Last Updated: July 2026
Hello Club and Raklet both call themselves club management software, but they are built around different centres of gravity, and that is the whole decision. Hello Club is a facility-first platform out of Tauranga, New Zealand, built for sports clubs where the daily job is court bookings, session sign-ups, and knowing who came through the door at 6am. It does that job well, and it is the only one of the two that sells physical access control hardware. Raklet is a membership-first platform: a CRM at the core, tiered memberships with renewals, digital membership cards, email automation, events, and custom-branded mobile apps, serving clubs alongside alumni networks, nonprofits, professional associations, chambers, and churches. If your club is defined by its facility, Hello Club is a strong fit. If it is defined by its membership, you will run into three specific limits in Hello Club, and this page walks through all of them honestly. If you are still mapping the field, see the wider list of alternatives to Hello Club.
Hello Club vs Raklet: At a Glance
| Dimension | Hello Club | Raklet | Stronger |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Sports clubs with courts and facilities to book, especially racket sports | Membership organizations: clubs, alumni, nonprofits, associations, chambers | Depends on need |
| Starting price | $46/mo Entry, up to 100 members. No free plan, 30-day trial | Free plan up to 100 contacts, then $49/mo Essentials for 500 | Raklet |
| Payment processing | Stripe only, required on every plan | Multiple payment methods supported | Raklet |
| Facility and court booking | Core strength, with access control hardware available | Event and session booking, no hardware offering | Hello Club |
| Mobile app | None. Web-responsive interface only | iOS and Android app, custom-branded app available | Raklet |
| Integrations | 2 on Entry, 5 Standard, 7 Premium, unlimited Business | 4,000+ via Zapier, API access on Premium | Raklet |
| Admin seats | Unlimited on every plan | 1 to 3 by tier, extra seats $190/yr each | Hello Club |
The short version: Hello Club wins on court booking, access hardware, and admin seat economics. Raklet wins on payment flexibility, mobile apps, integrations, and everything that happens past the facility door.
What Each Platform Actually Is
Hello Club launched in 2015 in Tauranga, New Zealand, and now operates under parent company Frello Limited following a merger with Friendly Manager. It serves 400 or more clubs and 250,000 member profiles under the Hello Club brand, with a strong concentration in racket sports: squash, tennis, pickleball, padel, badminton, and table tennis. It holds national body partnerships with Squash NZ and Pickleball NZ, and added a Swish integration for racket sports league and tournament management in November 2025. The product is built around the physical club: bookings, courts, sessions, and door access.
Raklet is a membership and community platform founded in 2013, headquartered in San Francisco with a fully remote team, backed by Techstars and Microsoft Ventures. Roughly half its customers are US-based and the rest span more than 50 countries. It is built around the member record rather than the facility: a CRM with segmentation, membership tiers with automatic renewals, digital membership cards, email and marketing automation, a private community feed, event ticketing including virtual events, and mobile apps.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Hello Club | Raklet | Stronger |
|---|---|---|---|
| Member management and CRM | Member records, membership types, family memberships | Full CRM with segmentation, custom fields, contact timeline | Raklet |
| Court and facility booking | Core product, built for it | Session and event booking, not facility-centric | Hello Club |
| Physical access control | Light and access control hardware add-on, custom priced | Not offered | Hello Club |
| League and tournament management | Via Swish integration, racket sports only | Not offered | Hello Club |
| Event management | Basic events, no virtual event support | Ticketing, multiple ticket types, virtual events, check-in | Raklet |
| Email and communications | Automated reminders and event communications | Email designer, marketing automation, segmented sending | Raklet |
| Mobile app | None, web-responsive only | iOS and Android app, custom-branded app as an add-on | Raklet |
| Digital membership cards | Not offered | Included from the Essentials plan | Raklet |
| API and integrations | 2 to unlimited by plan, Xero and Stripe among them | 4,000+ via Zapier, open API on Premium | Raklet |
| Payment processing | Stripe only, in 39 supported countries | Multiple payment methods | Raklet |
| Reporting | Standard reports, area usage added October 2025, no custom builder | Standard reports and exports, no custom builder | Roughly even |
| Non-sports membership types | No alumni, volunteer, or fundraising modules | Alumni, donors, volunteers, chapters, professional bodies | Raklet |
Two rows deserve emphasis because they run against the grain of this page. Hello Club sells access control hardware, and Raklet has no hardware offering at all. If your club needs members to badge into a court at hours when nobody is staffing the desk, Hello Club solves that and Raklet does not. Similarly, Hello Club’s Swish integration gives racket sports clubs real league and tournament management, which Raklet does not attempt.
