Looking for a TidyHQ alternative?

TidyHQ earned its place in Australian community life. Scout groups, service clubs and associations run their membership, minutes and finances through it, and its committee tooling is genuinely mature. If you are a general community group and TidyHQ is humming along, there may be no reason to move.

Sports clubs are where the fit gets tighter. TidyHQ is a general-purpose administration product — membership, finances, meetings and comms — with no competitions, teams, fixtures or match-day story, and a website capability that is a smaller part of the product than the admin behind it. That is not a defect. It is a different product to the one a football club needs in the last week of March.

If your club adopted TidyHQ because it was the local default, and you now keep fixtures in a spreadsheet and a sign-on day held together by email, this is for you. We build ClubHelix, so read our conclusions with that in mind — but every claim below about TidyHQ comes from public information, and where we could not verify something, we say so.

What TidyHQ is genuinely good at

TidyHQ has spent years refining the unglamorous machinery of running an incorporated association — meetings, minutes, office bearers, the paperwork a secretary is personally on the hook for — and that maturity shows. It is easy to underrate until you try to reconstruct a year of decisions from a shared inbox. Its finance and treasurer workflows are the other real strength, and for a group whose year is defined by an AGM and a set of accounts, that combination is most of the product.

It is also Australian, from Adelaide, with real mindshare at the Scouts-and-Rotary end of community life. That matters more than a feature table suggests: the treasurer joining your committee has probably used it before. On the Pro plan it carries unlimited contacts and unlimited admins, which removes a whole category of anxiety for a group with a growing list.

Feature by feature

Here is the detailed comparison. Every cell in the TidyHQ column comes from public information checked on 24 July 2026; where we could not verify something, the cell says so rather than guessing.

What you get with ClubHelix that you would otherwise bolt on

The table above is one point made repeatedly: a general administration tool does the administration, and a club buys four or five other things to do the rest. Here is what arrives in the same login instead.

The website, as a first-class product. The canvas page editor lets a committee member edit the site on the site itself, dragging sections around with autosaved recovery drafts, on a theme in your own colours. News posts schedule and publish an RSS feed, events handle recurrence and iCal subscriptions, and venue pages carry interactive maps.

Sport, properly. Competitions with divisions, fixtures and self-computing ladders, a finals series seeded from the ladder, a live match centre, team management with training attendance, and an officials register with appointments and fees. This is the part no general admin tool has, and the part that eats a secretary's Wednesday nights.

Commerce beyond dues. A club shop with variants, categories and a tax engine that snapshots the tax position onto every order. Event tickets with automatic member pricing. Discount codes with windows, caps and minimum spend. Raffles with permit details on the draw, because raffle rules in Australia are set state by state. Donations, waitlists and a sponsorship CRM with tiers, slots and a ready-made sponsor wall.

Facilities and programs. Courts, pitches and rooms bookable on a venue map you draw yourself, with clashes prevented rather than apologised for, and term programs with capacity, waitlists and session attendance.

The compliance work nobody volunteers for. Incident reporting as a structured register. Working-with-children checks, first aid and coaching credentials tracked with expiry reminders. Volunteer rostering with capacity and self-serve sign-up. A form builder with conditional fields, and versioned digital waivers so you can prove which wording somebody accepted. Governance meetings with lockable minutes and recorded motions.

Things you only notice when they are missing. An append-only audit log. Daily encrypted backups verified by real restore tests. Roles, council positions and per-person permission overrides, so the registrar sees what the registrar needs and nothing else. A report catalogue with saved views and committee packs. And the Helix Assistant, which edits a page or answers a "how do I" in plain English — worth a lot when the admin changes hands every October.

