Switching to Crickslab
Looking for a CricHQ alternative
CricHQ was the platform many boards, associations and leagues built their competitions on. It went offline in August 2024, in the middle of the English season, and never came back. Today the crichq.com domain is still registered but its DNS zone is empty, so the web application and any competition records inside it are not reachable over the public internet. Clubs and leagues that had years of fixtures, scorecards and player records in there have not been able to get them out through the platform since.
If you are still running your competitions on spreadsheets because of it, or you are choosing a replacement and want to be certain this does not happen twice, this page is for you.
Crickslab is cricket infrastructure built for the organisation that sits above the clubs. Pakistan Cricket Board and Bangladesh Cricket Board run on it. So do Qatar Cricket Association, Kuwait Cricket Club and the Italian Cricket Federation, each under its own name. Lahore Qalandars run on it in Pakistan, T Sports in Bangladesh and Dialog in Sri Lanka, alongside more than 500 clubs, academies and associations across 14 countries.
What actually happened to CricHQ
CricHQ was founded in Wellington, New Zealand in 2010 and at its peak managed competitions for national boards and thousands of clubs. Its scoring app and competition management tools were the default in several markets.
We are not going to speculate about the company. What we can state is what anyone can check today:
- The site went offline in August 2024, mid season, initially behind a page reading unplanned downtime. It has not returned.
- crichq.com is still registered, but its DNS zone publishes no address records. The domain has no A record, www.crichq.com and support.crichq.com return NXDOMAIN, and no mail exchanger is published, so email to the domain does not deliver either. Any browser request fails before it reaches a server.
- Search engines still hold crichq.com URLs, including competition, ground and support pages. Those results click through to nothing.
- There is no published migration route, export tool or support channel operating at the domain.
If your association held fixtures, scorecards, player records or officials data in CricHQ, treat it as data you cannot assume you will get back through the platform. Anything you still hold locally, in exports, in club spreadsheets or in scorer app backups, is now your primary copy. Preserve it before you do anything else.
What to do first if you were a CricHQ customer
- 1Collect every export, backup and spreadsheet your clubs and scorers still hold. Do not deduplicate yet, just gather. Two years on, this material is sitting on individual laptops and it is still disappearing.
- 2Write down which competitions must be live for your next season and by what date. That is the real deadline, not the migration itself.
- 3Identify the smallest thing that has to work first. For most associations it is fixtures and live scoring, not the full registration and payment stack.
- 4Talk to a vendor who has done a board level migration before and can tell you honestly what will and will not carry over.
Why boards choose Crickslab
Most cricket software is built for a club, then stretched upward when an association asks for it. Crickslab was built the other way around, as infrastructure for the organisation that has to answer for the whole competition structure.
It runs at national board level today
Crickslab is not asking you to be its first board. Pakistan Cricket Board, Bangladesh Cricket Board, Kuwait Cricket Club, Qatar Cricket Association and the Italian Cricket Federation are live on it, across 14 countries and more than 500 organisations. That matters for a migration, because board level problems are already solved rather than being scoped for the first time on your project: multi tier competition hierarchies, official registration, age group eligibility, disciplinary records and centrally mandated data standards.
A board answers for its whole competition structure, not just the first XI. The Pakistan Blind Cricket Council runs its Blind Cricket Super League on Crickslab alongside the mainstream domestic game, which is the practical test of whether a platform can carry every competition a governing body is responsible for.
What a national board specifically gets, from the single player registry to delegated administration and ICC reporting, is set out on cricket board management software.
Your brand, your domain, your app
White label here does not mean a logo swap on a vendor subdomain. It means the deployment carries your identity everywhere your members meet it.
Pakistan
Pakistan Cricket Board
Player and official registration and the public match centre, on the board's own domain.
Qatar
Qatar Cricket Association
Match central, scoring, ground booking, ticketing and payments, plus a cricket app published under the association's own name.
Kuwait
Kuwait Cricket Club
Match central and competition operations, with its own branded cricket app.
Your competitions, your logos, your domain, your app under your own name. Members interact with your organisation, not with a third party consumer app that also happens to host your league. When Qatar Cricket Association announced the partnership publicly in 2024, it was announced as Qatar's platform, and that is how it appears to every player who uses it.
One platform, not seven integrations
Registration, fixtures, live scoring, streaming, ground booking, ticketing, player records, officials and social output run on the same platform against the same data. There is no nightly sync between a scoring app, a registration portal and a separate ticketing vendor, and therefore no class of problem where three systems disagree about who played.
