Bracket vs Challonge

Bracket is a free, open-source tournament system for creating events, scheduling matches, tracking scores, and publishing rankings. It supports single-elimination, round-robin, and Swiss formats, with multiple stages and groups or brackets in a tournament. Organizers can move matches between courts or change their start times; Swiss tournaments can schedule matches dynamically based on earlier results. Teams and players can be added or updated individually or uploaded from CSV files. Users can create multiple clubs, each with multiple tournaments. Public dashboard pages show schedules and rankings and can be customized with a logo. Bracket also offers live scoreboards and a REST API, with public specifications in ReDoc and Swagger UI. It runs on web, Linux, and self-hosted setups, and can be deployed using Docker Compose. The project says it collects no analytics data. Its configuration documentation says production registration is currently disabled while the project remains in beta.

Challonge is competition management software for organizers handling registration, tournament progress, and records. It offers more than 25 formats, including single and double elimination, round robin, Swiss, and Grand Prix. Tournament pages can bring together brackets, participants, standings, sponsor details, stations, discussions, and score reporting. Event tools cover paid or unpaid tickets, registration fees, analytics, and attendee check-in; communities can host tournaments, events, contests, announcements, statistics, and Elo leaderboards. Applications can use its API to create tournaments and report scores. Paid registration runs through Stripe. The free Standard plan supports unlimited tournaments, events, and communities, up to 256 participants per tournament, and charges a $0.75 per-order Challonge fee on paid registrations. Premier is $83.88 a year, billed annually, and supports up to 512 participants, with no Challonge registration fee. Both plans limit single-stage Round Robin tournaments to 40 participants. Brackets can be embedded on websites; Premier adds custom themes and priority support. Challonge is available on web and through an API.