TidyHQ vs Wild Apricot — and where a club platform beats both

These two end up on the same shortlist more often than you would expect, because they answer the same question from opposite sides of the world. TidyHQ, from Adelaide, is the Australian default for community groups: membership, finances, meetings and comms, with committee paperwork as its centre of gravity. Wild Apricot, from Toronto, is the long-established membership and association platform: a database, a member portal, events and payments, with more than fifteen years of association workflows behind it.

Both are good products. If you are a service club, a professional body or an incorporated association whose year is defined by an AGM and a renewals run, one of them is probably right for you. Every claim about them below comes from public information checked in July 2026.

This page exists because many of the people comparing them are running a sporting club, and neither product is built for one. Both are administration platforms with a website attached. A club needs the reverse — a public site people find before they join, with the administration behind it — plus machinery neither vendor attempts. We build that product, ClubHelix, so weigh our conclusions accordingly; the third column is there to be judged on the same rows.

TidyHQ at a glance

TidyHQ is general club and association administration: membership, finances, meetings and comms in one place. Its committee tooling is the mature part, refined over years at the Scouts-and-Rotary end of Australian community life, and its finance and treasurer workflows are the other real strength. It is Australian-built and Australian-understood, which matters when a new treasurer joins already knowing the product.

Pricing, re-checked on 5 October 2026, is a free plan plus Pro at US$69 a month or US$690 a year — published locally as A$89, NZ$99 and £49 — with unlimited contacts, unlimited admins and 30,000 emails a month, and an Enterprise plan aimed at governing bodies. Both plans also carry a TidyHQ service fee on payments on top of Stripe's: 3% + A$0.20 on the free plan, 1% + A$0.20 on Pro. What it does not have is a sport story: no competitions, fixtures or match-day tooling. The website is a smaller part of the product than the administration behind it.

Wild Apricot at a glance

Wild Apricot is the generic default for membership and association management — a site builder, a member database, events and payments — serving associations, clubs and nonprofits in the United States and Canada. Its depth is real: more than fifteen years of association workflows, a member portal people log into and maintain themselves, and one of the largest integration directories in the category. It also publishes the biggest content library any of us have.

Pricing scales by contact count, and there is no longer a free plan: a 60-day trial, then US$66 a month at 100 contacts, with 10% off for pre-paying a year and 15% for two (checked 5 October 2026). The website builder is in an established but older style (July 2026). Like TidyHQ, it has no teams, competitions or match-day tooling.

Head to head

Every cell in the TidyHQ and Wild Apricot columns comes from public information checked on 24 July 2026. Where we could not verify something, the cell says so.

The Wild Apricot pricing below was re-checked on its own pricing page on 5 October 2026. It no longer has a free plan: there is a 60-day free trial with no setup fee, then US$66 a month at 100 contacts, or US$59.40 a month if you pre-pay a year and US$56.10 a month for two. Its page offers its own integrated payment processing, or other payment systems for an additional fee, without saying what that fee is. We could not read the higher contact tiers, so ask for the full table in writing with your own contact count in it. The rest of the Wild Apricot column is still from the July 2026 check.

Where TidyHQ wins

Committees, and Australia. If your organisation is an incorporated association whose year runs on meetings, minutes, office bearers and accounts, TidyHQ has been refining exactly that machinery for years and it shows. Its finance and treasurer workflows are more developed than ours, and unlimited contacts and admins on one Pro price removes a whole category of budgeting anxiety for a growing list.

Local familiarity is worth more than it looks on a feature table. The treasurer joining your committee next October may already know TidyHQ, and there are people around who can answer a question. Against Wild Apricot specifically, TidyHQ is the one that publishes an Australian price and understands an Australian committee.

Where Wild Apricot wins

Depth and connections. Fifteen years of association work produces a database that has already met your edge case, and a portal people keep up to date themselves — the difference between a secretary who maintains the list and one who does not have to. Against TidyHQ, that portal depth is the clearest gap.

The integration directory is the other, and a fair advantage to concede. If your operations already hang off other systems that connect to Wild Apricot, that fact alone can decide the whole thing, and no feature comparison will out-argue it. Its guides and templates also mean the product is well understood by anyone you might hire.

Where ClubHelix fits

Look down the middle of that table and a pattern appears. On membership, meetings and money, both hold their own — and on committee depth and integrations they beat us outright. Then comes a block of rows where the two columns say the same thing: no competitions, no teams, no match day, no SMS or chat, no shop. That block is the difference between an administration platform and a club platform.

