AllSquads vs TeamReach
A free team-communication app: group messaging, a shared schedule, event RSVPs and attendance for one team
2 months free. A card is required to start, and nothing is charged until your 2 free months end. The free profile and free tiers never need one.
TL;DR
TeamReach and AllSquads, side by side
- TeamReach is a free team app for messaging, a shared schedule, event RSVPs, attendance and polls, and it does that with almost no setup.
- Its own store listing describes no bookings, no payments, no memberships and no facility booking, so the money has to be collected somewhere else.
- AllSquads is the other half: paid enrolments, capacity, cancellation policies, credits, waitlists, memberships, court hire and one weekly payout.
- An RSVP tells you who intends to come. A booking tells you who has paid, which spot they hold and what happens if they pull out on Friday night.
- AllSquads carries club comms too: a chat on every session, contact-everyone, broadcasts by tag, and SMS when a session is called off.
- If nobody at your club ever pays for anything, TeamReach is free and sufficient, and this page says so in its own section rather than in the small print.
These two products are not really rivals, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. TeamReach is a free app for talking to one team: post the schedule, ask who is coming, mark who turned up, share the photos from Saturday. It takes no money, because taking money was never what it set out to do. So the real question is not which app is better at chat. It is what you are currently doing with the half of the job TeamReach leaves alone: the fees, the spots, the pro-rata for the family who joined in week four, the spare court on Saturday, and the coach waiting to be paid. This page compares the two on exactly that split, and says plainly where the free app is the right answer.
What is TeamReach?
TeamReach is a mobile app for running the communication side of a single team. A coach or manager sets up a group, the players or parents join it, and from then on the group carries the conversation: messages to everyone or to individuals, the upcoming fixtures and training times, a request for who can make Thursday, a record of who actually turned up, a quick poll when a decision needs making, and the photos and files everyone wants after the game. It is published by HCP Reach LLC, a United States company, and it is free to download, with an optional paid subscription whose function is removing the advertising.
What the listing does not describe is worth reading carefully, because it is the entire subject of this page. There is no checkout. There is no membership a player holds or a season ticket they buy. There is no capacity that stops filling once a session is full, no waitlist that charges the next person in line, no cancellation policy that decides whether somebody gets their money back, and nothing at all about hiring out a court, a lane or a net. None of that is a gap in the product. It is the shape of the product: a team app, not a booking platform.
That focus is why it is popular. A volunteer manager can have a team group running in a couple of minutes, on a budget of nothing, with no account for the club to administer and no payment plumbing to think about. Plenty of teams need nothing more than that for years. The clubs this page is written for are the ones where something else has quietly grown up beside the group chat, and where the growing is starting to cost somebody their weekends.
So read the comparison below as two halves of one job rather than a contest. TeamReach owns the conversation. What follows is what happens to the fees, the spots, the refunds and the payouts when a club decides they should stop being manual.
Why clubs look for a TeamReach alternative
None of the friction below is a fault in the app. Each one is what happens when a club asks a communication tool to hold the parts of a season that involve money, capacity or a promise.
An RSVP is not a paid place
Yes, maybe and no are useful answers, and they are not commitments. Ten yeses can turn into six on a wet Thursday, and the coach has already paid for the court. Once a place has to be paid for to be held, the answer you need is not an intention. It is a confirmed booking with money attached to it, and that is the thing the app was never built to produce.
The fees live in a second system
Term fees, camp fees, casual fees and the member rate end up in a spreadsheet, a note or the treasurer's head, alongside a bank account that receives transfers with no reference from parents whose surname differs from the child's. Reconciling that to who is actually training is an evening a week, and the unpaid list is never quite right, so the chase messages land on the wrong families.
Capacity is a manual head count
A session with twelve places and no capacity control fills by whoever reads the chat first, argues about it afterwards, and then runs with fourteen anyway. When somebody drops out there is no ordered queue to call on, so the spot either goes empty or goes to whoever happens to be online at the time.