Where TidyHQ may still be the better call

Be honest about what your organisation is. If you are a community group rather than a sporting club — a service club, a scout group, a hobby association — and your year revolves around meetings, membership and accounts, TidyHQ is built for exactly that and we are not the obvious upgrade. Its committee tooling is deeper than ours at running an incorporated association's paperwork, and its finance workflows are more developed. ClubHelix takes payments, exports for your bookkeeper and reports on the numbers; it is not a finance ledger, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Our own gaps are worth naming, because they are the ones people find in month three. We have no native app-store apps — our mobile experience is an installable web app with push notifications, which works well but is not a listing in the App Store. There is no Zapier connector, so chaining tools together means our REST API and webhooks. We have no background-check or screening integration; we track credentials and expiry dates, but somebody still runs the check. Payments run on Stripe and Square only, so no GoCardless direct debit. And the admin, your club's public site and member accounts are in English only today; only our own marketing site has Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese previews.

If TidyHQ is working, the cost of moving is real and the benefit has to be too. Migrations are cheapest at the start of a season.

Where ClubHelix fits

Choose ClubHelix when your club has a public face and a season. That is the dividing line. If people need to find you before they join, if there are teams and a draw, if money moves for more than one reason — subs, tickets, merchandise, a raffle — then the website and the administration are the same job, and running them as two products is where the effort goes.

ClubHelix is built for Australian clubs specifically: finals labels that read the way your season ends, financial-year quarters with GST and BAS figures your treasurer reports on, raffle rules handled state by state. It is one system where the join button on the page you just edited creates a member record, takes the payment and marks them paid, on your own domain. Free tier to start, published pricing on a 28-day cycle when you outgrow it.

Switching from TidyHQ

It is a spreadsheet-shaped migration, which is good news — there is nothing proprietary to unpick.

1. Export your members from TidyHQ to CSV. Take the payment history too, so the treasurer has continuity.
2. Import the roster with our bulk CSV import, which detects duplicates and previews the whole thing before writing.
3. Rebuild the site from a club site template, then make it yours in the canvas editor. Most committees have something publishable in an evening.
4. Point your domain at the new site on a paid tier. The setup guide covers over twenty DNS providers, including the big Australian registrars, with a copy button on every record value.
5. Turn on what you need — registrations, competitions, shop, facilities — rather than everything at once.

If nobody on the committee has the time, our done-for-you setup does the migration and the first build for you.

Two guides worth the time first: moving club member data between systems, on checking your export before you commit to anything, and how long it takes to switch club software, for setting the committee's expectations honestly rather than optimistically.

Frequently asked questions

We are a community group, not a sports club — is ClubHelix still a fit?

Often, yes. ClubHelix suits community organisations that want a strong public website with membership, events and payments behind it. If your needs are mostly meetings and light administration, TidyHQ remains a fine choice and we will say so.

Can we move our member data across?

Yes. Export your members to a spreadsheet and bring them in with our bulk CSV import, which flags duplicates and previews the import before writing anything. Our done-for-you service can handle the whole migration, website content included.

Does ClubHelix replace our accounting software?

No, and it should not. ClubHelix takes payments through your club's own connected account and produces accounting-shaped exports, with reports on Australian financial-year quarters including GST and BAS. Your books still live in your accounting package.

Is there a mobile app for members?

There is an installable app members add to their home screen, with lock-screen push notifications and no app store involved. It is not a native app-store listing, and if that matters to your club, know it before you switch.

What does ClubHelix cost compared with TidyHQ?

TidyHQ publishes a free plan and Pro at US$69 a month, listed as A$89, NZ$99 and £49, with Enterprise quoted for governing bodies. Each plan also takes a service fee on payments on top of Stripe's fees: 3% + A$0.20 on the free plan and 1% + A$0.20 on Pro (checked 5 October 2026). ClubHelix has a free tier and published tiers billed every 28 days, or yearly at a discount — see our pricing page.

Is the comparison on this page current?

TidyHQ's details were checked on 24 July 2026 from public information. If something here is out of date or unfair, tell us and we will correct it.

Ready to see it for yourself?

Most clubs find the gap the same way: the season starts, the draw changes on a Wednesday, and the website is the last thing anyone updates. The fix is one system where the page and the machinery are the same product. Start free, or check the pricing first.