Governance and continuity
The lesson of CricHQ is not that a feature was missing. It is that an association's entire competition history sat inside a system it did not control and could not export from once the platform went dark. Ask any vendor you talk to, including us, three questions: can I export my full dataset on demand, in what format, and what happens to my data if our contract ends. Get the answers in the contract, not in an email.
Honest comparison
We are not going to tell you Crickslab wins on every line. Here is where the market actually sits.
| Capability | Crickslab | CricHQ | CricHeroes | CricClubs | NV Play |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Status | Operating | Unreachable since August 2024 | Operating | Operating | Operating |
| Built for boards and associations | Yes, live at national board level | Was, historically | Association tier exists | Club and league focus | Yes. ECB, Cricket Ireland, Cricket Scotland, ICC Associates |
| Your own domain and branded app | Yes, both. Live for PCB, Qatar and Kuwait | Limited | No | Partial | Not published |
| Live streaming and broadcast output | Included | Was included | Limited | Overlay graphics | Strong, plus Vision AI ball tracking |
| Ticketing and ground booking | Included | No | No | No | No |
| Free entry tier | Yes, individual players | Was free at entry | Yes, large free tier | Yes, free | No |
| Consumer scale community | Smaller | Was large | Largest by a distance | Large in US and expat leagues | Not the focus |
Checked 20 August 2026. Competitor entries reflect each vendor's own published material.
Where CricHeroes is genuinely stronger
Community scale. It has far more individual players and casual matches than anyone else, and a free tier that costs a club nothing. If you are a single club and your requirement is letting your players score matches and see their stats, CricHeroes is a reasonable answer and Crickslab is more platform than you need.
Where NV Play is genuinely stronger
Elite performance analysis. Its ball tracking and Vision AI work is ahead of ours for professional analysis, and it holds ECB, ICC and Cricket Ireland relationships. If your primary requirement is elite player analysis rather than running a whole competition structure, evaluate them seriously.
Where Crickslab wins
When one organisation has to run registration, competitions, scoring, streaming, grounds and ticketing across multiple tiers, under its own brand, and be accountable for the data.
How a migration actually works
01
Week one
Scope
We look at what you have. Exports, spreadsheets, club level records, scorer app backups, whatever survived. We tell you plainly what can be imported, what needs manual entry and what is realistically not recoverable. You get that assessment before you commit to anything.
02
Weeks two to three
Structure
We build your competition structure in Crickslab: organisation, tiers, competitions, seasons, age groups, clubs, teams, grounds and officials. This is the part that determines whether the system fits how your board actually works, so it is done with your competitions staff, not around them.
03
Weeks three to five
Data load
Historic fixtures, results, player records and officials are loaded and reconciled. You review and sign off before anything goes public.
04
Weeks five to six
Brand and launch
Your deployment is configured under your domain and identity, and your app is prepared for both stores. Clubs and scorers are onboarded and trained. Your public site goes live.
05
Ongoing
First season
Support runs alongside your first live season, because that is when the questions actually arrive.
Typical board or association migration: six to eight weeks from scope to public launch. Single league or club: two to three weeks. Timelines depend on how much historic data you want carried across and how many clubs need training.
What it costs
Association, league, ticketing, ground booking and turnkey deployments are quoted rather than listed, because scope varies by the number of tiers, clubs and grounds, and by whether streaming and ticketing are in scope. Club and academy plans are published on our pricing page.
For a migration specifically, there is no charge for the scoping assessment. You get a written scope, a data recoverability assessment and a fixed price before you commit.
Book a migration scope callQuestions boards ask
Is CricHQ shut down?
Can I get my data out of CricHQ?
How long does migration to Crickslab take?
Will our competition history be preserved?
Do we get our own branded site and app?
Which cricket boards use Crickslab?
What happens to our data if we leave Crickslab?
Is there a free option?
Beyond the migration
One platform your competitions, your broadcast and your members all run on
A migration is the start. What a board actually gets is registration, competition structure, live scoring, streaming with scoreboard graphics, ground booking, ticketing and player records operating as one system, under your identity, with the data accountable to you.
What you get on day one
One platform, connected modules
Everything below runs on the same data, in the same deployment, under your brand. There is no second vendor and no nightly sync between systems.
Replaces what you ran on CricHQ
Every part of a competition CricHQ used to hold, rebuilt on your own deployment.
What CricHQ never gave you
The commercial and broadcast layers, on the same data, with no second vendor.
Registration, officials, disciplinary records and reporting are included with every board and association deployment. See all Crickslab modules.
CricHQ availability verified by DNS, WHOIS and HTTP request on 20 August 2026. Competitor information reflects each vendor's own published material on that date.