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LIGR vs KeepTheScore: manual scoreboards or automated broadcast graphics
KeepTheScore is a genuinely good product. If you are keeping score at a netball game on Saturday morning, it is very likely the right choice and this page will tell you so. It solves a different problem from the one LIGR solves, and the useful comparison is about which problem you actually have.
LIGR scoreboard overlaid on a live stream
1920×1080 MP4 loop, ~8s. Wide match feed with the data-driven score bug live in the corner.
The short answer
KeepTheScore
Manual score-keeping for club, school and social sport, priced for an individual. You open it, you pick a sport, you tap the score up, and an overlay URL puts the board on your stream. There is no account required to begin and almost nothing to learn. For one match run by one person, that is close to the ideal shape of a tool.
LIGR
Automated broadcast graphics driven by real match data, for organisations running seasons. The score, clock, squads, statistics and sponsor rotation come from a feed or a scoring app, and the graphics fire themselves. Setup is per competition rather than per match, which only pays back when there are a lot of matches.
Both products draw a score on a video. That is where the overlap ends. One is designed so a single person can run a single game with no preparation. The other is designed so nobody has to be present for the graphics at all, across every fixture in a season. Neither shape is better in the abstract, and the wrong one is genuinely painful.
LIGR vs KeepTheScore, side by side
We sell one of these, so read the table knowing that, and note the rows where we lose. Everything below reflects how each product is described by its makers at the time of writing. Features and pricing move, so check both before you decide.
| KeepTheScore | LIGR | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An online scoreboard you drive by hand, with a browser-source overlay for your stream. | A cloud broadcast graphics and streaming platform, driven by live match data. |
| Time to your first scoreboard | Under a minute. Pick a sport, start scoring, copy the overlay URL. | Longer, because setup happens per competition. After that, every fixture is already configured. |
| Account needed to start | No. You can create a board and score a game without signing up. | Yes for the platform. No for the free LIGR scoreboard. |
| Where the score comes from | A person tapping the board on a phone, tablet or laptop. | An official data feed, or the LiveScore app, which records timestamped match events. |
| Graphics | Clean, readable overlays with custom colours, team logos and CSS styling. | Animated Rive graphics with state machines and per-competition theming. |
| Beyond the score bug | Score focused, with custom messages and a stream ticker. | Lower thirds, line-ups, statistics panels, interval summaries, sponsor boards, transitions. |
| Automation | An API is available to read and update scores, if you build the integration yourself. | Rules fire graphics from match events and the clock. Set once per competition, no code. |
| Sponsors | Team and sponsor logos on the paid tiers. | Timed and event-triggered sponsor slots, plus a log of what was on screen and for how long. |
| Video | Overlay only. You bring OBS, vMix, Streamlabs or Wirecast. | Ingest over SRT, RTMP and NDI, including AI cameras, then graphics and delivery in one chain. |
| Outputs at once | One overlay URL per board. | Several simultaneous outputs from one match, horizontal and vertical. |
| Highlights and clips | Outside what a scoreboard overlay sets out to do. | Automated highlights built from the timestamped events the scoring app already produced. |
| Scaling across a season | Each match is set up by whoever happens to be running it that day. | Configure the competition once. Every fixture inherits design, data model and automation. |
| Pricing shape | A free tier plus low-cost paid tiers, priced for an individual or a single club. | Platform pricing for organisations producing sport at volume. |
| Best suited to | One match, one person, this Saturday. | A season of fixtures across venues you do not all control. |
Where KeepTheScore wins
Simplicity, price for one-off use, and an instant start with no account. There is a real cost to every setup step a product asks for, and KeepTheScore has removed almost all of them. If your requirement is a scoreboard today, complexity you do not need is not a feature, it is a tax. Any platform with per-competition configuration, LIGR included, loses that race and should admit it.
Where LIGR wins
Automation from a data feed or a scoring app, broadcast-quality animated graphics, sponsor rotation with exposure reporting, multiple simultaneous outputs, automated highlights, and the ability to hold all of that steady across a full season. Every one of those advantages is worth nothing for a single game, and decisive by the two-hundredth fixture.
