Alternatives · For organizers comparing options
A phpMyTourney alternative with nothing to install and nothing to maintain
If you are weighing up options, the question worth answering first is who keeps the thing running on match day. Below is a neutral checklist you can put to anything you are considering, and exactly what Tournamyx does on each point.
Free for small events · Nothing to install
- Price to start
- Free up to 8 players, unlimited events, no card
- To install
- Nothing — it runs in a browser tab
- To maintain
- No server, no database, no upgrades, no backups
- The honest gap
- Your data lives on our servers, not yours
The real cost of running it yourself is not the hosting bill
If you are currently maintaining a tournament tool on your own hosting, you already know the bill is the cheap part. The expensive part is that you are the on-call engineer for it, and the pager goes off on the one morning a year when 200 people are standing in a sports hall waiting for a schedule.
That work is real and it is invisible until it is not: keeping the runtime and the database patched, renewing certificates before they lapse, taking backups you have actually tested restoring, and knowing what to do when a shared host changes a default without telling you. None of it makes your event better. All of it has to happen anyway.
There is a genuine trade in the other direction, and it is worth saying plainly: running your own means the data sits on infrastructure you control, and moving to anything hosted means it does not. If that is the deciding factor for you, it should be — the checklist below is written so you can weigh it honestly rather than talked out of it.
The checklist
What to look for in a phpMyTourney alternative
7 questions to answer against whatever you are evaluating, this product included. We have filled in our own column; the point is that you can check every one of these yourself rather than take anybody’s word for it.
Who is responsible when it breaks during an event?
Anything you host yourself makes that person you, on a morning when you are also running the tournament and cannot stop to read logs.
In Tournamyx
Tournamyx runs as a hosted web app at scores.tournamyx.com. There is no server of yours in the path, so a bad morning is not also an infrastructure problem you have to fix between matches.
What has to be kept patched and upgraded?
Self-hosted software sits on a language runtime, a database and a web server, and every one of them ships security updates you are responsible for applying.
In Tournamyx
Nothing on your side. Tournamyx is updated centrally and every organizer is on the current version — there is no upgrade for you to schedule and nothing to migrate between releases.
What happens to your data if the server goes away?
A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis. Hosting that lapses, or a disk that fails between events, takes the fixture history with it.
In Tournamyx
Tournament data is stored and backed up by Tournamyx. The honest trade is stated above: that means it is on our infrastructure rather than yours, which is the right call for some organizers and the wrong one for others.
Can spectators reach it without you configuring anything?
Getting a self-hosted page in front of a few hundred phones means a domain, a certificate and enough capacity for everyone opening it at once.
In Tournamyx
Every tournament gets one public link that works in any browser with no account, no login and no app. Certificates, domain and capacity are not yours to arrange.
How long does it take to get from nothing to a schedule?
Install, database setup and configuration happen before you have entered a single team, and that time is spent again on every fresh deployment.
In Tournamyx
About five minutes from a team list to a shareable link: paste the teams, pick a format, enter how many courts or fields you have. The schedule itself generates in roughly ten seconds.
Can more than one person enter scores at once?
On a multi-court day, one person typing every result is the bottleneck, and it usually means results lag an hour behind play.
In Tournamyx
Tournamyx has owner, admin and member roles plus per-tournament scoring permissions, so several people can score at the same time from different courts into the same standings.
What does it cost once the event is real?
Self-hosting trades a licence for a hosting bill plus your time, and the time is the part that never appears on an invoice.
In Tournamyx
Free forever for tournaments up to 8 players with unlimited events. Plus is $19/month for 64 players, Pro is $49/month for 256, and a one-off $9 unlocks a single event for 30 days.
What Tournamyx does
What replaces the install step
There is no install. Tournamyx runs in a browser tab, and the setup that would otherwise be a database and a config file is three answers: your team list, a format, and how many courts or fields you actually have. The tournament schedule maker shows the shape of that before you create an account.
Formats are chosen at generation time rather than configured: round robin, single elimination, double elimination, Swiss, and group stage into knockout. Byes are placed automatically on the top seeds, so an entry count that is not a power of two needs no manual padding.
If you want to see the arithmetic before committing anything, every generator on this site runs in the browser with no account and nothing saved — paste a team list and the match counts, rounds and byes appear immediately.
What replaces the maintenance window
The work that disappears is the work nobody sees: runtime and database patching, certificate renewal, backup verification, and the upgrade you postpone because the last one broke something the week before an event. Tournamyx is updated centrally, so every organizer is on the current version without scheduling anything.
What you keep is control over the event itself. The draw can be seeded deliberately or randomised, fixtures can be swapped by hand after generation, and a team that drops out can be replaced without rebuilding the bracket — the standings and the public link update together.
The one thing to weigh honestly is the one named in the checklist: hosted means the data is on our infrastructure. If your reason for self-hosting is that the data must stay on hardware you control, that reason does not go away because the maintenance is annoying, and no feature list here should talk you out of it.
Proven at the size where self-hosting gets stressful
Tournamyx ran the IIUM Robotic Competition in July 2025: 406 teams across 3 categories, 755 matches scheduled and scored live across 8 fields, all on a single public link. That is the scale at which a self-hosted box either holds up or becomes the story of the day.
Scheduling is round-based: matches are laid out a round at a time across the court or field count you enter, and because a round already has each team in at most one match, a round spread across your courts cannot double-book anyone. There is no rest-gap optimiser and no awareness across separate tournaments — categories are separate tournaments, so it will not spot a competitor entered in two of them.
For the paper side of the day, a live event exports print-ready schedules and blank scoresheets per court as PDFs, and the printable bracket produces a wall sheet with no account at all.
Is there anything to install or host?
No. Tournamyx is a hosted web app at scores.tournamyx.com and runs in any modern browser on desktop, tablet or phone. There is no server to provision, no database to configure, no certificate to renew, and nothing for scorers or spectators to download.
Can tournament data be exported?
Tournamyx exports the full match schedule and blank scoresheets for every court as print-ready PDFs, and every tournament has a public results page showing the schedule, live scores, standings and brackets. On the Pro plan those PDFs carry your organization logo.
What does Tournamyx cost compared with self-hosting?
Tournamyx is free forever for tournaments of up to 8 players with unlimited tournaments and no credit card. Plus is $19 per month for 64 players, Pro is $49 per month for 256, and a one-off $9 unlocks a single event for 30 days at 64 players.
Where is tournament data stored?
On Tournamyx infrastructure, not on your own server. That is the direct trade for having nothing to maintain, and it is the point to weigh first if your reason for self-hosting is that data must remain on hardware you control.
Which formats can Tournamyx generate?
Tournamyx generates round-robin, single elimination with automatic byes, double elimination with winners and losers brackets and an optional grand final reset, Swiss rounds, group stage into knockout, and attempt-based placement scoring for time trials and robotics runs.
Still comparing
Other options organizers weigh up.
Kickoff
Test it with your real team list.
The free generators need no account and save nothing — paste your teams and see the match count, rounds and byes before you decide anything.
Free for small events · No credit card · Nothing to install
Disclosure
Tournamyx is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any other tournament platform. Product names and trademarks mentioned on this page belong to their respective owners and are used only to describe what a reader may be searching for. This page makes no claims about any other product’s features, pricing or capabilities — for those, check that product’s own site. Every capability described here describes Tournamyx.