Does Hello Club Use AI? How Does Raklet Compare?
Hello Club markets no AI features, and we found no AI roadmap on its website, blog, or help center as of July 2026. What it does have is rule-based automation: scheduled membership renewal reminders, automatic invoice reconciliation through Xero, and automated event communications. That is worth stating without a sneer, because rule-based automation is what most clubs actually need day to day, and it is predictable in a way generative features are not yet.
Raklet’s AI capabilities are on the roadmap rather than shipping today. Neither platform is an AI-forward product in 2026, so this is not a useful axis for choosing between them. If a comparison page tells you otherwise about either product, check the feature list yourself.
Hello Club vs Raklet Pricing
Both companies publish their pricing openly, which is less common in this category than it should be. Hello Club’s four plans are priced by member count:
| Plan | Price per month (USD) | Member cap | Integrations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry | $46 | 100 | 2 |
| Standard | $82 | 300 | 5 |
| Premium | $118 | 1,000 | 7 |
| Business | $226 | 2,500 | Unlimited |
Paying annually gives you two months free, roughly a 17 percent saving. Prices are also quoted in AUD, GBP, and NZD. There is no free plan, but the 30-day trial requires no payment details. Every plan includes unlimited admin accounts, which is a genuinely good structure for clubs run by large volunteer committees.
Raklet prices by contact count: a free plan for 100 contacts, then Essentials at $49/mo for 500 contacts, Professional at $99/mo for 1,000, and Premium at $399/mo for 10,000, all on annual billing. Extra capacity comes from add-on packs for contacts, admin seats, and email credits, so exceeding one limit does not force a full tier upgrade. Full details are on the Raklet pricing page.
What a 500-member club actually pays
Sticker prices are not comparable until you pick a real club and do the arithmetic, so take a club with 500 members and five people who need admin access.
On Hello Club, 500 members exceeds the Standard plan’s 300-member cap, so you land on Premium at $118/mo. That is $1,416 a year billed monthly, or roughly $1,175 billed annually. All five admins are included at no extra cost.
On Raklet, 500 contacts fits the Essentials plan at $588 a year on annual billing, which includes one admin seat. Adding four more seats at $190 each brings the total to $1,348 a year.
So at 500 members with a small admin team, Raklet is meaningfully cheaper. At 500 members with a five-person committee, the two land within about $175 of each other, and Hello Club’s unlimited-admin model is the better structure for clubs that keep adding volunteers. The honest conclusion is that price is not the reason to move from Hello Club to Raklet. The reasons are the constraints described below.
Costs to factor in beyond the plan
Stripe’s processing fees apply on top of the Hello Club subscription, and because Stripe is the only supported processor there is no option to shop for a cheaper gateway. There is also no EFTPOS path for in-person card payments, which matters for clubs taking payment at a physical desk or bar.
Integration caps are the other cost that shows up late. A club that wants Mailchimp, Xero, and Stripe running at once is already past the Entry plan’s two-integration limit and has to move up to Standard, regardless of how few members it has.
Neither platform locks you into a multi-year contract. Monthly plans on both can be cancelled at any time, and annual billing is a one-year commitment. There is no long-term contract risk to weigh on either side.
Hello Club: Company Background and Long-term Stability
Hello Club operates under Frello Limited, a New Zealand company formed when Hello Club merged with Friendly Manager. It is privately held and angel-backed, with two undisclosed investments from Enterprise Angels, a Tauranga-based investor network, in 2022 and 2023. There is no venture capital and no private equity ownership. In a category where a great many membership platforms have been rolled up by private equity firms, independent ownership is a real point in Hello Club’s favour, and buyers weighing long-term stability should count it as one.