What a LIGR scoreboard looks like on a stream
1920×1080 still or ~6s MP4 loop. Side-by-side of the same fixture: hand-driven bug left, competition-themed animated LIGR bug right.
Which one should you use
The test is not features. It is how many matches you are responsible for, and whether anyone is paying for what appears on screen.
Use KeepTheScore if
- You are scoring one game and you want a scoreboard on the screen in the next five minutes.
- A volunteer is running it, they have never seen the tool before, and nobody is going to train them.
- You need a board on a phone and a display on a TV in the hall, and that is the whole requirement.
- The budget is a personal card, not a purchase order, and it needs to stay that way.
- You are running social sport, a school carnival, a club night or a tournament bracket rather than a broadcast.
- You already have OBS or vMix set up and you only want the score part solved.
Use LIGR if
- You are producing a season, not a match, and the number of fixtures makes manual setup per game the bottleneck.
- The competition brand has to look the same at a grand final and at a Tuesday night reserve grade game.
- You have sponsors who are paying for exposure and expect a report on what they actually got.
- You need more than a score bug: player introductions, scorer graphics, line-ups, statistics and interval panels.
- There is an official data feed, or you want your scoring to also produce highlights, statistics and clips.
- You cannot staff a graphics operator for every fixture, and you are not willing to drop the production standard because of it.
- You need the same match published to several destinations at once, in more than one aspect ratio.
If you read both lists and the left one describes you, stop here and go and use KeepTheScore, or the free LIGR scoreboard, whichever you prefer. A comparison page that talks somebody into the wrong product has failed at the only thing it was for.
We give away the free scoreboard too
The manual scoreboard is a solved problem and it should be free. So we built one and put no price on it.
The LIGR online scoreboard covers ten sports, each with the scoring and clock logic that sport actually needs rather than a generic home versus away counter: shot clock and team fouls in basketball, the count and the bases in baseball, sets and serve in volleyball, down and distance in American football, games and tie breaks in tennis. It runs in a browser, needs no download, and produces an overlay URL that goes straight into OBS, vMix or Streamlabs as a browser source with a transparent background.
That tool exists because the honest answer to most people asking for a scoreboard is a free scoreboard, not a sales call. The platform is a separate conversation, and it starts when the number of fixtures makes doing it by hand the wrong shape of work. There is a wider view of what that platform covers on the broadcast graphics software page.
What changes when the graphics are driven by data
This is the actual difference, and it is not a longer feature list. It is that nobody has to be watching the match in order for the right graphic to appear.
The animation framework the designs are authored in. Vector animation with state machines, so a graphic transitions between states rather than cutting between stills.
The configuration and publishing engine. Fuse binds those designs to live data fields and themes them per competition and per club, with no code. One design set covers every fixture.
The sport-specific scoring app. Somebody still presses buttons, but they press real match events: goal by a named player, card, substitution, timeout. Each one carries a timestamp.
The automation layer. Line-ups before kick-off, a scorer graphic on a goal, statistics at the interval, sponsors on rotation. Set once per competition, applied to every match in it.
The browser control surface for when a human should be in the loop. Correct a score, hold a graphic, drop a sponsor, live and without stopping the broadcast.
Soccer scorebug — scorer graphic on a goal
1920×540 MP4 loop, ~6s, alpha or chequerboard. Goal event firing the named-scorer graphic.
Basketball scorebug — shot clock and team fouls
1920×540 MP4 loop, ~6s, alpha or chequerboard. Shot-clock reset during a scoring run.
Tennis scorebug — games, sets and tie break
1920×540 MP4 loop, ~6s, alpha or chequerboard. Tie-break points ticking over with serve indicator.
The compounding effect is the point. Because every event is timestamped, the same input that drives the score bug also produces automated highlights, statistics panels and sponsor exposure reporting. A manually tapped score cannot do that, because incrementing a number does not record who scored, when, or from what.
Where this runs at volume
Volume is the only real test of the model, because anything looks fine for one showcase match.
DAZN National League
More than 640 matches of English National League football per season, across grounds with very different production capability.
