSpark wins
A comparison with no concessions is an advertisement. These are the places where ClubSpark is genuinely the better purchase today, written so a club that needs any of them can act on it.
- Gate and light access joined to the booking. SmartAccess lets an unstaffed venue sell a court at night and have only the paying player get in and turn the lights on. That is hardware, integration and years of field work, and AllSquads has no equivalent. A club whose courts depend on it should keep it.
- The Tennis Australia relationship and Book a Court. If your venue is affiliated and your courts are online through that programme, ClubSpark is the platform that programme runs on, with the branding, the national consistency and the support arrangement that come with it. Its own case study records Book a Court reaching 56 venues and 486 courts nationwide and winning an Australian Sports Commission innovation award in 2017.
- Court booking at national scale. Running booking for hundreds of courts across dozens of sites, with a federation's requirements layered on top, is a different engineering problem from running one club's timetable, and it is one ClubSpark has solved repeatedly in this market.
- Federation membership handling. Where membership is defined and held by the governing body rather than the club, a platform built for sport bodies can sync it in ways club-owned software cannot, and a venue whose members expect that continuity gets it out of the box.
- The player-facing booking app is well liked. Its Booker app holds a high rating from a very large number of ratings on the United Kingdom App Store, which is a real signal about the everyday experience of booking a court, gathered over years and across far more people than any review site has for this product.
Independent ratings and verified pricing
What other people say matters more than what we say, so both figures below are quoted exactly as published, with the count visible and the link there for you to open. Read them together rather than separately: one is a large pool of players rating the booking app they use, the other is a very small pool of business reviewers, and neither on its own is the whole picture.
Capterra
1.5 / 5
2 reviews
Two reviews only, which is far too small a sample to judge a platform this widely installed. Quoted because it is what the public record holds, not because two people settle anything.
App Store
4.8 / 5
14167 ratings
The Clubspark Booker app on the United Kingdom App Store, where players book courts. Apple counts ratings rather than written reviews.
ClubSpark publishes no price for anyone to compare: its pricing page returns a not-found, there is no Australian figure on its site, and the route to a number is a demo or a sales conversation. There is therefore no published figure to put beside ours, so this page compares the two on what they do instead. Our own current rates are read live on the pricing page. See pricing
Measured impact
The bands below are platform-wide and deliberately rounded. They are what clubs consistently report after putting a term online, not one club's numbers dressed up as a benchmark.
- Chasing term fees by bank transfer
- most of it goes away, because the enrolment is not confirmed until the payment clears
- Evenings spent reconciling who paid
- from a regular weekly job to a glance at a report
- Casual places sold from a term class
- consistently more, because the empty spots are visible to anyone looking at the class
- Credits owed after a called-off session
- from a list in somebody's head to a balance the member can see themselves
- Time to reconcile the club's bank statement
- one itemised weekly report instead of matching unreferenced transfers
None of that requires the courts to move. The fastest way to test the claim is to put one real term through it while everything else carries on exactly as it does now.
Should you choose AllSquads or ClubSpark?
Choose AllSquads if
- Your week is terms, camps and private lessons as much as it is court hire, and you want all of it on one roster.
- You want the same class to take enrolled juniors and casual players at different prices, with one capacity and one attendance list.
- Somebody has to be paid: the club weekly, or an independent coach directly for the sessions they ran.
- You want cancellation and credit rules decided once and then applied by the software rather than by whoever is kindest.
- You want to read what it costs on a public page, in Australian dollars with GST inside the figure, before you talk to anyone.
- You want memberships that set what a member pays automatically, with expiries and renewals tracked.
Consider ClubSpark if
- Your courts depend on gate or light access tied to the booking, and an unstaffed site has to let the right person in.
- Your venue is part of Tennis Australia's Book a Court programme and the affiliation, branding and support arrangement matter to how you operate.
- Membership is held by your governing body rather than by your club, and you need it to stay in step automatically.
- You run booking across many sites or hundreds of courts, where federation-scale deployment is the actual requirement.
Pricing: AllSquads vs ClubSpark
The two products handle the cost question in opposite ways. AllSquads publishes its plans on one public page, bills in Australian dollars with GST inside the published rate, and the platform charges from the same data that page renders, so what you read is what leaves the account. ClubSpark publishes nothing: its pricing URL returns a not-found, there is no Australian figure on its site, and a buyer is routed to a demo or to sales.
That is not an accusation, plenty of enterprise software prices by conversation, and a platform deployed through a national programme may genuinely have no single number to publish. But it does have a practical cost for a volunteer treasurer writing next year's budget, and it makes an honest side-by-side impossible until somebody has had a sales call.
This page therefore quotes no figure for either product, and no fee percentage for either. There are United Kingdom processing figures on a ClubSpark support article; they are United Kingdom figures and an Australian club should not read them as its own. Our fees, both the booking fee a player pays at checkout and the platform fee a club pays when the payout is made, are published on our pricing page and deliberately nowhere else on this site. Read each at its source: ClubSpark's own site is linked below, and ours is read live from the data the platform bills from.
How to add AllSquads without touching your courts
This is the unusual case in this category where the honest advice is not to migrate everything. The courts and the access hardware can stay exactly where they are while the coaching business moves, and you can judge it on one term.
