We have used every major trivia app and score tracker currently active in the pub quiz space. This guide covers what actually works in a busy bar on a Wednesday night, what looks good on a product page but fails in practice, and what to skip entirely. It is written for both trivia hosts running game nights and players who want to track team performance over time — because those are genuinely different problems that different tools solve. Updated June 2026.
Methodology note: Pricing accurate as of June 2026 and subject to change. Tool assessments based on direct use and publicly available product information. We are the team behind MyTriviaTeam — we have tried to assess competitors honestly, but read with appropriate skepticism where we evaluate ourselves.1
TL;DR — Quick Comparison
| Tool | Best for | Host or player? | Persistent history | Free tier? | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KeepTheScore | Live scoreboards, any event type | Hosts | No (per-event) | Yes | Free / ~$14/mo paid |
| trivialeaderboard.live | Simple pub quiz leaderboards | Hosts | Limited | Yes | Free / low-cost paid |
| QuizMeisters app | Playing at QuizMeisters venues | Players (in-ecosystem) | Within app | Yes | Free (venue-tied) |
| MyTriviaTeam | Team performance tracking over time | Players | Yes | Yes | Free / $5/mo Pro |
| Google Sheets / Paper | Total control, zero cost | Either | Manual | Yes | Free |
KeepTheScore
KeepTheScore is the most widely used general-purpose score tracker in the pub quiz and trivia hosting space, and its traffic numbers reflect that — Semrush data from late 2024 put its monthly visits at approximately 279,000, making it the largest audience of any dedicated scoreboard tool we know of. It earned that audience legitimately: the product works, it ships quickly, and it has been around long enough to accumulate serious SEO presence.
What it does well
KeepTheScore is fast to spin up. You create a scoreboard, give it a shareable URL, add team names, and start updating scores — all in under three minutes, no account required. The drag-and-drop team reordering is genuinely better than anything else in this space: when you need to swap teams around mid-game, KeepTheScore handles it without the visual lag or friction of a manual re-entry. The public shareable URL means players can follow along on their phones without a host having to project anything. For a pub quiz host who needs a live leaderboard displayed on a TV at the bar, this is the fastest path there.
Where it falls short
KeepTheScore is an event tool, not a tracking tool. Each scorecard is a standalone session. When the night ends, the data does not go anywhere useful — there is no team history, no win rate, no record that this team has been playing every Tuesday for four months. If you come back next week, you start from scratch. For players who want persistent performance data, this is a dead end. KeepTheScore also skews general-purpose — it handles bowling leagues, classroom competitions, and office brackets equally. That breadth means it has made no specific concessions to how pub quiz actually works (rounds, wagers, category scoring).2
Best for
Hosts who need a shareable live scoreboard with zero setup friction. Casual game nights where persistence is irrelevant. Venues running infrequent or one-off events.
Pricing
Free for basic public scoreboards. Paid plans (approximately $14/month as of June 2026) unlock private scoreboards, additional customization, and higher team limits. The free tier covers most casual hosting use cases.
trivialeaderboard.live
trivialeaderboard.live is a newer, more focused entrant — built specifically for pub trivia rather than general-purpose scoring. It has less traffic and a smaller footprint than KeepTheScore, but its narrower scope means some of its pub-quiz-specific features are cleaner than a general tool would bother building.
What it does well
The interface is simpler and less cluttered than KeepTheScore's. If you are running a straightforward pub quiz with a fixed number of rounds and standard point increments, trivialeaderboard.live gets out of your way and lets you score. The pub-quiz-specific framing — rounds, teams, cumulative scores — is baked into the default structure rather than added as configuration on top of a blank slate. Hosts who found KeepTheScore overly flexible (paradoxically, a real complaint) tend to find trivialeaderboard.live easier to operate in a live environment.
Where it falls short
The product is newer and the feature set reflects that. Advanced customization, branding options, and integrations are limited compared to KeepTheScore. Documentation and support are thinner. Like KeepTheScore, it is event-scoped — there is no persistent history for players or teams across multiple nights. Traffic and community are significantly smaller, which matters if you want to share a leaderboard link that your players will recognise as a known platform.