AFL and SANFL
Australian rules football, a code whose time-on clock and three-value scoring generic overlay tools consistently get wrong.
WTA Tour and ITF World Tennis Tour
Tennis scored in games, sets and tie breaks, across tour events with their own brand requirements.
Also Queensland Rugby League, Basketball NSW, Cricket Tasmania, the EuroMillions Basketball League in Belgium, Horizon League, World Sevens Football in Miami and the Corsican football league. Football Australia runs LIGR across 4,000+ live matches annually, spanning nine State Member Federations.
If you want the element-by-element detail on the graphic everybody argues about, we have written it up sport by sport in the guide to sports scoreboard graphics, and there are further comparisons against Singular.live, Flowics and a traditional production truck on the compare index.
KeepTheScore and LIGR: common questions
What is the best KeepTheScore alternative?
It depends on what you are replacing. If you want the same job done, a scoreboard you tap on a phone with an overlay URL for OBS, then the honest answer is that KeepTheScore already does that well and most alternatives are variations on it, including our own free scoreboard. If you are outgrowing manual score-keeping because you now run a season of fixtures across several venues, you are not looking for another scoreboard app. You are looking for automated broadcast graphics driven by match data, which is what LIGR is.
Is LIGR a free scoreboard like KeepTheScore?
LIGR publishes a free online scoreboard and stream overlay. It covers ten sports, runs in a browser, needs no download and gives you an overlay URL you can paste into OBS, vMix or Streamlabs as a browser source. That tool is deliberately free and it is not the platform. The LIGR platform is the automated broadcast graphics system underneath, and that is a paid product for organisations.
What does LIGR do that a scoreboard app does not?
Four things. It takes scores from an official data feed or a sport-specific scoring app rather than from someone typing. It renders broadcast-grade animated graphics, including lower thirds, line-ups, statistics panels and sponsor boards, not just a score bug. It fires those graphics automatically from match events and the clock. And it handles the video itself, ingesting camera feeds and delivering multiple simultaneous outputs.
What does KeepTheScore do better than LIGR?
Starting. You can be scoring a game inside a minute with no account and no setup, and for a single match on a Saturday that matters more than anything on a feature list. It is also priced for an individual rather than for an organisation, and it is simple enough that a volunteer can be handed a phone and told to keep score with no training. Those are real advantages and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Do I need an account to use a free scoreboard overlay?
Not with KeepTheScore, which lets you create a board and start scoring without signing up, and not with the LIGR free scoreboard either. Both give you a browser source URL you can drop straight into OBS. You only need an account when you want boards to persist, brand them properly, or move up to a platform that runs graphics across a whole competition.
Which tool suits a whole league season?
A manual scoreboard is configured per match by whoever is running that match, so the effort and the quality both scale linearly with the number of fixtures. A data-driven platform is configured once per competition and every fixture inherits it, which is why leagues producing hundreds of matches a season end up on that model. If your season is twenty games at one ground, the manual approach is fine.
Does LIGR replace OBS or vMix?
It can. A scoreboard overlay tool always sits alongside OBS or vMix, because something else has to do the video. LIGR ingests the camera feed directly over SRT, RTMP or NDI, including from AI cameras such as Veo, Pixellot, Spiideo and Hudl Focus, applies the graphics in the cloud and publishes the output. You can still send LIGR a feed from OBS if you prefer to keep your existing switcher.
Can I move from a manual scoreboard to LIGR without changing how the match is scored?
Largely, yes. Most clubs below the top tier already have a person keeping score on a phone, and LIGR expects exactly that person. The difference is that the LiveScore app records real match events, a goal by a named player, a card, a substitution, each with a timestamp, rather than only incrementing a number. Same job at the scorer table, considerably more output from it.
A season of fixtures, one design set
1920×1080 MP4 loop, ~8s. Quad-split of four different fixtures carrying the same competition-themed graphics.
Start with the free scoreboard
Use it for as long as it is the right tool. When the fixture list gets long enough that somebody has to be at every game just to run the graphics, bring us that fixture list and we will show you what the season looks like automated.