This is a comparison written by the people who make one of the products in it, so read it that way. The prices are from each company's public price page as of the date at the top, and the feature calls are what we could verify by using the products or reading their documentation. If we have something wrong, tell us and we will fix it.
The short version
- Script Week: play designer with situational tags; call sheets fill from the tags and print with wristband inserts. Free for one coach, 20 plays and one call sheet; Coach $96/yr, Staff $240/yr for up to 10 coaches, Team $400/yr adds player accounts. Film is an add-on on Coach and up, $199/yr for 100 stored hours; no film exchange.
- FirstDown PlayBook: 35,000+ pre-drawn plays plus a designer, PlayGrids page layouts for printing, and a call sheet builder (Full Team only from January 2027). $250/yr for one tackle coach ($150 flag-only), $750/yr for a staff with unlimited users. The largest play library in the space.
- Football Play Card: play cards, wristbands and play scripts for tackle and flag (4v4 through 12v12), with custom tags that can fill call-sheet sections and AI-graded player quizzes. $36/yr for one coach without call sheets, $180/yr with them, $192 to $768/yr for a team. The closest to Script Week on tagging; its tags are one flat list rather than down, distance, field zone and personnel.
- Just Play: playbook, installs, quizzes and scouting with Hudl and Catapult video integrations, aimed mostly at college and pro staffs. Call sheets are not the focus. Pricing is by demo only; there are no public plans.
- Hudl: film exchange and breakdown, $400 to $1,600 per year for a club team and $1,500 to $4,000 per year for a high school program. No call sheet builder. Most staffs that use Hudl pair it with one of the tools above or a spreadsheet.
- Pro Quick Draw: a PowerPoint and Visio plug-in with football stencils and scout-card templates, sold as a yearly subscription by quote. Good if your staff already lives in PowerPoint; a plug-in, not a playbook system.
- A spreadsheet: free, infinitely flexible, and entirely manual. Every week you retype play names into boxes. Works for a 30-play youth offense; falls over for a 150-play varsity install.
What actually separates them
Every tool on this list can produce a page with plays in boxes. The differences are in where the plays come from and what happens when something changes.
- Does the sheet fill itself? Only tools with situational tags on each play can do this. Script Week tags plays by down, distance, field zone, hash, personnel and defensive front, and a box on the sheet is a filter over those tags. Football Play Card's custom tags can fill a section too, matching all or any of the tags you pick from one flat list. FirstDown and Just Play organize plays by folder or formation, so filling a box is still a manual pick. A spreadsheet is manual by definition.
- What happens when you rename or redraw a play? In a system where the sheet references the play, every sheet follows. In a spreadsheet or a static PDF, you find and fix each copy.
- Do the wristband numbers match the sheet? Script Week prints wristband inserts from the same call list, so they cannot drift. Elsewhere it is two documents to keep in step.
- Can you draw one play against several fronts? Script Week keeps defensive variants inside one play. FirstDown and Just Play treat each drawing as its own play, which means duplicates.
- Is there film? Just Play links to video you keep in Hudl or Catapult; Hudl is film. Script Week hosts your own film as an add-on ($199/yr, 100 hours) but does not exchange film with other schools. FirstDown's Full Team includes 50 GB of video, also with no exchange. If film exchange is the priority, you are buying Hudl or QwikCut anyway, and the question is what you pair it with.
- Pre-drawn plays. FirstDown's 35,000-play library is real and useful for a coach building an offense from scratch. Script Week has a smaller community library of coach-submitted plays you can copy into your own book.
Who should pick what
- A single coach at a youth or small high school program who draws their own plays: Script Week, starting on the free plan. Tagging is the feature that pays for itself the second week.
- A staff that wants a big library of ready-made plays and a print grid, and does not mind manual sheet building: FirstDown PlayBook at $750 for the whole staff.
- A college or well-funded program whose main need is teaching players: Just Play, with the understanding that call sheets are a side feature and the price is a sales conversation.
- A staff on Hudl that wants scouting, practice scripts and call sheets in one place without another film bill: Script Week Staff alongside Hudl. The two do not overlap.
- A coach with a 30-play offense and a good spreadsheet habit: keep the spreadsheet until it hurts.
What we are not telling you
Script Week is nine weeks old at the time of writing. FirstDown has been around for more than a decade and Hudl runs most of American high school football film. Maturity is a real thing to weigh. What we can say is that the price you sign up at is locked for as long as you stay subscribed, cancelling is two clicks, and every play you draw exports as a printable card whether you stay or not.