Looking for a footytips alternative? Here's a straight comparison
26 August 2026 · 3 min read
If you’re reading this, something probably just happened. Your competition froze mid-finals, a round of tips vanished, or you’re staring at the app wondering why it’s asking you to log in again for the third time this week. You’re not imagining it — footytips has a well-documented reliability problem, and you’re not the first organiser it’s cost a season.
This isn’t a takedown. footytips has been around a long time, it’s free, and for a lot of competitions it works fine. This is a straight, feature-by-feature look at what you’d actually be trading if you moved a competition over — so you can decide with facts instead of a grudge.
The reliability question, first — because it’s the reason you’re here 🔧
A May 2026 App Store review of footytips put it about as plainly as it can be put: it “freezes more often than it opens.” That’s not an outlier complaint — footytips sits at 1.8 stars across roughly 4,010 reviews, with the same complaints (freezing, lost tips, login loops) showing up for years, not weeks. It also still has around 500,000+ downloads, so plenty of people are living with it — but “plenty of people put up with it” and “it works well” aren’t the same claim.
We’re not going to promise you TippingMates never has a bad day — no app can honestly promise that, and we’d rather tell you what’s actually true. What we can tell you is the mechanism: tips lock server-side, five minutes before kickoff, off the server’s clock rather than your phone’s — so there’s no “my app said 7:29” argument for anyone to referee, and no client-side crash mid-round can un-submit a tip that already made it to the server. Results are published automatically once a match is confirmed final. That’s a description of how it’s built, not a claim about how reliable it will always be — you can judge the rest for yourself.
Feature-by-feature 📋
| footytips | TippingMates | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 1.8★ (≈4,010 reviews) | — (new) |
| Codes | AFL, NRL, EPL, A-League, NBL, cricket and more | AFL, AFLW, NRL, soccer, NFL |
| Cost | Free | Free |
| Ads | Heavy, mid-screen | None |
| Betting adjacency | Users have reported Sportsbet multi-bet integration inside the app | None, anywhere, ever |
| Tip lockout | User reports of tips lost during app freezes | Server-side, five minutes before kickoff |
| Results | — | Published automatically once a match is confirmed final |
A note on that “no ads, no betting adjacency” row, because it matters more than it might look: it’s not a jab at footytips, it’s the actual reason a lot of workplace and family competitions exist at TippingMates in the first place. No money, no odds, nothing in the app to explain to HR or to a parent. That’s a separate decision from the reliability one — you might care about one, the other, or both.
What you’d actually be moving 📦
The thing that kills most “I should switch” intentions is the thought of re-entering a whole season’s worth of ladder history and getting everyone to download something new mid-year. Fair concern. If your old competition’s season is still live, the practical move is usually to start the new competition for the next season rather than mid-migrate one that’s already running — bring the group across at the natural break point, not mid-round.
The honest limit ⚖️
footytips has real distribution, official-adjacent branding for some codes, and features TippingMates doesn’t have yet. This page exists to answer one specific question — “is there something more reliable I can move my competition to?” — not to claim we’ve solved every problem a bigger, older app has had time to build.
If your competition just lost a round of tips to a freeze, that’s the actual cost this page is written for. Everything else is a bonus.