Data is king. 

Our world revolves around collecting and analyzing data to make informed decisions and sport is no different. This has become obvious in how data has impacted strategy at the highest levels of every sport. In football, teams “go for it” on 4th down more now than ever, in hockey, coaches pull their goalies earlier now than in years past and in golf, athletes are working harder to hit the ball farther than they ever have before. All of these changes are the result of data collection and analysis that helped identify the optimal decisions and strategies that give teams and athletes an edge over each other.

In golf, stats tracking is used heavily at the elite junior, collegiate and professional levels; it is no longer unique and is required to improve. If you have aspirations of reaching or excelling at those levels then you’re in the right place. We’re going to review the top 5 stats tracking options available to you today that will help you reach your goals. 

When I think about what makes a great stats tracking platform, it is one that will help you become the best golfer you can be (effectiveness) with minimal time (ease of use) and money (price). With that in mind, let’s dive in… 

1. One Iota Golf

Ease of Use (A)

One Iota Golf offers both mobile and web stats entry that emphasizes the most important stats without collecting unnecessary details. The mobile app allows for on course entry to make it easier and less time consuming to track your stats. One Iota Golf also provides post round summaries directly to your (and coaches) email to help you understand how you performed and where you can focus your training with no additional effort required.

Effectiveness (A)

Making use of their company’s coaching background, the One Iota Golf app provides an extensive drill library of high-quality drills built to help maximize your training time and improve in an impactful way. Based on your performance One Iota Golf provides specific drill recommendations that you can bring to the training facility whether that is on-course, on the range or indoors. Combined with their powerful comparative analysis enabling you to easily identify your strengths and weaknesses against collegiate and professional benchmarks, One Iota Golf makes getting better easy.

Unique Feature (A+)

One Iota Golf stands out on our list because of its unique offering to measure and analyze the mental side of the game. They have recognized the importance of the mental aspects of the game and provide a method for you to track your mental performance with their proprietary PERFoRM™ Profile and then help you improve it using their extensive drill library. 

Pricing (A+)

Athletes: $92 USD ($129 CAD) / year

Coaches: $570 USD ($799 CAD) / year – for 10 athletes 

2. Upgame

Ease of Use (B+)

Upgame provides drag and drop round entry for stats entry which provides the ability to record tour-level stats tracking detail. This level of detail can be a distraction while entering all of your stats accurately while on the course but if you are willing to do the work, can be highly valuable.

Effectiveness (A-)

Upgame makes extensive use of your stats to help you plan and execute your on-course strategy. With the ability for coaches to create and publish drills to you as an athlete this tool can be highly effective but lacks a built-in library of coach-approved drills for individuals and does not recommend drills based on your on-course performance. 

Unique Feature (A+)

Upgame provides the ability to overlay your driving and approach dispersions on the golf holes you are currently playing making course strategy highly intuitive and easy. They are also promoting an integration with Trackman Golf which has the potential to bring your training and indoor round data directly to their app.

Pricing (D)

Athletes: $300 USD / year

3. Circles

Ease of Use (B+)

Circles provides drag and drop round entry for stats entry which provides the ability to record highly detailed stats tracking detail. This method is quite simple when the hole played is simple (fairway, green, putt) but can quickly become challenging and time consuming as you attempt to enter more complex situations. 

Effectiveness (B)

The Circles app provides a highly intuitive interface centered around providing comparisons against benchmarks to help you determine where your strengths and weaknesses lie. They also provide the ability to isolate and record data from training but do not provide any effective drills to work on specific areas that are identified.  

Unique Feature (B)

Circles provides you with the ability to compare your training output against benchmarks for you to work towards and achieve. This is uniquely available at highly granular levels (such as expected fairway approach proximity from 100-125yds).

Pricing (C)

Athletes: $249 USD / year

Coaches: Free (athletes pay)

4. Clippd

Ease of Use (C+)

Clippd provides the ability to capture your on-course stats through their apps but emphasizes integrations with golf technologies such as Arccos. While technologies such as Arccos make ease of entry highly effective, they lack crucial detail that can make the collected data less reliable such as on the putting green or approach distances. 

Effectiveness (B-)

Clippd provides a visually appealing interface that makes looking at your analysis exciting and interesting but does not provide any form of drill library that you can make use of to actually improve your performance in the identified areas. This list of items to work on can be highly effective if you have a library of drills already available and accessible to you.

Unique Feature (B+)

Clippd provides a ‘new benchmark of skill’ that they label as shot and player quality. This allows you to view a single number that is comparable across various parts of your game to see how they stack up against each other. This helps them to clearly identify a list of priorities for your training.

Pricing (C-)

Athletes: $240 USD / year

Teams: $2440 USD / team / year

5. Decade

Ease of Use  (D)

Decade provides an extensive level of detail for their stats tracking but the number 1 criticism is the difficulty of entering all of the stats. This often causes frustration and disengagement with athletes at all levels. They have introduced GPS stats entry but that presents similar issues as the GPS entry methods discussed.

Effectiveness (C)

Decade golf provides the ability to dig into the details of your collected stats but stops short of making this an easy or intuitive process. Identifying how to make use of the statistics to improve your performance will require time and effort. Decade golf does offer a drill library but does not suggest drills based on your performance.

Unique Feature (A+)

Decade golf provides the ability to print yardage books directly from their course database which can then be used during tournaments for capturing course strategy. Additionally, decade golf provides an extensive education library on course strategy, a highly effective and data driven approach to decision making. Many of the core concepts can be found online for free.

Pricing (D)

Athletes: $325 USD / year

College Teams: $1500 USD / team / year

Bottom Line

Finding the right stats tracking tool for you means identifying what features you care about most and determining how you will use the tool to help you reach your goals. 

We believe One Iota Golf is the number one choice for this because of its personalized drill recommendations and its unique focus on the mental side of the game. Add this on to the highly competitive price of less than $100/year and we think it’s an obvious choice!