Association cricket, or your own tournament.
PlayHQ runs Australian association cricket. This is for an independent event you own.
The short answer
These two are not really competing for the same event
One is the platform an official season is registered and administered on. The other runs a single tournament you control, where the auction and the entry fees are the work.
Choose PlayHQ when
Your competition sits inside an official association structure.
- Australian community cricket runs on it
- National registration and insurance
- Seasons reporting into a hierarchy
- Player pays a National Registration Fee
Choose CricketOrganizer when
You run an independent tournament that reports to nobody.
- A corporate, club or private cup
- A live player auction builds the squads
- Entry fees straight to you
- Free to 3 teams, auction included
Being accurate about PlayHQ
What its own material says, and what we will not claim
An earlier version of this page asserted that PlayHQ has no auction and that it requires a paid subscription to start. Neither statement was sourced, and the second one is wrong.
PlayHQ’s own support material and Cricket Australia’s Play Cricket Support pages describe registration forms, local programs, and a National Registration Fee paid by the player at registration, which covers insurance and a digital services contribution. Associations can add their own fees on top. That is a materially different arrangement from a club buying a subscription before it can start, which is what this page used to say.
On the auction: we did not find one described in the public cricket material we read, but an absence in the documentation we happened to read is not proof a feature does not exist, so we are not putting a red cross next to it. If an auction matters to you, ask PlayHQ.
The boundary that matters
What CricketOrganizer will not do for you
Most of these are the things PlayHQ exists to do, which is the clearest way to say who should stay where they are.
No association structure
No seasons rolling up to a district, region or state body.
No national registration
No accredited-official records and no insurance layer.
No wagon wheels or ball tracking
Matches are scored ball by ball, but the output is the record, not shot-analysis charts.
No cross-season transfers
Career totals do carry across seasons. Squads do not: players register into each new one.
Payment approval is manual
You review the uploaded screenshot. Nothing confirms it for you.
No PlayHQ import
A player list moves as a spreadsheet. Everything else is set up fresh.
Our own numbers
What we can show you rather than claim
No competitor operating data and no ratings we did not earn. These are CricketOrganizer's own figures, printed with what each one counted.
- 105+
- Tournaments organized
- 80+
- Auctions run
- 3,000+
- Live bids placed
- 95%
- Sell-through
since launch
live bidding, not manual picks
across those auctions
of listed players found a team
Lifetime totals since launch, rounded down. They include tournaments since removed, so they will not match a count of what is live on the platform today.
If the decision is really between named auction or scoring products, read the CricAuction comparison or the CricHeroes comparison. For the whole shortlist, start at the category comparison.
The people behind the tournaments.
We put the auction up on a projector and the hall went quiet every time a bid came in. First time it felt like an event instead of a meeting.
Players registered themselves with photo, role and bowling style. We used to spend a week collecting that over WhatsApp and half of it still came in wrong.
I hammered a player to the wrong team and undid it in a second, in front of the whole room. The bidding just carried on.
The squad and auction PDFs at the end are what the committee actually wanted. Every player, base price and final bid on record, and nobody typed it up.
Entry fees came in over UPI straight to my own account, with the payment screenshot sitting on each registration. No cash box and no register.
Our second season took one evening to set up. The format, the purse and the bid steps were already the way we wanted them.
Good to know
PlayHQ and CricketOrganizer: common decisions
Choosing
Should I move my club off PlayHQ?
Not if your association mandates it, and most Australian community cricket sits inside that structure. PlayHQ is where the season, the registration and the national registration fee live for those competitions, and running your official fixtures somewhere else creates work rather than removing it. The honest case for CricketOrganizer is a separate, independent event: a corporate cup, a club-run auction league, a private tournament that reports to nobody.
What does CricketOrganizer do that suits an auction-led event?
The auction is a stage of the tournament rather than a separate exercise. Registrations feed the player pool, the auction console runs the room with tiered increments and a purse the server enforces, team owners follow their own budget on their phones, and the squads that come out of it become the teams in the fixture list and the points table.
Pricing
How is CricketOrganizer priced?
Per tournament, not per month and not per player. Up to 3 teams and 75 players is free with no card and no trial clock, auction included. You are billed in Australian dollars. Beyond that you pay one flat price for each extra team, up to 32 teams, charged once for the tournament rather than every month. Every feature is on every plan, so paying more buys a bigger event and never a bigger feature list. Entry fees your players pay go straight to you, on whatever terms you set, and we take no share of them. UPI QR codes are an India-only convenience; elsewhere you write your own payment instructions and players upload proof.
Switching
Can I import my data from PlayHQ?
Not directly. There is no PlayHQ importer and we are not going to pretend otherwise. A player list can come across as a spreadsheet using the xlsx template, with name, contact, role and base price. Teams, fixtures and rules are set up fresh, which for a single event is usually under an hour.
Keep exploring
- Cricket Auction SoftwareLive bidding, one screen
- IPL Auction SoftwareAuction night, run properly
- Cricket Fixture GeneratorRound robin to knockout
- Player Registration SoftwareForms, fees, approvals
- Tournament Management SoftwareThe whole tournament, one place
- Cricket Scoring AppBall by ball, from any phone
Running a tournament that reports to nobody?
Up to 3 teams and 75 players run free, auction included, with no card and no trial clock.
Questions? WhatsApp us