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Some clubs are happy on a spreadsheet. Some need a single-purpose tool. The three comparisons below cover where SailHQ fits and where it doesn't.
Three full comparisons, written from the perspective of a UK sailing club committee. No fake feature ticks, no manufactured wins.
Three side-by-side comparisons, written for sailing clubs.
The right comparison depends on what your club is running today. Most UK sailing clubs sit in one of three places. The first is the spreadsheet club, where the membership list lives in Excel, the duty rota is a Google Sheet, and the only "system" is the muscle memory of whichever volunteer has been on the committee longest. That works at small scale. It stops working when the committee turns over and the new lot can't find half the files.
The second is the patchwork club. Duty rota in one tool, payments in another, a website built somewhere else, an email list on top, and a shared drive holding all of it together. Each tool does its one job well. The problem is the seams between them - when someone joins, three different systems need updating, and when someone leaves, two of them get forgotten.
The third is the generalist platform club. The committee picked a cross-sport club management tool that was meant to handle everything from rugby to rowing, and the sailing-specific bits never quite fit. There's no concept of an OOD, no qualification gating on safety boats, and the duty types had to be bent into "events" because the platform never had sailing in mind.
Pick the comparison below that matches your situation. If a spreadsheet still suits your club, the spreadsheet page will tell you so. The aim is not to argue every club should be on SailHQ - it is to give you enough detail to decide for yourself.
Comparison 1
What you outgrow when the membership list hits 60 names
Spreadsheets are free, familiar and infinitely flexible - which is exactly why they break at the worst time. The full comparison covers where Excel still wins, the symptoms of having outgrown it, and what changes when one live system replaces seven workbooks. Worth noting what you lose, too: there is no spreadsheet match for ad hoc formulae.
Read the comparisonComparison 2
When you've patched together duty rota, payments, and a website
Each single-purpose tool does its one job well. The committee pays the cost in the seams - reconciling members across three logins, watching renewal dates drift between systems, copy-pasting duty details into the website. The full comparison weighs the polish of best-of-breed against the friction of holding it all together by hand.
Read the comparisonComparison 3
When the cross-sport platform doesn't know what an OOD is
Generalist club platforms cover dozens of sports with one schema. The trade-off shows up in the language - "events" instead of races, "roles" instead of duty types, no native handling for safety boat qualifications or Portsmouth ratings. The full comparison covers what generalist tools do better and where sailing-native software changes the day-to-day.
Read the comparisonSailHQ is sailing-native and admin-focused. There are two categories of tool we deliberately don't try to replace, and we won't pretend otherwise.
The first is dedicated race scoring software. Sailing scoring tools have decades of work behind them on Portsmouth, IRC, ORC and the more interesting corners of the racing rules. SailHQ handles series planning, race calendars, duty allocation and entry tracking - then your existing scoring tool takes the results and does what it does best.
The second is full accounting software. SailHQ tracks membership fees, renewal status and payment due dates, but VAT returns, year-end accounts and full bookkeeping belong in a dedicated accounting package. Pair SailHQ with both for a complete club tech stack - one system for admin, one for scoring, one for the books. That is the real shape of a sailing club's tech stack, and trying to collapse all three into a single tool tends to weaken at least one of them.
More questions? Read the full FAQ, browse the sailing club software overview, or contact the team.
A 30 minute demo with your own club configured - your duty types, your membership tiers, your race calendar. The fastest way to judge whether SailHQ replaces what you have or pairs with it.
Six months free for early access clubs. Built in the UK.