Running a PlayHQ club? PlayHQ Websites, or a club platform beside it

First things first: if your club plays in a competition your association runs on PlayHQ, PlayHQ is not something your committee can swap out, and this page will not pretend otherwise. The competition runs there, the draw lives there, and it does that job at a scale no club-sized tool could attempt.

What has changed is the website question. PlayHQ now sells PlayHQ Websites: a club site built automatically from your PlayHQ data, with fixtures, ladders and results that update themselves. That makes this, for the first time, a real choice for a PlayHQ club — use PlayHQ's own website, or use a club platform like ClubHelix for the website and everything else the competition leaves to the club. Both are reasonable. This page sets out which fits which club.

Everything below about PlayHQ comes from its own website, checked on 5 October 2026. Where PlayHQ does not say something publicly, we say so rather than guess.

What PlayHQ is genuinely good at

Competitions, at national scale. Fixtures, ladders, results, live scoring and participant registration, run the same way across every association and grade. When a parent wants to know where the under-13s are playing on Saturday, the answer is authoritative and it is the same everywhere.

Its website is built from that data, and that is the point of it. PlayHQ Websites builds a club site from your PlayHQ account in minutes, using AI to set it up. Fixtures, ladders and results flow onto it in real time, so nobody re-types a score after the round. There are two templates — a Club template built around team pages, news, registration calls to action and shop links, and a League and Association template built around fixtures, ladders and results — with a drag-and-drop editor for your colours, layout and content. You can connect your own domain (the domain fee is separate) or start on a free playhq-sites.com subdomain. Any PlayHQ admin can edit it with their existing login.

Its pricing is published. Organisations pay per registration: for Registration and Competition Management, A$10 a registration under 2,000 registrations, A$8 under 10,000 and A$6 under 50,000, with bigger bodies quoted; Registration and Dashboard Only runs A$7, A$5 and A$4 over similar bands. The Websites subscription is yearly with no lock-in, though PlayHQ does not print its price on the Websites page. If you cancel, the site is taken offline and its content archived.

If the only thing your club needs from a website is a tidy home for your PlayHQ fixtures, registration link and shop link, PlayHQ Websites may be all you need — and it is the least effort option going.

Who covers what

This table maps what each side does, checked against PlayHQ's own pages on 5 October 2026. "Not among the features PlayHQ lists" means exactly that: we looked at its published feature list and did not find it, not that it can never be done.

What you get with ClubHelix that a competition website does not cover

Most clubs on PlayHQ are running three or four things at once: PlayHQ for the comp, a website someone built years ago, a Facebook page, a spreadsheet of social members and a bank account nobody can reconcile. A PlayHQ website tidies up the first two. This is what ClubHelix does with the rest.

A website that is about the club, not just the comp. The canvas page editor edits your site on the site itself, with autosaved recovery drafts, version history and scheduled publishing. Themes carry your colours and fonts, templates give you a starting point, and custom domains mean your address is your club's.

Club membership that is not competition registration. Social members, life members, volunteers, families and non-playing supporters all have fees, terms and renewal dates that a competition platform is not built around. Applications, approvals, dues status, renewal reminders, digital membership cards with live QR verification, and a bulk import with duplicate detection.

Communication from your own address. Broadcasts go out from your club domain with your own DKIM sending identity. SMS, push notifications and member chat cover the fast stuff, and news gives you somewhere permanent to put the match report.

Commerce under one roof. A club shop with a tax engine, event tickets with member pricing, donations, raffles, discount codes and sponsorship records — settling into your own Stripe or Square account, with treasurer exports and an optional Xero sync behind them.

Match day for the games PlayHQ does not run. Internal ladders, club championships, social grades and pre-season rounds can run as their own competitions with a live match centre, without touching the association's draw.

The jobs nobody volunteers for. Court, arena and facility booking, term enrolment, volunteer rostering, incident reporting, accreditation and working-with-children expiry tracking, digital waivers, and governance meetings with agendas and minutes.

Committee-grade control. Roles, council positions and per-person permission overrides; a report catalogue with CSV and PDF exports; daily encrypted backups; an audit log of who changed what; Helix Assistant inside the admin; and a done-for-you service if it is more than your volunteers have time for.

Some of these switch on per plan or per module, so check pricing rather than assuming it all sits on the free tier.

Where PlayHQ is the right answer

Anything the competition owns. Registration into a graded competition, the draw, results and ladders. If your governing body runs it on PlayHQ, it runs there. ClubHelix does not offer governing-body-mandated distribution, and it is not trying to.

A website that is a window onto the competition. If what you want is fixtures, ladders, results, a registration button and a shop link, kept current with no effort, PlayHQ Websites does exactly that from data you already maintain. Native apps on both stores are a genuine plus too, and we do not have them.

Clubs that genuinely need nothing else. If your club has no social members, sells nothing beyond what PlayHQ's shop covers, sends nothing, holds no waivers and owns no facilities, the competition platform and its website really are the whole requirement. Some clubs are that simple, and they should not be sold a platform.