A sporting club does not just have members. It has teams and a draw that changes on a Wednesday. It has a canteen roster, a sign-on day, courts two groups both want at six o'clock, and merchandise somebody's partner sells from a spreadsheet. It has working-with-children checks that expire, injuries to record properly, and waivers you may need to produce years later in the exact wording somebody accepted. And a public website that has to convince a parent before any of the rest matters.

ClubHelix puts those in one system. The join button on the page you just edited in the canvas editor creates a member record, takes the payment through your club's own connected account and marks them paid — on your own domain. Behind it sit competitions with ladders and finals, a live match centre, a shop with a tax engine, event ticketing with member pricing, facility booking paid by card or at the venue, raffles with state-by-state permit handling, sponsorship management, volunteer rostering, an incident register, governance meetings, an audit log and daily verified backups. It is built for Australian clubs down to the details: financial-year quarters with GST and BAS figures, finals labels that read the way your season ends.

We have gaps, and you should know them first. No Zapier connector, so connecting other tools means our REST API and webhooks — Wild Apricot wins that comparison. No native app-store apps: our mobile experience is an installable web app with push notifications. No background-check or screening integration; we track credentials and expiry dates, but somebody still runs the check. Payments are Stripe and Square only, so no GoCardless direct debit. 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. And we are younger than both.

Moving across from either

Both of these are administration platforms holding the things an organisation cannot afford to lose — the contact list, the finance history, the meeting record. So the order below is deliberately cautious, and the first step is the one people skip.

Export first, and read the file. Before you commit to any move, get your contacts and your financial history out of your current system and open them. What a platform hands back varies, so check rather than assume: if custom fields, join dates or consent records are not in the export, they are not coming, and you want that on the table while it is still a decision rather than a discovery. Keep the finance history as a file regardless — your treasurer needs continuity across the changeover whatever you do next, and a spreadsheet in the club's own drive is the safest place for it.

Bring the members in. A cleaned CSV imports with duplicate detection and a dry run, so the whole thing is previewed before a single record is written.

Rebuild the public side. Start from a template and make the pages that matter yours in the canvas editor. Bringing an existing website across automatically is something we are building rather than something we have today, so for now the content moves by hand — which for most organisations is an evening, and a good excuse to delete the pages nobody has opened since 2021.

Change the domain last and keep the old addresses working, so the search results people already use still land somewhere. Keeping your Google rankings when you change club website is the guide for that part.

Two things never come across, on any platform. The design, which is rebuilt rather than imported. And stored card details or direct debit authorities, which cannot be transferred between providers because the authorisation was given to the provider and not to you — so every member on a recurring payment has to authorise again. For a membership organisation that is the single biggest risk in the whole move, and it is worth running as a deliberate campaign: switching club software without losing your members sets out how. The full order of operations is how to move your club website, and done-for-you setup is the option where we do it instead.

Frequently asked questions

Which is better for a sporting club, TidyHQ or Wild Apricot?

Neither is built for one. TidyHQ is stronger if your club is committee-heavy and Australian; Wild Apricot if your membership database is complex and you need its integrations. Both leave fixtures, teams, match day and merchandise for you to solve elsewhere.

Which is cheaper?

It depends on your size. TidyHQ publishes one Pro price with unlimited contacts, so a large list is cheap. Wild Apricot scales by contact count from US$66 a month at 100 contacts, with no free plan, so a growing list re-prices as it grows. Both prices re-checked on 5 October 2026.

Do either of them build a proper club website?

Both include a website. TidyHQ's is a lighter part of a product built around administration; Wild Apricot's is in an established but older style. If the public site does real recruitment work for your club, look closely in a demo.

Can we run competitions and fixtures on either?

No. Neither has competitions, fixtures, ladders or match-day tooling. If your season needs them, that machinery comes from a governing-body platform, a separate product, or a club platform that includes it.

Can we move data from either one into ClubHelix?

Yes, and both are spreadsheet-shaped migrations. Export your members to CSV, bring them in with our bulk import — it flags duplicates and previews everything before writing — then rebuild the site from a template. Our done-for-you setup can do it all for you.

Is the comparison on this page current?

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

Ready to see it for yourself?

If the shortlist really is these two, pick the one built for your kind of organisation and do not overthink it. If you are a club with a season, a draw and a shopfront, neither is that, and the workarounds compound every year. Start free with ClubHelix, or read the pricing first.