Best for
Hosts who want a purpose-built pub quiz leaderboard without the configuration overhead of a general tool. Good for hosts running regular events who want something cleaner than KeepTheScore and are not yet running a full trivia business.
Pricing
Free tier covers core leaderboard functionality. Paid options exist for additional features; pricing is modest and aimed at individual hosts rather than enterprise operators.
QuizMeisters
QuizMeisters is a venue-led pub quiz company operating primarily in Australia, with a strong presence in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, and beyond. Unlike the tools above, QuizMeisters is not a piece of software you install — it is a trivia operation that runs quiz nights at partner venues and provides a companion app for players within that ecosystem. We include it here because it represents a distinct model: the app as extension of a managed trivia product rather than standalone software.
What it does well
Within the QuizMeisters ecosystem, the experience is polished and consistent. The app lets players follow along with questions, track scores during the game, and see standings at participating venues. The quality of the trivia itself — questions, hosting, production — is a genuine selling point of the QuizMeisters model, and the app is designed to complement that experience rather than exist independently of it. If you play at QuizMeisters venues regularly, the app adds real value to an already solid live product.
Where it falls short
The app has no utility outside the QuizMeisters venue network. If you play trivia at bars that are not QuizMeisters partners, the app does nothing for you. This is not a criticism of the product — it is the correct design decision for what they are building — but it makes it genuinely irrelevant for most teams in North America or teams in Australia who play at non-partner venues. As a general-purpose trivia tracker, it is not one.
Best for
Teams who regularly play at QuizMeisters partner venues in Australia and want a companion app to that specific experience. Not useful for venue-agnostic tracking.
Pricing
Free to download. Revenue comes from the venue partnership model rather than direct user charges.
MyTriviaTeam
We built MyTriviaTeam. Read everything below with that in mind — we have tried to be honest, but you should weigh our self-assessment accordingly.
The design premise is specific: we built for players, not hosts. The question we started with was not "how does a host display scores on a TV?" but "how does a team know if they are actually getting better?" Those are different problems and they produce different tools.
What it does well
Game logging is fast — under 30 seconds to record a result (venue, date, placement, field size). Win rate, podium rate, current streak, and venue-specific performance all update automatically. There is a public team page and a city-level leaderboard showing how teams compare at specific venues. The free tier is genuinely free — no credit card, no time limit. Pro ($5/month) adds player synergy tracking (which lineup wins most often), optimal conditions analysis, and full game history export to CSV.
For a team that plays weekly at the same bar and wants to know their real win rate — not what they remember it being — MyTriviaTeam fills a gap that nothing else in this list addresses.
Where it falls short
We are newer and smaller than KeepTheScore. The team count in the city leaderboards is limited; in most cities outside major US metros, there are not yet enough logged teams to make the comparative rankings especially meaningful. We have no live in-game scoreboard — this is post-game logging, not real-time scoring, which means we are not the right choice if what you need is something displayed on a screen behind the bar during the game. Our mobile UI has rough edges that a more mature product would have smoothed out. And the player synergy and optimal conditions features, while genuinely useful, require a meaningful game history before they produce reliable signals — a team with five logged games does not have enough data to draw conclusions from them.
Best for
Teams — not hosts — who play weekly pub quiz and want persistent performance data: win rate, venue history, streaks, and a record of improvement over time. If you want a live scoreboard, use KeepTheScore. If you want to know whether your team is actually better than it was three months ago, use this.
Pricing
Free for core tracking. Pro is $5/month — worth it for competitive teams playing at multiple venues who want roster analytics and data export.
Google Sheets, Notion, and Paper
The honest truth is that most pub trivia teams track results in a group chat, a notes app, or their collective memory. A meaningful minority use a spreadsheet. A smaller number use a dedicated tool. Paper-and-pen scoresheets are still the default at most venues. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
What it does well
Google Sheets is free, infinitely flexible, and requires no account creation from the team. You can build exactly the tracking system you want, with exactly the columns you care about, formatted however you like. It never goes away because a startup shuts down. If you have one technically inclined team member who enjoys building formulas, a well-constructed Sheets tracker can produce analysis that rivals any dedicated app. Notion adds nice organization for teams that already live in that tool. Paper is the lowest-friction option of all for in-game scoring at the host level — no battery issues, no connectivity problems, no UI to learn.