One group per team, and a club is many teams
A club is not a team. It is a dozen squads, a holiday camp, a handful of private lessons and a membership list, and the same family appears in several of them. Run that as separate groups and nobody can see the whole picture: not one roster, not one contact record, not one set of takings, and no way to message every junior parent at once.
Cancellations and refunds are promises
A session called off at five o'clock is a message, and then it is a debt. Who was owed something, whether it was a refund or a credit, and whether it was ever honoured all depend on somebody remembering. Families rarely complain the first time. They notice the second, and a credit that quietly evaporated costs more goodwill than the session was worth.
Nothing knows about the court
The facility itself, the courts, the lanes, the nets or the tee times that members want on a Saturday, is outside the app entirely. It ends up on a whiteboard, in a paper diary or in a shared calendar, with payment handled separately or not at all, and with no link to the training session that is already using the same court at the same hour.
Nobody can audit the season
At the end of the year a committee wants to know what each program took, what the coaches were paid and what is still outstanding. Messages, RSVPs and bank transfers cannot answer that together. The records that would answer it were never created, because the tool holding the season was only ever holding the conversation.
Which setup fits your club?
Your team just needs to talk, and nobody pays for anything
Worth knowingThen stay on TeamReach. A free group with a schedule, RSVPs and attendance is the right tool for a side that trains, plays and splits nothing, and moving to a booking platform would add administration you have no use for. The free AllSquads profile is there if you ever want a public page people can find you through, but there is no reason to hurry.
You charge a term fee and chase the transfers by hand
Good fitThis is the case AllSquads exists for. Set the term dates, the weekly time, the public-holiday exclusions and the fee, publish it, and parents pay when they enrol. The roster builds itself from the payments, the unpaid list becomes the empty list, and the club receives one transfer every Monday for the week just gone with every booking itemised on the report.
Your sessions cap out and people argue about who got in
Good fitCapacity is a number on the session, and once it is reached the waitlist opens by itself, in the order people joined. When a place frees up the next person is told, and everyone who ever waited becomes a contact you can message about the next intake. The decision stops being social and becomes a queue nobody has to arbitrate.
Members pay less than visitors, and the courts get hired out too
Good fitMembership is either a status on the contact or a tier the member bought, and the member rate applies itself at checkout on classes and on court time without anybody remembering who is current. Facility hire on the Club tiers carries its own opening hours, slot lengths, member and evening rates, recurring bookings and maintenance blocks.
You want to keep the team chat exactly as it is
Worth knowingKeep it. Nothing about moving enrolments and money onto AllSquads requires you to close a group your players like. AllSquads adds a chat on each session for the coach and the people booked into it, a contact-everyone button, and broadcasts filtered by tag or membership, so the operational messages reach people reliably while the team banter stays wherever it already lives.
