Free Dance Competition Software
What runs at zero, and where zero stops
Three things run a dance competition at no licence cost: JudgeMate (free for organizers at any size, with three dance scoring engines), CompMngr (free under an entry cap, then per competition day), and a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is the one that deserves a warning. Ordinal scrutineering is not arithmetic you can eyeball — the Skating System's rule 7 sums only the marks that form the majority, not all of a couple's marks, and getting that wrong produces a protocol that looks finished and names the wrong winner.
What free actually means, per tool
“Free” hides several different arrangements. This table separates them.
| Platform | Focus | Pricing model | Known rate | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| JudgeMate | Three dance engines, plus every other sport | Free for organizers | No entry cap, no per-event credits, no commission | Yes, unlimited |
| CompMngr | Ballroom competition management | Free below a cap, then per day | Free up to 250 entries; $350 first day above it (read Aug 2026) | Yes, entry-capped |
| Spreadsheet | Whatever you build | No licence cost | Zero — the cost is your time and the errors | Yes, in the narrow sense |
| O2CM | Entries and results | Per entry | $0.30 per entry (read Aug 2026) | No |
| danceit | IDO and WADF systems | Licence | Volume discount for high-frequency venues | No |
| TopTurnier | WDSF-certified scrutineering | Licence plus weekend rental | €475 full edition; €24 per sheet per weekend (read Aug 2026) | No |
How we read the word free
A tool is listed as free only if you can run a real competition on it without paying — not if it offers a trial, and not if the free tier stops at a size real events exceed. Where a cap exists we give the number, because a cap is the whole story of a free tier.
We also count what free costs elsewhere. A spreadsheet has no licence fee and a very real price in scrutineering errors and hours. A capped tier is free until your event grows, and events grow. Neither of those is a criticism — they are just the part of the price that does not appear on the invoice.
JudgeMate — free with no cap
Free for organizers regardless of entry count, across every sport in the catalogue. For dance that includes all three scoring engines: absolute points with deductions and award levels, ordinal placement under the Skating System with rules 1 to 11, and battles decided by judge votes on a knockout bracket.
Also included at no cost: entry formats from solo to club, so a pair or a formation is one entry with one number; rounds as linked categories with carry-over; club and cross-category rankings; live public results; a jumbotron view for a LED screen; PDF and CSV export.
Where free stops: we are not WDSF-certified, so sanctioned dancesport is out of scope no matter what it costs. We also do not do per-judge analytics or video replay. Those are real limits, and they are not a pricing question.
A spreadsheet — and the specific way it fails
For a small absolute-scoring event a spreadsheet genuinely works: sum the criteria, average the panel, sort descending. Plenty of good competitions have run that way.
Ordinal scrutineering is a different matter, and this is the part worth reading carefully. The Skating System does not average anything. A couple takes the lowest place at which a majority of adjudicators placed them at that place or better. When two couples reach that majority in the same column, rule 6 compares how many marks each has there. If they are still level, rule 7 compares the sum of the marks that form the majority — not the sum of every mark the couple received.
That distinction is the single most common error in hand scrutineering, and it is invisible: the spreadsheet returns a number, the protocol prints, and nothing looks wrong. It simply names a different winner than the rules do.
The summary rules add more of the same. A shared place is written as a fraction, and that fraction is read differently depending on the operation — 2½ counts as third when counting places and enters as 2.5 when adding them. A formula that treats it one way throughout is wrong half the time.
If you want to check your own arithmetic, our Skating System calculator runs rules 5 to 11 and labels every position with the rule that produced it.
CompMngr — free under the cap
Free up to 250 entries, which covers a genuine first competition rather than a demo. Above that it charges per competition day with modules on top.
The cap is the thing to plan around. A club competition that grows past 250 entries crosses into paid pricing mid-life, and that is a budgeting question rather than a migration one — the tool is the same on both sides of the line.
Worth knowing: CompMngr publishes a documented arrangement for its source code to be released by the executors of its author's estate. In a market where several tools depend on very few people, that is a serious answer to a serious risk.
Decision tree
Pick by what your event actually needs at zero cost:
| If you run | Pick |
|---|---|
| Any dance competition, any size, outside WDSF sanction | JudgeMate |
| A first ballroom competition under 250 entries | CompMngr free tier |
| A small absolute-scored event you already have a working sheet for | A spreadsheet |
| Anything scored by places rather than points | Not a spreadsheet — rule 7 is where it breaks |
| A WDSF-sanctioned competition | Certified software; free is not an option here |
Try JudgeMate on your next event
A dancesport event takes about 10 minutes to configure. No athlete limits, no commission on registrations. See dancesport features · Dancesport glossary
See also
Dance competition software compared
Six platforms across ballroom, studio tours and breaking — plus the certification line that decides it for WDSF-sanctioned events.
danceit alternative
A dance-specific product with sixteen named judging systems, including IDO 1D–4D, the IDO battle formats and WADF 1D–5D.
Common questions
Sources
- CompMngr — pricing — CompMngr
- O2CM — organizer information — O2CM
- TopTurnier — editions and licensing — TopTurnier
- danceit — competition system — danceit