Where it falls short
The problem with spreadsheets is not capability — it is maintenance. Teams that start with a spreadsheet consistently fail to maintain data quality over time. Column naming drifts. One person enters "2nd" and another enters "2" and another enters "place 2 of 8." By game 20, the data is too inconsistent to analyze reliably. The analysis you planned to build never gets built, because the team member who was going to build it changed jobs or had a baby. We have seen this pattern enough times that we can predict it. Spreadsheets work for the first month; they degrade after that without active maintenance discipline that most casual trivia teams cannot sustain.
Paper-and-pen has obvious limitations for performance tracking: you cannot query it, calculate a win rate from it, or spot a trend across 40 games. It is fine for in-the-moment scoring; it is useless as a performance record.
Best for
Technically inclined teams willing to invest setup time and maintenance discipline. Teams that want to try tracking before committing to any app. Hosts who want in-game scoring with zero technology dependency.
Pricing
Free. Always.
Who Should Use What — 5 Personas
| Persona | Situation | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| The weekly pub quiz team | Plays the same bar most weeks, wants to know if they're improving | MyTriviaTeam (free tier covers everything you need) |
| The independent trivia host | Runs their own pub quiz night, needs a live scoreboard players can see | KeepTheScore (fastest setup, best live UX, shareable URL) |
| The host who wants pub-quiz-specific tools | Runs regular pub quiz and finds KeepTheScore too general | trivialeaderboard.live (built for this format specifically) |
| The Australian team in a QuizMeisters city | Plays at QuizMeisters partner venues regularly | QuizMeisters app (seamless in-ecosystem; use MyTriviaTeam for non-partner nights) |
| The control freak team captain | Wants complete ownership of the data, doesn't trust SaaS | Google Sheets — but document the schema on day one and enforce it |
What Is Still Missing in This Market
The host-facing and player-facing tools have developed largely independently, and the gap between them remains wide. A host can display a beautiful live scoreboard, but that data does not automatically follow the teams home. A player can track their performance meticulously in MyTriviaTeam, but their data does not feed back into the venue's records. There is no shared infrastructure connecting the two sides of the same game — hosts see tonight, players want history, and no tool has solved both simultaneously.
The second gap is cross-venue performance data. Every team develops a sense of which bars they do well at versus where they struggle — but that sense is impressionistic without structured data. Venue-specific win rates exist in MyTriviaTeam for teams that log their results, but aggregated, anonymised venue difficulty scores (how hard is this bar compared to the city average?) do not exist anywhere yet in a form the public can access. That is a genuinely useful signal that the industry has not built.
The Honest Verdict
If you are a host and you need a scoreboard up in 10 minutes, use KeepTheScore. It is the proven choice and the drag-and-drop reordering alone justifies it.
If you are a player and you want to know whether your team is actually improving — not what your gut says, but what the data says — the honest answer is that no tool except a dedicated tracker will give you that. MyTriviaTeam is what we built for that problem, and we think it solves it. Whether it is the right tool for you depends on how seriously you take the tracking discipline, and whether you play at enough venues and enough games for the data to become meaningful.
If you play at QuizMeisters venues, use their app. If you want complete control over your data and have the patience to maintain a spreadsheet, use Google Sheets. The worst outcome is the most common one: you track nothing, remember the wins, forget the losses, and never know what is actually working.
1 We did not pay for feature placement or reviews from any tool reviewed here. Traffic figures cited for KeepTheScore are from third-party Semrush data, not self-reported. QuizMeisters venue count reflects publicly listed partner venues; exact counts change as the network grows.
2 Pricing and features for all tools reviewed here are accurate as of June 2026. SaaS products change pricing and features frequently. Verify current pricing directly with each vendor before purchase decisions.