Chickadee Bandit

Eight team and group apps, by what each one is actually for

TeamSnap, Spond, Heja, BAND, GroupMe, Remind, SignUpGenius and ours, compared for a coach, teacher or group leader by price, ads and what each does.

Compare › Team communication app for parents

Quick answer

For a youth sports team or league that collects fees and wants stats and drills: TeamSnap. For a club that wants to collect payments with no subscription: Spond. For one volunteer-coached team that wants the simplest app parents will install: Heja. For a big social group that wants a feed, albums and live video: BAND. For a free group chat anyone can join by text: GroupMe. For a teacher reaching families by text, in their own language: Remind. For sign-up slots and collecting money from people who will never join an app: SignUpGenius. For a coach or leader who wants to broadcast, take RSVPs and the roll, and keep families' contact details private from each other, with no ads: ours.

"Team app" means two different things. One is a sports product built around a season: the schedule, the roster, fees, stats and a league above the team. The other is a way to reach a group of people: a feed, a chat or a class list, whether the group is a team, a class, a choir or a troop. Most coaches end up with one of each, plus a sign-up sheet for snacks.

This list is for the person running the group, ordered from the most complete sports product to the most general tool. We make one of the eight and it is marked. Every price here is from each product's own pricing page, help center or app store listing, checked in September 2026, and where a price is not published we say so rather than quote a review site.

The list

  1. TeamSnap

    Best for: A youth sports team, club or league that collects fees and wants sports-specific tools

    The most complete sports product here: schedules, rosters, messages, assignments, invoicing, game statistics, and practice plans and drills from its pro-league partners. Clubs and leagues get registration, org-wide messaging and live streaming. Read the plan labels: availability and RSVP tracking are paid features, and the free plan stops at 15 players. On a paid plan, the ads go away for the team's owner and managers only; parents still see them unless they buy their own TeamSnap+ subscription, which does not remove them on the web either. It runs on iPhone, Android and the web.

    Cost: Per team: free for teams under 15 players, with ads; Premium $10.83/mo billed yearly or $18.99/mo, Ultra (unlimited roster) $13.75/mo billed yearly or $25.99/mo, with a free trial of 7 days. Clubs and leagues are quoted after a demo. Online invoices cost the payer 3.25% + $1.50.

  2. Spond

    Best for: A grassroots club that wants to collect payments with no subscription

    Free team and club organizing funded by payments rather than a plan: events with a season planner, availability requests, waitlists, polls, file storage, messaging with guardian oversight for players under age, payment requests and fundraising raffles, for up to 500 members. It is strongest in UK and European grassroots sport, and its Spond Club tier adds membership management and a club website. We found no game stats or live scores. It runs on iPhone, Android and the web.

    Cost: No subscription and no paid plan: Spond earns from payments and brand partners. Each payment costs $1.00 + 3.29% in the US and Canada, paid by the group unless it passes the fee on. The ads cannot be removed. An optional club website carries a monthly fee after a free trial.

  3. Heja

    Best for: One volunteer-coached team that wants the simplest app parents will install

    A small, mobile-first team app: schedule, RSVPs, team chat with read receipts and shared documents, free for one admin. Team Pro adds unlimited admins, reminders, polls, attendance statistics, payment collection and the desktop version, and removes ads for coaches and admins; parents keep seeing them unless the team is on Pro Max or they buy Heja Plus themselves. It says more than 300,000 teams use it. We found no game stats or live scores, and the free plan is phone-only.

    Cost: Free with ads. Team Pro from $8.33, per team; Heja's pricing page does not state the period, and the price shown at checkout varies with the number of teams. Team Pro Max, which removes ads for every member, publishes no price. In-app payments, on Pro only, cost the payer about 2–5%.

  4. Chickadee Bandit

    That's us

    Best for: A coach, teacher or group leader who broadcasts to families and needs to know who is coming

    A roster rather than a chat room: families see the coach and never each other, a parent can message the coach and only the coach, and nobody's phone number is shared. Announcements expire so last week's change is not still on top, the schedule lands on each family's own calendar, Event RSVPs gives a headcount and reminds only the families who have not answered, and Attendance shows who has been drifting. Polls, surveys and documents install per space, four to ten apps at once depending on the plan, and a join link or a printed QR code fills the roster. Each family keeps its own household private beside it. What we do not do: we collect no fees or registrations, keep no stats or scores, send no text messages and translate nothing. Volunteer sign-ups, carpools and the gear closet need a space where families see each other, which holds 8 people on Family, 12 on Group or 20 on Organization. It runs on iPhone, Android and the web, with no ads and a full data export on every plan.

    Cost: The leader sponsors the space and every family joins free. $6/mo or $60/yr on the Family plan, or the Community add-on alone at $30/yr, runs a roster of up to 30 members; Group ($10/mo) runs rosters of 75 and Organization ($30/mo or $300/yr) rosters of 200. 30-day free trial with no card. No payments, so no processing fees.