AllSquads vs TeamReach
| AllSquads | TeamReach | |
|---|---|---|
| Getting paid | Card, Apple Pay or Google Pay at the moment of booking, with the place held only once the payment clears. | No checkout is described on its store listing, so fees are collected outside the app by transfer, cash or invoice. |
| Roster | One session list carrying enrolments, drop-ins, payment status and attendance, with parents booking for their children. | An attendance record built from who replied to the event and who was marked present on the day. |
| Term + drop-in on one class | A term class with drop-in switched on: two prices on one roster and one capacity, pro-rata for anyone joining late. | Sessions are scheduled events people reply to, with no fee attached and no casual price beside a term price. |
| Cancellations | A policy per class setting the notice window and whether credit is full, partial or none, shown before the player confirms. | A message to the group, with any refund or credit handled by hand and remembered by whoever handled it. |
| Reminders | Email and in-app the day before, in-app an hour out, and an SMS to everyone booked when a session is called off. | Event notifications and RSVP requests inside the app, reaching the members who have notifications enabled. |
| Member pricing | Membership tiers including family compositions, with member rates applying themselves to classes and court time at checkout. | No membership or pricing of any kind is described on its store listing, so rates are applied outside the app. |
| Waitlist | Opens automatically once a session is full, first in first out, notifies the next person, and keeps everyone as a contact. | Event waitlists are a published capability, tracking who else wants in without taking any payment from them. |
| Payouts | One transfer every Monday for the previous week, platform fee netted off, card processing absorbed, itemised per booking. | Nothing to pay out, because no money passes through the app; the club banks it and splits it manually. |
| Court hire | Courts, lanes, nets and tee times with hours, slot lengths, member and evening rates, repeats, blocks and automatic class holds. | No facility or court booking appears on its store listing; the app is built around a team, not a venue. |
| Comms | A group chat per session, contact-everyone, direct messages, and broadcasts filtered by tag, sport or membership status. | Group and direct messaging, polls, announcements and photo or file sharing, which is the heart of the product. |
| Records | A booking audit trail, itemised payout history, membership change history and a contact record holding credits and notes. | Message history, event responses and attendance marks; no financial record exists because no money is handled. |
Rather have it walked through?
A free 30-minute call. Two minutes to book, no pitch.
How AllSquads compares to TeamReach
Compared dimension by dimension, this is not a longer feature list beating a shorter one. It is a tool that holds the conversation beside a platform that holds the commitments, and the difference shows wherever a commitment involves money, a place or a date.
What each product is organised around
TeamReach is organised around the group: a team, its people and the thread they share. AllSquads is organised around the session and the person booked into it, who paid, what they paid, which spot they hold, whether they showed up and what they are owed if it rains. Ask either product a question about a conversation and TeamReach answers faster. Ask a question about money and only one of them can answer at all.
Intent against commitment
An RSVP is the cheapest possible signal, which is exactly why it is easy to give and easy to change. A booking costs the person something at the moment they make it, which is why it predicts attendance. That difference is what lets a club plan courts, coaches and equipment against a number it can trust, and it is the single largest practical change clubs notice after moving the fees online.
How a season is modelled
AllSquads ships six formats: recurring group lessons, one-off social sessions, holiday camps priced by the day or the week, private lessons with duration tiers and coach approval, facility hire, and retreats. A term class is a group lesson carrying term dates, holiday exclusions, drop-in, pro-rata and auto-renew into the next term. TeamReach models the calendar as a list of events people reply to.
Money and payouts
AllSquads takes every payment on its own Stripe platform account and transfers to the club each Monday for the week just finished, with the platform fee already netted off, card processing absorbed and every booking itemised for the treasurer. An independent coach connects their own Stripe account and is paid directly; a coach employed by the club needs no Stripe account, because the money reaches them through the club.
Facilities
On the Club tiers a court, lane, net or tee time is a bookable thing in its own right: opening hours, slot lengths, standard and member rates, day and evening bands, free-for-members windows, recurring weekly bookings, manual blocks for maintenance, and a class that automatically holds the court it has been assigned. The vocabulary follows the sport, so a golf club sees tee times and a swim club sees lanes.
Families
One parent login holds each child's profile with emergency contacts and medical notes, books one child or three into the same session, and can add a friend as a guest. Every attendee is priced, rostered and cancellable on their own line, and a membership tier can cover two adults and three children under one arrangement. On a team app the parent is simply another member of the group.
Talking to people
This is the dimension where TeamReach is strongest, so it deserves detail. AllSquads is not trying to replace a social group; it puts a chat on each session for the coach and the players booked in, adds a contact-everyone button, direct messages, announcements, and broadcasts filtered by tag, sport, membership status or class type, with notification preferences per club so a family can mute marketing without losing booking email.
