Race Committee scoring tools compared: Yacht Scoring, Clubspot, SailWave, Regatta Network, and RaceCommittee.app.

These five tools come up most often when sailing clubs and race committees evaluate software for the on-water side of running a regatta. They solve different problems — most are registration platforms that bolt scoring onto entry and payment, one is a desktop scoring engine you run after race day, and one (ours) is built around the committee boat itself. Here’s an honest, scope-by-scope comparison.

RaceCommittee.app

Built for the workflow that actually happens under sail: one volunteer on the committee boat with a phone, a stack of finish cards, and the wind picking up. Photograph the cards and AI vision reads the sails; type live with a tap-to-finish roster grid; or upload an Excel template later. Multi-recorder reconciliation diffs independent recorders, flags disagreements, and only transmits canonical results to a real-time shore dashboard.

• Clubs running weekly series, one-design regattas, or PHRF events where the bottleneck is the on-water capture — not registration.
• Race committees who want scoring done by the time the fleet is tied up at the dock.
• Anyone tired of typing finish-card sails into a spreadsheet after a six-race day.

• AI photo OCR on paper finish cards, check-in sheets, and scratch sheets (two-pass voting; disagreements flagged for review).
• Multi-recorder reconciliation with a full audit trail per race.
• Real-time shore dashboard via Supabase realtime — every regatta has its own shareable URL.
• Every fleet format: one-design, PHRF Time-on-Time, PHRF Time-on-Distance, pursuit. Single-day, multi-day, full series with sub-series and throwouts.
• Per-class PHRF coefficient overrides, custom DNF / TLE formulas, custom absent-night policies.

• We don’t do regatta registration, entry forms, payment processing, member management, NORs, or sailing instructions. Pair us with a registration platform (Clubspot, Regatta Network, Yacht Scoring) for those.
• Currently in beta; Stripe billing isn’t live yet (every account is effectively unlimited during this period).
• Photo OCR needs an internet connection (the typed and Excel-upload paths work offline; only canonical results sync to shore).

Yacht Scoring

The grandparent of US regatta software. Bill Allen’s long-running platform powers a huge fraction of large North American regattas — the Newport Bermuda Race, Bayview Mac, and many championship-level events. It’s a full-stack web app: online entry, fleet rosters, multi-day scoring, results posting, and announcements. It’s free for clubs and run as a labor of love.

• Big established regattas where the chairman is already familiar with the platform and the entry list runs into the hundreds.
• Events that want a one-stop site for registration + scratch sheets + results all under one URL.

• Mature scoring engine that handles complex multi-class, multi-day events.
• Free.
• Trusted track record — if your regatta has used it for ten years, switching costs are real.

• UI is 2010-era. Not mobile-friendly — you’re not running it on a committee boat in spray.
• No real-time on-water workflow: race results are typed in after the fact, usually back at the office.
• No multi-recorder reconciliation, no photo OCR.
• Setup is heavyweight; intended for the big-regatta-with-a-volunteer-IT-person crowd, not the Wednesday-night series.

Clubspot

A modern (Y Combinator-backed) sailing-club operations platform. The product is mostly about club management: member directories, dues, event registration, payment processing, fleet captain tools, communications. Scoring is included but isn’t the centerpiece — it’s one feature alongside many.

• Yacht clubs that want a single platform for member management, dues, regatta registration, and event payment.
• Clubs that have a treasurer or admin person who can manage the platform year-round.

• Polished modern UI, mobile-aware.
• Payment processing is genuinely good — collect entry fees, dues, social tickets in one place.
• Strong member-facing experience (a sailor logs in, sees their boats, their fleets, their dues).

• Premium pricing — tiered by club size and feature set; clubs typically pay several thousand dollars per year.
• Scoring is functional but not the primary investment area — no photo OCR on paper cards, no multi-recorder reconciliation built around the committee boat.
• Overkill for a club whose only need is “score this Wednesday-night series.”

SailWave

The de-facto standard desktop scoring engine across the global sailing community. Free, donation-supported, written by Colin Jenkins. It handles every imaginable scoring system — one-design, PHRF, ORC, IRC, pursuit, multi-stage series, complex tie-breakers — with a thoroughness no web tool matches. It’s an offline tool: you collect race data however you want (paper, spreadsheet, photos), then import / type into SailWave to compute and publish final results.

• Series-end scoring and championship final results where edge-case rules matter (Appendix A tie-breakers, redress, complex throwouts).
• Race officers who already know SailWave inside-out and trust its calculations.
• Anyone publishing the official scratch sheet at the end of a season.

• Probably the most battle-tested scoring engine in the sport.
• Free.
• Works offline (Windows + Mac).
• Imports from / exports to virtually every other tool.

• Desktop-only. Nothing happens on a committee boat with SailWave.
• No registration, no entry forms, no live shore dashboard.
• Steep learning curve; the UI is dense and intended for people who score regattas regularly.
• You still need a tool for the on-water capture — SailWave starts after the data already exists in a spreadsheet.

Regatta Network

Owned by Sail America, this is the de-facto US-club entry platform for a huge range of small-to-mid regattas. The core product is entry forms + payment processing + results posting: sailors register, pay the entry fee, the organizer pulls a roster, and results get posted as a PDF or spreadsheet after the event. Free for organizers; some features (custom branding, advanced payouts) are paid.

• Clubs that need a familiar, known-quantity entry form to collect entries and fees.
• Regattas where most sailors expect to find the entry link on regattanetwork.com.

• Brand familiarity in US sailing — sailors know the workflow.
• Free for organizers (basic tier).
• Solid entry-form + payment pipeline.

• Scoring is essentially “upload your spreadsheet, we’ll post it.” The actual computation happens elsewhere (SailWave usually).
• No on-water tooling, no photo OCR, no real-time results.
• UI is dated.

None of the platforms above is a complete replacement for the others. Most clubs end up using two or three of them together: a registration platform (Clubspot or Regatta Network or Yacht Scoring) for entry forms and payment, an on-water tool (RaceCommittee.app) for the committee-boat workflow, and SailWave for end-of-season official scoring when the rules get hairy. Every tool above supports CSV export, which is the lingua franca for moving rosters and results between them.

If you’re a club deciding what to add, the most important question isn’t “which one tool replaces all the others?” — it’s “what part of our workflow hurts the most right now?” If registration is messy, fix that. If race day takes three hours to score after the last gun, fix that. Pick the tool that solves the actual pain.