Export your members
ClubSpark's support centre documents exporting member data to CSV or PDF, so start there and take the CSV. While you have it open, note who has already paid for the current term and who is owed a credit from a session that was called off, because those are the two things a spreadsheet always holds and no export ever carries.
Import the contacts
Upload that CSV under Contacts, then Import. Imported people keep a record of where they came from, can be tagged as juniors or members, and can be given a membership status and an expiry straight away. A credit raised against somebody who has not signed up yet waits as pending and attaches itself the moment they register with that email address, so nothing owed goes missing in the move.
Publish one term, and leave the courts alone
Pick a single class, set the dates, the weekly time, the excluded public holidays, the capacity and both the term and casual prices, and publish it. Post the link where you already post everything. Your ClubSpark court booking keeps running untouched, which is the point: you are testing the half that is currently living in a spreadsheet, not betting the venue.
Watch one Monday
After the first week, open the payout report. One payment into the club account for the previous week, itemised booking by booking, is the thing a treasurer can judge immediately, and it is the clearest single test of whether this removes work or adds it. If your coaches are independent, check that their own sessions paid out to them the same way.
What to try in your first week
It is self-serve, so there is nothing to book and nobody to sit through. Five things to do inside the trial, each ending in something on screen you can judge for yourself.
Publish one term class with a capacity and a casual price, then open it as a player would.
The booking panel offers the term fee and the casual fee together, and the remaining places count down in front of you.
Book the class out to its capacity, then try to take one more place.
The waitlist opens by itself and the next person is queued in order, already saved as a contact you can message.
Cancel one session in the middle of the term.
Everyone booked in is notified straight away, and the credit your policy entitles them to appears on their account without you calculating anything.
Add a membership, put one family on it, and book them into the same class.
The member price is what they are charged at checkout, and the public rate is still what everybody else sees.
Open the payout report after your first week of real bookings.
One weekly figure for the club with every booking itemised beneath it, in the shape your bank statement can be reconciled against.
Got a question right now?
Instant answers, in the page, without leaving it.
Other ClubSpark alternatives to consider
If ClubSpark has stopped covering what your club needs, it is worth knowing what else clubs land on, and that the honest answers split into venue-booking products and platforms that run the whole season. Where we have written a full comparison it is linked; the rest are named so you can go and look for yourself.
TeamUp
Fitness-studio software built around class packs, memberships and recurring billing, with an Australian dollar figure published on its own pricing page.
Punchpass
Simple, well-liked class-pass and attendance software for single-location studios, priced openly in United States dollars.
CourtReserve
United States racquet-club software with strong court and league management, priced in United States dollars.
Mindbody
A large wellness and fitness platform with Australian dollar pricing published per location, aimed at studios more than sports clubs.
SportLogic
An Australian club and association platform covering registrations and competitions, priced by quote.
Spreadsheets and a group chat
Still the most common setup in Australian club sport, and the one most clubs are actually comparing against.
Where this comes from
- ClubSpark publishes no pricing page, so there is no public figure to compare
- clubspark.com/pricing (returns not found)
- The company's offices, including its Australian office in Richmond, Victoria
- ClubSpark: Contact
- The sports ClubSpark serves and how it presents itself to clubs, coaches and sport bodies
- ClubSpark
- Book a Court's pilot in Victoria, its rollout to 56 venues and 486 courts, and its 2017 innovation award
- ClubSpark: Tennis Australia Book a Court
- The Capterra rating for ClubSpark and the number of reviews behind it
- Capterra: ClubSpark
- The Clubspark Booker app rating and the size of its ratings pool on the United Kingdom App Store
- App Store: Clubspark Booker
- How AllSquads runs terms, drop-ins, memberships, credits and payouts
- AllSquads help centre
- Our current published rates, read live from the data the platform bills from
- AllSquads pricing
FAQ: ClubSpark vs AllSquads
The honest summary
ClubSpark solved a problem that is genuinely hard and genuinely physical: a court with nobody on site, sold at night, entered only by the person who paid, with the lights coming on. It did that at national scale, through a federation programme, in a market where most software never gets near hardware. None of that is in question on this page.
What is in question is everything stacked on top of those courts. The ten-week squad collected by bank transfer. The July camp in a spreadsheet. The casual player added to the roster by hand at the gate. The credit owed for the session that was rained off, remembered by one volunteer. The coach still waiting to be paid. That work does not appear in anybody's software comparison, because it is paid in evenings rather than invoices.
AllSquads is that half. Paid enrolments with real capacity, a term class that also sells casual places, cancellation policies that resolve into credits by themselves, waitlists that offer a released place in order, memberships that set their own rates, courts on the same roster, and one itemised payment into the club account every Monday.
The way to settle it is not a migration. Put one real term through AllSquads while the courts keep running exactly as they do, then look at the paid list, the waitlist and the Monday report and decide whether they tell you things the spreadsheet never could.
- ClubSpark is venue software: online court booking with gate and light access, run at national scale for sport bodies including Tennis Australia.
- AllSquads is club software: term enrolments that also take drop-ins, camps, private lessons, memberships and court hire on one roster.
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