Who each one is for
TeamReach suits the person running one team, usually a volunteer, usually on a phone, usually with no budget. AllSquads suits the person running a club: several programs, several coaches, a facility, a membership list, a committee that wants figures and a treasurer who wants one payment to reconcile. A club can run one team on either. Only one of them can run twenty and take the money for all of them.
Being Australian
AllSquads is built and run here: prices in Australian dollars with GST inside the published rate, Australian public holidays flagged while you lay out a term, Queensland Play On! vouchers accepted at checkout on classes that opt in, and support in local hours. TeamReach is published by a United States company, which matters less for a free chat app than it would for anything handling your fees.
Where TeamReach wins
This is not a grudging section. TeamReach is genuinely the better choice for a large number of teams, and if any of the following describes yours, the right decision is to keep it and stop reading comparisons.
- It is free. Not free for a trial period, not free until you outgrow a limit: free to download and free to use, with an optional paid subscription whose only job is removing the advertising. For a volunteer running a junior side with no club bank account, that is not a discount, it is the difference between having an app and not having one.
- There is nothing to set up. A group, a handful of people in it, a schedule posted, and the team is running. No account for the club, no payment provider to connect, no identity checks, no pricing decisions, no policies to write. Any platform that handles money has onboarding TeamReach simply does not need, and for a team that needs none of it that onboarding is pure cost.
- Chat, availability polls and RSVPs for one team are the whole job it was built for, and it does them directly. Ask who can make Thursday, watch the answers arrive, mark who turned up, share the photos afterwards. A booking platform that also carries comms will always be carrying more, and more is not automatically better when the team only wanted the message thread.
- No payment plumbing has to exist at all. Teams that split costs in cash, fold the fees into a club subscription collected once a year, or genuinely charge nothing are not avoiding a checkout, they have no use for one. Adding a platform to that arrangement would mean inventing an administrative problem in order to solve it.
- It is well liked by the people using it, across both of the store listings we checked, with a rating on the United States listing built on thousands of them. A free app that people keep and rate highly after years of use is telling you something honest about how well it does the narrow thing it does.
Independent ratings and verified pricing
The two figures below are the app's own store ratings, quoted exactly as published and linked so you can open them rather than take our word for it. Read them as what they are: the verdict of people using a free team-messaging app on how well it handles messaging, schedules and RSVPs. They say nothing either way about payments, enrolments or facility booking, because the app does not do those things. The vendor's own website returned an error to every attempt to read it while this page was written, so nothing on this page is sourced from it.
App Store (United States)
4.6 / 5
7000 ratings
The United States listing, whose ratings pool runs to about seven thousand, rounded here to the nearest thousand.
App Store (Australia)
4.3 / 5
104 ratings
The Australian listing, where the ratings count is much smaller than the United States one.
TeamReach is free to download, with an optional paid subscription whose function is removing advertising, so there is no vendor monthly price to set beside ours and this page compares on features alone. Our own figures are published on the pricing page, read live from the same data the platform bills against. See pricing
Measured impact
The bands below are platform-wide and deliberately rounded, and they describe what changes when the money moves onto a platform rather than what changes about your team chat. They are not one club's season presented as a benchmark.
- Unpaid fees
- The list shortens to almost nothing, because a place is only held once the payment has gone through.
- Attendance certainty
- A paid booking predicts who arrives far better than a reply to an event ever did.
- Bookings taken
- Thousands on the platform so far, running at roughly a thousand each month across a growing set of Australian clubs.
- Programs per club
- Fifteen to twenty is typical in a term for a mid-sized club; the busiest carry several dozen.
- Empty places
- Fewer, because the waitlist is an ordered queue that offers the spot instead of a message nobody answers.
- The treasurer's Monday
- One transfer and one itemised report, instead of a bank feed read against a spreadsheet and a chat thread.
Clubs willing to be named tell it in their own words on the customer stories pages; the bands above are the cautious version that does not lean on anybody's best term.
Should you choose AllSquads or TeamReach?
