That's the whole difference, and it's not a criticism — Skedda is a space-reservation product and a clean one. If your business is renting out courts, pitches or rooms by the hour and nothing else, it does that job simply and well. This page is for the venue that has also become a coaching programme, an academy, a membership base and a second site.
If this is the whole job, the simpler tool is the better answer and we'd rather say so.
A tidy interface, a clear grid, and customers booking a court or a room themselves without phoning the desk. Reviewers consistently praise how quick it is to set up and how little training it needs.
Who can book what, when, for how long, and at what rate. Time-based and demand-based pricing rules are part of the product rather than an upgrade, which is more than a lot of general booking tools manage.
Meeting rooms, desks, community halls, studios. If your facility is a mixed-use space that happens to include courts, that generality is a feature rather than a compromise.
Both take a booking for a court and apply a rate to it. This covers what happens on either side of that.
Scroll the table sideways to see both columns.
| Real Sports Bookings | Space-booking tools (e.g. Skedda) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it's built around | Running a sports venue — courts, classes, coaching, academies, memberships and the money. | Reserving space — courts, rooms, desks, halls — and the rules around who books what. |
| Hourly space hire | A price per court, gaps between bookings, minimum lengths, booking windows, splitting one pitch into sections. | Their coreThis is the product, and it's well made. Flexible rules, clean self-service booking. |
| Coaching & academies | Built inSquads by age group, term enrolment, coach-taken registers, monthly billing to parents, sibling rates, trials. | Outside the model — a space tool books the space, not the programme running in it. |
| One adult, several participants | YesA parent holds two children in different squads, each with their own attendance, on one invoice. | Bookings belong to the person who made them. |
| Memberships & credits | On every plan including the free one. One balance spends on a court hour, a class or a coaching session. | Available, but typically on an upper tier — check which plan you'd actually need. |
| Pricing shape | Flat$49/month for Pro whether you run two courts or twenty. Billed on bookings, not on spaces. Free to start, no commission, no fixed term. | Typically per space, in tiers that step up as you add courts. Work out the cost at the size you'll be in two years. |
| Reporting | Utilisation by hour and resource, revenue by sport, channel and hour, revenue per available hour, finance-ready exports. | Booking and usage reports. Reviewers commonly ask for more depth here. |
| Payments | Your own Stripe, Checkout.com or Paymob account, settling straight to you, no commission from us. Paymob matters in the Gulf, where some platforms can't pay out locally. | Card payments through their Stripe integration — check current terms and which regions settle. |
| AI growth layer | Real Sports OS audits your presence, finds the hours that aren't selling and drafts the campaign from your own booking data. Starter includes two audit reports; the full suite is on Pro. | Not part of the product. |
We don't publish other companies' prices or screenshots: their plans change and a stale number here is worse than none. The right-hand column describes space-reservation tools generally, from public materials as of August 2026 — check the specifics, and the plan you'd actually need, with them directly. Skedda is a trademark of its owner; we're not affiliated with them, and nothing here is a statement about their service quality.
Three things venues add, each of which a space-booking tool wasn't built to hold.
A coach, a squad, a term, a register, and a parent paying monthly for two children on different nights. None of that is a space reservation — it's a programme that happens to need a court, and it has to sit on the same calendar so the court can't be sold underneath it.
Recurring revenue changes the software you need, because the member rate has to apply itself, the renewal has to charge itself, and a failed card has to appear on a list rather than in a month-end surprise.
Worth checking before you sign anything: on a per-space price, every court you build raises your software bill. On a flat price it doesn't. Over a two-year expansion that difference compounds quietly.
No. Pro is $49 a month flat whether you run two courts or twenty — we bill on bookings per month, not on how many spaces you have. Per-space pricing is common in space-reservation tools, so if you are comparing, work out what each option costs at the number of courts you expect to have in two years rather than the number you have today.
Honestly, maybe not. If you rent spaces by the hour and do nothing else, a dedicated space-reservation tool is simple and does the job. The case for us starts when you add coaching, an academy, memberships, classes or a second site — the things that turn a facility into a club.
Yes, and this is the main gap. Squads by age group, term enrolment, registers taken by the coach, monthly billing to a parent who has two children in different squads, and sibling rates as a rule rather than a manual edit. All of it on the same calendar as the courts, so a squad session cannot be sold underneath.
Yes. Memberships, class packs and credit wallets are on every plan including the free one, and a balance spends across a court hour, a class or a coaching session. Space-booking tools often place memberships on an upper tier, so check which plan you would actually need.
Utilisation by hour and by resource, revenue by sport, channel and hour, and finance-ready exports — on every plan. The figure that matters most is revenue per available hour, because booking counts rise in exactly the situation you want to avoid: moving peak customers into a cheaper off-peak band.
Free to start, no commission, no fixed term.