  5. BAND

    Best for: A large, social group that wants a feed, albums and live video

    A private social network for a group, and the widest free feature set on this list: a feed with comments, photo and video albums, files, chat and group calls, live broadcasts of up to two hours, a calendar with RSVPs that syncs to Google, Apple and Outlook, polls, surveys, sign-up sheets, to-do lists and attendance sheets. A band holds up to 1,000 members by default and more if the admin allows it. Members see each other and each other's posts, which is the point for a church group, alumni class or hobby club; phone numbers and birthdays stay hidden unless the admin turns them on, and the admin can limit who posts and who starts a chat. Children under 13 join only through BAND for Kids, with a parent's consent. It is made by NAVER and runs on iPhone, Android, the web and a desktop app.

    Cost: Free with ads, which BAND says are never shown to users under 18. No paid plan for groups. Ad removal and extra storage are sold only in the app: on its App Store listing, ad removal is $1.99 for 30 days and 100 GB of storage for a band $16.99 for six months or $33.99 a year.

  6. GroupMe

    Best for: A free group chat that anyone can join, including by text message

    The group chat, done simply: groups of up to 5,000, direct messages, polls with up to ten options, calendar events with reminders, a photo gallery, and announcement groups where only admins post. In the US, a member without the app can take part by ordinary text message. Microsoft itself warns that every message goes to everyone and large groups get noisy, and it has no attendance or sign-up slots. It runs on iPhone, Android and the web.

    Cost: Free, with no paid plan: Microsoft says it does not charge for the service. No payments.

  7. Remind

    Best for: A teacher or school coach reaching families by text, in their own language

    Class messaging that reaches families however they read: by text with no smartphone needed, by email, in the app or on the web, with automatic translation into more than 90 languages and phone numbers hidden on both sides. It is now part of ParentSquare, where school districts are sent. We found no calendar RSVPs, sign-ups or attendance. It runs on iPhone, Android and the web.

    Cost: Remind Chat is free, for up to 10 classes of 150 participants each. Remind Hub, for up to 5,000 per class, is sold only to schools and organizations and publishes no price. No payments.

  8. SignUpGenius

    Best for: Volunteer and snack sign-ups, and collecting money, from people who will never join an app

    The public sign-up sheet: anyone can claim a slot from a link without an account, with confirmation and reminder emails, recurring sign-ups, waitlists and volunteer-hour reports on Gold, and payment collection for dues, fees, tickets and donations. It is not a chat app: messages go out as email and texts under monthly allowances, 1,000 emails and no texts on the free plan. It runs on the web and an iPhone app.

    Cost: Free with ads on every sign-up. Silver $11.99/mo or $107.89/yr, Gold $29.99/mo or $269.89/yr, Platinum $59.99/mo or $539.89/yr, which remove ads from 1 sign-up, 10, or all of them. Card payments cost 3.95% + $0.95 on every plan, e-checks 1.95%.

Prices and features are from each product's own site as of September 2026; where a product has a head-to-head page here, its entry restates that page. Products change — always check the other product's site for current details.

Choosing between them

  1. Ask your league, club or school first. If it already pays for TeamSnap, Spond or ParentSquare, use that for the job it covers.
  2. If you collect registration or team fees online and want stats, drills or live scores, TeamSnap.
  3. If you run a club that wants to collect payments and does not want a subscription, Spond.
  4. If you coach one team and want the simplest app the parents will install, Heja.
  5. If your group is social and wants a shared feed, albums and live video, BAND.
  6. If you want a free chat everyone is already on, GroupMe.
  7. If you teach, and families need texts in their own language, Remind.
  8. If the job is a sign-up sheet, with or without money, SignUpGenius.
  9. If you want to tell everyone once, know who is coming, take the roll, and keep families' contact details away from each other, with no ads, that is what we built.

Free, with ads, or paid by the team

Most of these are free to start and paid for by advertising: TeamSnap, Spond, Heja, BAND and SignUpGenius all show ads on their free plans, and on TeamSnap and Heja a paid plan removes the ads for the coach and admins, not for the parents. The ones that collect money also earn on every payment, from a percentage plus, on most, a fixed fee, as each row says. GroupMe and Remind's free Chat are free and collect nothing. Ours is paid for by one leader's plan, shows no ads to anyone and handles no money, so it has no fees; the trade-off is that families pay dues and fees some other way.

Privacy between families

On a group chat or a social feed, everyone in the group can see everyone else, and usually their profile. That suits friends and adults who chose to be there. It is a question for a youth team or a class, whose families did not choose each other. Check each product's settings for what members can see. Remind hides phone numbers on both sides of a text, and ours is built so that families see the leader and never each other.

What none of them does

None of these replaces your league's registration, your club's insurance or your school's rules on contacting students. None imports another's history, so export the roster and the contact list before you switch, and tell families where to go before the old chat goes quiet.

The feature list is not fixed

Every other product on this page is a fixed set of features: it does what it does, and a need it did not anticipate gets a no. Chickadee Bandit is built from small apps, and a household can add one of its own. An admin describes the app in a paragraph on the Apps page and the hub builds and installs it, using the AI credits that come with every plan; someone who writes code can start from any of the open-source apps and install their own version from a URL. A custom app gets the same checks as the ones we ship: it declares what it reads and writes, keeps its data in your household's own database, and the hub refuses anything it did not ask for.

How to build a custom app for your household

Where this list comes from

We make one of the products on it, and it is marked. Every claim about another product was checked against that product's own pricing and feature pages on the date above — not against another review site — and where we could not find a published price we say so rather than quote one. The order is by what each product is for, not a ranking of merit.

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