Choose AllSquads if
- Players or parents pay for sessions, and somebody is currently matching those payments to names by hand.
- Your sessions have a real limit and you want a queue rather than an argument when they fill.
- You run several squads, a camp or private lessons, and the same families appear across more than one of them.
- Cancelled sessions leave you owing people something, and you would rather that were recorded than remembered.
- Courts, lanes or nets are hired out, and you want that on the same contacts and the same weekly payout as coaching.
- Coaches take a share, and you want it paid and itemised instead of calculated on a Sunday night.
Consider TeamReach if
- You never take money: nobody pays a fee, and nothing about your team needs a checkout.
- You run exactly one team and the only thing you need is messaging, a schedule and who is coming on Thursday.
- Your budget is genuinely nothing and a free app with advertising is a trade you are happy to make.
- You want an app running in the next five minutes with no account, no onboarding and no decisions to make first.
Pricing: AllSquads vs TeamReach
There is no price comparison to make here, which is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up. TeamReach is free to download and free to use, funded by advertising, with an optional paid subscription available monthly or yearly whose function is to remove those ads. It does not charge a club, because it does not act for a club: it takes no fees, holds no member money and moves nothing to a bank account. Whatever your fees currently cost you to collect, you are already paying it somewhere else, in bank transfers, in cash handling and in the evenings somebody spends reconciling the two.
AllSquads is priced as a flat monthly subscription per tier, in Australian dollars with GST inside the published rate, with free Coach and Club tiers underneath the paid ones and Pro tiers above, billable monthly or annually. Every paid tier opens with a trial at full tier access; a card is required to start it and nothing is charged on the day, and cancelling before it ends drops the account to the free tier with the data intact. The free tiers never ask for a card at all, which is the fairest way to compare against something that is free.
Two fees exist and two different people pay them: a booking fee the player pays on top of the class price at checkout, and a platform fee the club pays when the weekly payout is made, set by the club's tier. Both are published on the pricing page and deliberately nowhere else on this site, so this page quotes no figure of ours and no figure of TeamReach's. The comparison that actually matters is not a subscription against nothing; it is what collecting the money manually is costing the person who currently does it.
How to move the money off a group chat
You are not migrating a system, because there is no system to migrate: the contacts are in a group and the fees are in a spreadsheet. Three moves and a first term, each with the article that walks it.
Get the list out of the group
TeamReach documents no export on its listing, so the practical route is the one clubs already use: read the member list off the group and put the names, parent emails and mobile numbers into a spreadsheet, or ask the group once for the details you are missing. While you are there, write down who has already paid for this term and who is owed a credit from a session that was called off.
Import the contacts
Upload that spreadsheet as a 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 expiry immediately. 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.
Publish the term and share the link
Build the class with its dates, weekly time, holiday exclusions, capacity, term fee and optional drop-in price, assign the coach, pick the cancellation policy, and publish. Post the link in the group you already have, which is the easiest distribution any club ever gets. Bookings can start before Stripe onboarding is finished; only the payout waits on that.
Keep the chat, move the commitments
Let the team group carry on doing what it does well. What moves across is the part with consequences: who is enrolled, who has paid, who is next on the list, who is owed a credit and what the club is paid on Monday. By the second term the group has stopped being the place anyone asks whether there is a spot.
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 drop-in price, then open it as a player would.
The booking panel offers the term fee and the casual fee together, and the remaining places are counted down in front of you.
Book the class out to its capacity, then try to book one more place.
The waitlist opens by itself and the next person is queued in order, with their details already saved as a contact you can message.
From a parent account, book two children into the same session and add a friend as a guest.
The confirmation itemises all three attendees with their own amounts, and the coach's roster lists them on separate lines.
Cancel a session as the coach and choose the credit outcome for everyone booked in.
Every player is notified by email, in-app and SMS, and the credit lands on each of their balances for your club without a transfer.