Where ClubHelix fits

ClubHelix runs the club. PlayHQ runs the competition. We are not a replacement for an association's mandated competition platform, and any vendor telling you otherwise is selling you a fight with your governing body.

Where we differ from a PlayHQ website is scope. A PlayHQ site is a front window onto your PlayHQ data, and members are handed back to the PlayHQ portal to join or pay. ClubHelix is the club's own front door and back office: a branded website at your own address, membership beyond competition registration with member accounts on your own site, communications from your own domain, a shop, ticketed events, facility bookings, volunteers, waivers, incident records and governance — in one admin the whole committee can share, with an audit log so the October handover is not an act of faith.

In practice the two sit together neatly. Your ClubHelix site carries a "Register with the club" path and a "Fixtures and ladders" link that goes straight to PlayHQ; if your association publishes a feed, the ladder can appear on your own page with the source credited. Members get one front door. The competition data stays exactly where the sport intends it to.

Setting up alongside PlayHQ

Start with the site, not the data. Pick a template, put your own words and photos in with the canvas editor, and get a home page, a join page, a contact page and a fixtures link live. Nothing is public until you publish.

Link the competition properly. Put your PlayHQ registration and fixture links where members expect them — the main navigation and the join page — rather than buried in a news post from March.

Bring across the members PlayHQ does not hold. Your social members, life members, volunteers and sponsors are almost certainly in a spreadsheet already. Tidy the columns and run it through the bulk import, which flags duplicates and previews the result before writing anything.

Point your domain. If the club already owns one, connect it on a paid plan. If it does not, register one in the club's name first — advice we would give you whoever you choose.

Add the rest a piece at a time. Shop, waivers, volunteer rosters and facility booking do not all have to land in the same month — and bookings settled at the venue need no payment processor, so that one can come first. Pick whichever is currently costing your committee the most evenings.

Or hand it to us. Our done-for-you service does the site build and the setup with you.

Moving your existing website across

Most clubs reading this already have a website somewhere — one a volunteer built, one a supplier hosts, or now perhaps a PlayHQ site — and the question underneath the comparison is what happens to it.

Your content moves by hand, and that is fine. Copy the pages people actually open into a template and make them yours in the canvas editor. Bringing an existing site across automatically is something we are building rather than something we have today, so for now this is a copy-and-tidy job, and it is usually one evening rather than a project. Take the chance to delete the pages nobody has opened since 2021.

Your domain is the asset. Point it at the new site only once the new site is better than the old one, and never cancel the old hosting first — that is how clubs lose an address they have had for a decade. What happens to your old club website has the safe cancellation order.

Your search results are worth keeping. If your old pages ranked for your club's name and your suburb, keep those addresses resolving to the new equivalents rather than letting them 404. Keeping your Google rankings when you change club website covers that in plain English, and how to move your club website is the whole sequence in order.

None of this touches your competition setup, which stays exactly where your association put it.

Frequently asked questions

Do we have to stop using PlayHQ?

No — and you could not anyway if your governing body runs its competitions there. ClubHelix sits alongside it: the competition stays on PlayHQ, and your club's website, membership, communications, shop and operations run on ClubHelix.

Should we just use PlayHQ Websites instead?

If your website only needs to show your PlayHQ fixtures, results, a registration link and a shop link, it is a sensible, low-effort choice and we would not talk you out of it. If you also need social and life memberships, members who log in on your own site, email from your own domain, tickets, raffles, facility bookings, volunteer rosters or waivers, those sit outside what PlayHQ lists for its website, and that is where ClubHelix earns its place.

Can our PlayHQ fixtures and ladder appear on our ClubHelix site?

If your association publishes a data feed, yes — external feeds display a governing body's ladder and fixtures on your own pages, refreshed automatically and credited to the source, and a failed fetch never wipes the last good data. If no feed is published, link straight through to PlayHQ instead, which is the honest answer for most clubs.

Does ClubHelix duplicate our competition registration?

No, and you should not want it to. Registration into the association's competition belongs on PlayHQ. ClubHelix handles club membership, social and life members, volunteers, programs, events and forms — the sign-ups your club owns.

Can we bring our member list into ClubHelix?

Yes. Export whatever list you have to a spreadsheet and bring it in with the bulk import, which flags duplicates and previews the result before writing anything. Our done-for-you service will handle the whole setup, including your website content, if you would rather not.

Is the information on this page current?

The PlayHQ facts here were checked on 5 October 2026 against PlayHQ's own website, including its Websites and pricing pages. If something has changed, or you think we have been unfair, tell us and we will correct it.

Ready to see it for yourself?

Start free at sign up, build a home page and a join page, and put your fixtures link where members can find it. What sits on each tier is on the pricing page, billed on a 28-day cycle. Rather talk it through first? Get in touch. Weighing other platforms too? Every ClubHelix comparison is on one page.