The Enterprise Angels materials from the 2023 investment put the merged business at NZD $1.25 million in annual recurring revenue, growing 50 percent year over year, with more than 700 clubs and 500,000 member profiles across both brands and 22 percent of customers outside New Zealand. Those figures are three years old now, and no more recent financials have been published.
LinkedIn lists the company in the 11 to 50 employee range, with around 13 people named publicly on the team page. Headcount looks stable, with no signs of layoffs or sudden expansion. Rodd Penney has been CEO since the merger completed at the end of 2022, having previously led Friendly Manager. Original Hello Club co-founder Liat Reis stepped back to a board role at that point. A change of chief executive within the past few years is worth knowing about when you are making a multi-year platform decision, though the transition here was a planned consequence of a merger rather than a sign of trouble.
Product updates ship on a roughly quarterly rhythm. The most recent significant release, in October 2025, added family registrations, guest signups, and area usage reports. The honest caveat about Hello Club is not its health, which looks solid, but its scale: a company of 15 to 25 people serving 400 clubs has a narrower roadmap than larger competitors, and features you need may sit in a queue for a while.
What Hello Club Users Say
In a discovery call in March 2025, a club manager evaluating platforms for a members club told us where Hello Club had landed in his search:
“I talked to Hello Club last night, because we are a members club. I want something that can handle everything: membership CRM, so able to build a membership, monthly or yearly, hopefully with an invoice system that works in Norway, and then event booking as well, ticketing, and connecting those tickets to the membership profile, ideally with a website membership integration or app as well, and then booking a meeting room. And the marketing communication factor as well.”
That is the shape of the decision in a buyer’s own words. Hello Club came up as a credible booking candidate. What kept him shopping was everything wrapped around the booking: a real membership CRM, invoicing that worked in his country, tickets tied to member profiles, an app, and marketing communications.
The public review record is strongly positive. Hello Club holds 4.7 out of 5 across 46 reviews on Capterra, with ease of use at 4.6 and customer service at 4.8, and the same rating and review count on GetApp. Reviewers repeatedly praise the support team and the administrative time the platform saves, with one club manager reporting admin work dropping from around 15 hours a week to about 3. Reviewers also describe migrating onto Hello Club as straightforward. We could not find a G2 profile for Hello Club in searches through July 2026, so no G2 rating is cited here.
Two things are worth being clear about before reading the criticisms below. The Capterra pool is small at 46 reviews and skews heavily positive, so it is a self-selected sample rather than a representative one. And with essentially no negative reviews on record, every criticism below comes from the cons section of a review that was otherwise complimentary. These are the reservations of satisfied customers, which arguably makes them more useful than complaints from people who already left.
- Stripe is the only payment processor. Enabling card payments requires signing up for Stripe, and there is no alternative gateway on any plan. Payments go directly into the club’s own bank account through Stripe Connect, and card payments are supported in 39 countries, but clubs in markets where Stripe is uncommon, or who prefer a local gateway, have no route around it.
- Events are basic. Reviewers describe the event tools as handling only very simple events. There is no native league management outside the Swish integration for racket sports, event changes do not always propagate to linked calendar entries, and there is no virtual event support.
- Family memberships are confusing. Family discounts are not calculated automatically, pro-rata billing for partial periods is manual, and adding family members to an existing account takes several steps.
- Reporting has gaps. Individual reviewers rated the customer database and attendance tracking well below the platform’s overall score. Area usage reporting only arrived in October 2025, and there is no custom report builder.
- There is no native mobile app. The interface is web-responsive only. Multiple reviewers independently asked for a native app, kiosk screens were described as less user-friendly than they could be, and some older members find the online payment flow difficult.
Switching from Hello Club to Raklet: What to Expect
This is a low-friction switch, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. Hello Club has no multi-year contracts and no exit penalties. Monthly plans cancel at any time and annual plans run for a year. We found no public complaints from clubs about leaving Hello Club.
Getting your data out is straightforward too. Hello Club’s export tool downloads member data as CSV with column headers, and any filters applied on screen are respected in the export, so you can pull exactly the segment you want. That covers the thing most clubs worry about first.