Connect Stripe, take one real booking, and open the Payments page the Monday after.
The payout card shows that week's bookings with the platform fee already taken off, and the itemised report downloads for the treasurer.
Got a question right now?
Instant answers, in the page, without leaving it.
Other TeamReach alternatives to consider
If TeamReach has stopped covering what your club needs, it is worth knowing what else people land on, and that the honest answers fall into two groups: better team apps, and platforms that take the money. Where we have written a full comparison it is linked; the rest are named so you can go and look for yourself.
Heja
Another free team app in the same mould, strong on schedules, availability and parent communication for one squad.
Spond
A free team and club app for schedules, attendance and messaging, widely used by grassroots clubs in Europe.
TeamSnap
A long-established team and league product with paid plans, deeper on rosters, availability and season admin.
SportsEngine
Registration and league administration at association scale, aimed at governing bodies rather than a single coach.
Spreadsheets and group chat
What most clubs actually run beside a team app, and the setup worth comparing against honestly before buying anything.
TeamUp
Studio and gym software at a larger scale, with memberships, recurring billing and a branded member app add-on.
Punchpass
Class packs, attendance and memberships for a small studio timetable, simpler than a full club platform.
Where this comes from
- TeamReach is free with in-app purchases, and its Australian rating and ratings count
- App Store: TeamReach AU
- The United States rating for TeamReach and the size of that ratings pool
- App Store: TeamReach US
- How a free app with in-app purchases is presented to a buyer before installing
- Apple App Store
- The card processing and bank transfers behind every AllSquads payout
- Stripe (stripe.com/au)
- The financial records an Australian club is required to keep and retain
- ATO: record keeping
- Capacity, waitlists and how a place is held once payment clears
- Help centre: Class types
- Term dates, holiday exclusions, the drop-in toggle and pro-rata joining
- Help centre: Term classes
- The Monday payout, credits and how member money is handled
- Help centre: Payments
- Notice windows and the credit a player is shown before cancelling
- Help: Cancellation policy
- Reminders, cancellation SMS and per-club notification preferences
- Help: Notifications
- Hours, slot lengths, member rates and automatic holds on facilities
- Help centre: Court hire
- Our tiers, the trial and the two fees, published in Australian dollars
- Pricing page
FAQ: TeamReach vs AllSquads
The honest summary
TeamReach was never trying to take your money, and that is not a criticism, it is the design. It is a free app that lets one team talk, share a schedule and say who is coming, and it does that well enough that thousands of people have rated it highly after living with it for years. If that is the whole of your problem, you already have the right tool and nothing on this page should persuade you otherwise.
The clubs that come looking are the ones where a second, invisible system has grown up beside the chat: a spreadsheet of who has paid, a bank account full of unreferenced transfers, a mental list of who is owed a credit, a whiteboard for the courts and one volunteer holding all of it together. That system has a cost, it is simply paid in evenings instead of invoices.
AllSquads is the half TeamReach leaves alone. Paid enrolments with real capacity, a term class that also sells casual spots, cancellation policies that resolve themselves into credits, a waitlist that offers the place in order, memberships that apply their own rates, courts on the same roster, and one payment into the club account every Monday with every booking itemised.
The fastest way to settle it is to put one real term through it while the group chat carries on as normal. Publish the class, post the link where you already post everything, and see whether the paid list, the waitlist and the Monday report tell you things the RSVPs never could.
- TeamReach is a free team app for messaging, a shared schedule, event RSVPs, attendance and polls, and it does that with almost no setup.
- Its own store listing describes no bookings, no payments, no memberships and no facility booking, so the money has to be collected somewhere else.
Talk to a person
Two minutes, no pitch.
Founding rate locked for life
First 100 paying signups lock the founding rate, no matter what we change later.
Try AllSquads on one real term
Full tier access, 2 months free. A card is required to start, and nothing is charged until your 2 free months end. The free profile and free tiers never need one.