Rankedin Alternative for Padel Tournaments

Rankedin is a Norwegian platform for racket sports, and padel is one of fourteen it carries. Calling it tournament software undersells it. The product is really three things stacked on each other: a competition engine, a federation back office, and a social network for players.

The competition engine is deep. Their draw catalogue runs well past ours: round robin and multi round robin, Monrad, straight elimination, elimination with a double or triple plate, elimination with a playoff, qualifying draws, plus a Draw Wizard that assembles two-stage events where groups feed an elimination or a Monrad main draw. Alongside tournaments sit two separate products — Club League, where pools promote and relegate on win-loss ratio, and Team League with divisions and home-and-away fixtures.

The federation layer is the part nobody else on this page has. A federation administers its own national ranking inside Rankedin, in six categories: men's and women's singles, men's, women's and mixed doubles, and team events. It manages membership and licences, licence money lands in the federation's own account, and organisers apply to have a tournament count towards the official ranking, which the federation then accepts or rejects. This is software sold to a governing body, not to one organiser with a Saturday to fill.

The social layer is the quiet advantage. Players carry a permanent Rankedin identity with match history, head-to-head statistics, a skill rating, a messenger and an events calendar. An organiser posting a tournament reaches an existing population. Every JudgeMate event starts from an empty list.

Court booking is real but sits next door: Book247 is their own booking system, and one account registers you for both. The integration is switched on by pasting an application key from the Book247 admin panel.

For how the padel formats themselves work, see the padel tournament formats guide and the JudgeMate padel page.

Both platforms build draws, take sign-ups and publish results without a login. The decisions sit in the padel-specific formats, in who can enter a score during the match, and in whether the event needs to feed something outside itself. For the wider field, see the padel tournament software comparison.

Capability	Rankedin	JudgeMate
Padel status	Full tournament and ranking sport, one of 14 racket sports	One of 41 sports; padel drives the match-play tournament module
Live scoring during a match	E-Referee — their manual lists tennis, squash, badminton and racquetball; padel is not on that list	Yes. Score entry per match, standings recomputed on read
Scoreboards	Court and match scoreboards, inheriting the E-Referee sport list	Public event page plus an LED view at /display/[event-slug]
Americano	Yes, capped: "The number of players must be between 4 and 16"	Yes, no player cap; sit-outs rotated round by round
Mexicano	Not present on the surfaces we checked	Yes. Quartets by current standing, court 1 plays 1+4 against 2+3
Sign-up without a partner	Not in Americano — the admin adds players or creates a fake player	Yes. Americano and mexicano register individual players
Pair sign-up	Yes, into singles, doubles and team classes, with Stripe entry fees	Yes: create a team, join one, or join the looking-for-a-partner list
Draw catalogue	Round robin, multi round robin, Monrad, elimination, double and triple plate, qualifying, playoffs, Draw Wizard	Six formats: americano, mexicano, team americano, round robin, knockout, groups plus knockout
Courts	Match scheduling with time settings; booking through Book247, tied to a private match rather than to a draw	Courts as resources with an auto-schedule: start time, slot length, conflict detection
Entry fees	Yes, Stripe, plus licence payments	No. We take no money and hold none
National ranking and licences	Yes, six ranking types, membership control, approve or reject a tournament for points	No. Results feed nothing beyond JudgeMate
Native app	PWA; the native apps under their bundle are the SportCam companion	Web only
Interface languages	16	3: English, Polish, German
Organiser price	€0 Basic; €14.90–€59.90 per tournament for Premium	€0

Pick JudgeMate for the day itself: a club americano, a mexicano evening, a weekend club championship — events where nothing has to reach a federation and the schedule simply has to hold.

• Americano with no player cap. Rankedin's own string reads "The number of players must be between 4 and 16". Twenty-four players on four courts is an ordinary Tuesday in a padel club, and it does not fit inside that range.
• Mexicano is in the product, not on a roadmap. Quartets are formed by current standing and court 1 plays first and fourth against second and third, the canonical split. We could not find mexicano anywhere on Rankedin's surfaces.
• Players sign up alone. In americano and mexicano the entrant is a person, not a pair, so a single player registers from the public event page without hunting for a partner first. In pair formats there are three routes: create a team, join an existing one, or mark yourself as looking for a partner and get paired before the draw.
• Live scoring that actually covers padel. Their manual's E-Referee list is tennis, squash, badminton and racquetball. Ours is the padel module itself, with the standings table recomputed as results are confirmed.
• A referee QR at every net. Scanning opens the score panel for that one match. There is also a printable sheet for the club noticeboard.
• Courts on an auto-schedule. Set the start time and slot length; the scheduler assigns matches and flags conflicts. Court, table, mat, lane, pitch, rink, ring, pool and stage are all resource types, which matters when the venue is mixed.
• An arena screen with no extra kit. /display/[event-slug] takes scale, rotation and row-count parameters in the URL. Any browser and a TV.
• Free at every size, and free for players. No player cap, no per-event charge, no commission on sign-ups, no card.
• You can play in your own tournament. Roles accumulate, so the organiser enters the draw through "play in this category" without handing the laptop to someone else.

Start with the organiser guide, or draw the rounds first without an account in the americano generator.

If your club is already inside a national ranking that lives in Rankedin, the honest recommendation is not to migrate. Split by what each tool is for.

1. Ranked events stay in Rankedin, end to end. Anything that awards points, checks a licence or collects an entry fee belongs where the federation can see it.
2. Social nights come here. The Tuesday americano, the mexicano evening, the corporate day — events nobody is ranking — set up in minutes and cost nothing.
3. Take the start list from wherever it already exists. Import participants from a spreadsheet, or open public sign-up and let players register themselves.
4. Put the LED view on the club TV. Open /display/[event-slug] with the scale and row parameters set for the screen you actually own.
5. Print the referee sheet before doors open. One QR per match, taped by the net, beats one person walking between four courts with a phone.

What does not happen: nothing flows between the two systems. There is no importer for Rankedin data, no shared player database and no way to push a JudgeMate result into a ranking. A start list entered twice is entered twice. If the event must award ranking points, do not split it at all — run the whole thing in Rankedin.

The club championship walkthrough covers a full weekend from sign-up to the final.