On the Raklet side, member records, custom fields, membership tiers, payment history, and event history all import. Raklet offers free migration support and onboarding, and the free plan lets you load real data and test the fit before committing to anything.
The real work in this migration is not extracting data or escaping a vendor. It is conceptual: you are moving from a tool organized around your facility to one organized around your members, so your membership types, categories, and communication flows are worth rethinking rather than copying across as they are.
Which One Should You Choose?
Hello Club is the better fit if
- Your club runs on court and facility bookings, and that is the daily operational core
- You want physical access control so members can enter during unstaffed hours, which Raklet does not offer
- You need league and tournament management for squash, tennis, pickleball, padel, or badminton through Swish
- You have a large volunteer committee, where unlimited admin accounts on every plan changes your real cost
- You are in New Zealand or Australia and value the Squash NZ and Pickleball NZ partnerships
- Stripe is already your payment processor and you have no reason to change
Raklet is the better fit if
- You need a payment processor other than Stripe, or in-person payment options Stripe does not cover
- Your members expect a mobile app, particularly one carrying your own branding
- You are more than a sports club: an alumni network, nonprofit, association, chamber, church, or a club with donors and volunteers to manage
- You run real events, including virtual ones, and need tickets connected to member profiles
- You need more integrations than your plan tier allows, or direct API access
- You want digital membership cards, email marketing automation, and a community feed alongside membership management
What Raklet Includes as Standard
Raklet gives every plan access to an open API with full documentation, transparent pricing with no hidden fees, and the option to launch custom-branded mobile apps for your members. These are not add-ons: they are part of how Raklet is built.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Raklet a good Hello Club alternative?
Raklet is a strong alternative for organizations whose priority is membership rather than facility management. It adds a full CRM, digital membership cards, mobile apps, flexible payment options, and thousands of integrations. It is a weaker fit than Hello Club for clubs whose core need is court booking and door access hardware.
How much does Hello Club cost?
Hello Club has four plans priced by member count: Entry at $46/mo for up to 100 members, Standard at $82/mo for 300, Premium at $118/mo for 1,000, and Business at $226/mo for 2,500. Annual billing gives you two months free. There is no free plan, but there is a 30-day trial that requires no payment details.
Does Hello Club have a mobile app?
No. Hello Club’s interface is web-responsive and works in a mobile browser, but there is no native iOS or Android app. Multiple reviewers have asked for one. Raklet offers both a standard mobile app and a custom-branded app as an add-on.
Can Hello Club use a payment processor other than Stripe?
No. Enabling card payments in Hello Club requires a Stripe account, and Stripe is the only supported processor on every plan. Payments are deposited directly into your club’s bank account through Stripe Connect, and card payments are supported in 39 countries, but there is no alternative gateway and no EFTPOS option for in-person payments.
Does Hello Club have a free plan?
No. Hello Club offers a 30-day trial with no payment details required, but the lowest paid plan is $46 per month. Raklet has a permanently free plan for up to 100 contacts.
Is Hello Club only for sports clubs?
Hello Club can be used by other membership organizations, but it is built for and marketed to sports clubs, with a particular focus on racket sports. It has no alumni management, volunteer management, or fundraising modules, so organizations needing those will find it a narrow fit.
The Verdict
Hello Club is a well-built, well-liked product from a stable independent company, and for a racket sports club whose life revolves around court availability it is a better tool than Raklet. The bookings are the point, the access hardware has no equivalent here, and unlimited admin accounts suit a volunteer-run committee. We would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.
Raklet is the better choice when the membership, not the facility, is what you are actually managing. That is the case for organizations that need flexibility in how members pay, that want a branded app in members’ pockets, that run events beyond simple sign-up sheets, that connect to a wider set of tools, or that are not sports clubs at all. The cost of the two platforms is close enough that price should not decide it. The three things that should are Stripe-only payments, the absence of a mobile app, and the integration caps.
Related comparisons
If you are comparing club and membership platforms more broadly, it is worth reading TidyHQ vs Raklet for another Australasian option built for sports and community clubs, MyClubhouse vs Raklet for a UK platform with a similar booking-led approach, and ClubExpress vs Raklet for a long-established North American alternative.