Guide · Updated June 2026 · 7 min read

The Best Sporting Clays Scoring Apps in 2026 (Honest Comparison)

Paper scorecards get lost, smudged, and never tell you anything useful afterward. A good scoring app keeps your rounds in one place and — if it's any good — shows you where you're actually losing targets. Here's an honest look at the main options in 2026, including where ours fits in.

What to look for

• Disciplines you shoot — sporting clays, super sporting, FITASC, 5-Stand, skeet, trap.
• Squad scoring — can one person score the whole squad, or just themselves?
• Offline use — most clays courses have terrible cell service.
• Analytics — does it just store scores, or tell you why you missed?

HotClays

The long-standing favorite, frequently recommended on trapshooters.com. Free, proven, and supports trap, skeet and sporting clays with solid squad scoring. If you want a no-cost, battle-tested scorekeeper, it's the default. It leans on scoring and logging rather than deep performance analytics.

ClaysBuddy

Covers an unusually wide range of discipline variations, which makes it appealing if you shoot formats other apps ignore. Strong on flexibility of scoring formats.

ClayTrack

Differentiates with per-shot detail and scorecard scanning (OCR). Good if you want granular per-target records and a way to digitize paper cards.

ClayAI

Full disclosure — this is our app, and it's launching soon, so we're listing it for context, not pretending it's been around for years. ClayAI's wedge is analytics and coaching: it breaks down your hit rate by station, target type, and presentation, and surfaces the patterns you'd never catch from memory. It also does real-time squad scoring with a live view and guest scoring, and works offline. If "why did I miss the teal all day?" is the question you care about, that's what we built it to answer.

The honest bottom line

If you want a free, proven scorekeeper today, HotClays is hard to beat. If you shoot unusual formats, look at ClaysBuddy. If you want per-shot granularity, ClayTrack. If you want an app that analyzes your performance and tells you what to work on, that's the gap ClayAI is built to fill.