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Two membership platforms with very different scopes. Row HQ does one thing: rowing. LoveAdmin is a UK general-purpose club system spanning dozens of activities. Here is the honest comparison for a Canadian rowing club deciding between them.
By Jason Burns, Founder, Row HQ · Updated
LoveAdmin is broad club-admin software used across gymnastics, dance, soccer, swim, drama and plenty more. Row HQ was written for rowing clubs and nothing else. One thing to settle up front: LoveAdmin sells mainly into the UK, so ask them directly whether they support Canadian clubs today - CAD billing, a payment provider that handles Interac and Canadian cards, and support hours that overlap your time zone. If your club lives on rowing workflows (shell booking gated by hull type, drag-and-drop crew building, regatta entries, splitting on-water outings from winter erg work, coxswain roles), Row HQ already thinks that way. If you are really a multi-activity club and want one login for everything, LoveAdmin has the wider reach. The everyday basics - dues, messaging, attendance - are solid on both.
The day-to-day rowing tasks where the two platforms part ways. Last checked against the feature pages published on loveadmin.com.
| What you need | Row HQ | LoveAdmin |
|---|---|---|
| Built specifically for | Rowing clubs only | Any sport or activity club |
| Boat booking with hull-type rules | Yes - per-hull access rules and conflict blocking | Not advertised on their site |
| Drag-and-drop crew selection | Yes - visual crew builder with seat assignment | Not advertised |
| Regatta entry workflow | Yes - crew sheets, fees, Rowing Canada Aviron-ready exports | Generic event management |
| Coxswain as a first-class seat | Yes - the cox is a recognized seat with its own permissions | Not advertised |
| Sweep vs sculling distinction | Yes - built into the data model | Not advertised |
| On-water vs erg session types | Yes - separate session categories | Generic class and event types |
| Member CRM, online payments, comms | Yes | Yes |
| Email and text messaging to members | Yes | Yes |
| Attendance tracking | Yes - one tap in the app | Yes |
| Member self-service app | Yes - white-labelled in your club's colours | Yes - JoinIn app |
| Pricing model | Banded by member count, CAD, published on our pricing page | See loveadmin.com for current pricing |
LoveAdmin sells breadth. Its customers span gymnastics, dance, soccer, swim, drama and a long list of other activities. That range is the whole argument for choosing them.
If your organization is more than a rowing club - a multi-sport community association, a school that offers rowing next to hockey, basketball or swimming, or a rec centre juggling several programs - LoveAdmin can hold all of it in one place. One member database, one payment setup, one messaging tool, and the office staff learn a single system instead of several.
They also sell a hands-on onboarding model: a named consultant plus a wider club-development programme running alongside the software. If you want a partner leaning in on general club growth, that is on the table with them.
And if your club is already on LoveAdmin - member records, payment history and reporting all sitting inside it - the case to move has to be strong before it is worth the upheaval. For some clubs, staying put is simply the sensible call.
Row HQ earns its keep when rowing is the entire operation. That describes most Canadian clubs, from Argonaut Rowing Club on Toronto's waterfront to Vancouver Rowing Club under the mountains. The fleet, the crew lists and the regatta season are the daily work here, not a footnote beside a dozen other sports, and the software is shaped around exactly that.
Boats are a proper entity in Row HQ, not a line in a generic asset list. Every shell carries its hull type, its sign-off rules (who is cleared to take out a single or the club eight), conflict blocking and a maintenance log. Boat booking was designed for rowing rather than retrofitted from a room-booking tool.
Crew selection follows the same logic. Coaches drag rowers into seats, read attendance and side preference at a glance, keep reusable crew templates and send the finished lineup out in a single tap. The coxswain is a real role with its own permissions and cox-box assignment, not a spare text field bent to fit.
The vocabulary is right too. Sessions are on-water or erg. Events are head races or regattas. Rowers are scullers or sweep. Crews are eights, fours, quads, doubles, pairs and singles. It is built for people who already talk like a rowing club, so nobody has to mentally translate a generic sports app on every screen.
Multi-squad clubs - juniors, seniors, masters, novice learn-to-row - each run their own scheduling, attendance and crew lists while sharing one admin team and one set of books. School programs racing at CSSRA, and university boat clubs in OUA and U SPORTS, lean on the same building blocks without any awkward workarounds.
Six rowing-specific workflows where the platforms diverge.
Row HQ treats each shell as a tracked asset with a hull type, sign-off rules and crew limits. Members see live availability, can only book the boats they are cleared for, and clashes are blocked for them automatically. Coaches can see who is in which boat for any given outing. See the boat booking feature. LoveAdmin's booking engine is built around classes and session slots - a member reserves a slot, not a specific shell with its own hull rules.
Drag rowers into a crew and read their availability, side preference (port versus starboard) and recent attendance next to each other. Save lineup templates for outings you repeat week to week. Send the crew sheet to members and watch the acknowledgements come back. See the coach tools. LoveAdmin handles team rosters and squad lists rather than seat-by-seat crew building with rowing's side-and-seat rules.
Members tap once in the app to confirm. Coaches see who is available, grouped by squad and by session type - on-water, erg or land. Cancel for weather or ice and the whole session reschedules and notifies everyone in seconds, which matters through a long Canadian winter when the erg calendar carries the club for months. See training session management. Both platforms track attendance well; the difference is that Row HQ already knows on-water from erg from land, so the reports split those out on their own.
Assemble a regatta or head race entry, attach the crews, collect entry fees, produce Rowing Canada Aviron returns and track acknowledgements in one place. It is shaped around the Canadian calendar - the Royal Canadian Henley in St. Catharines, CSSRA championships and the provincial regatta season. See event and regatta management. LoveAdmin gives you generic event management and ticketing - workable for lots of sports, but it has no notion of a Canadian head race entry or a Henley draw.
Juniors, seniors, masters, school and university squads each get their own scheduling, crew templates and attendance while sharing a single membership database, one set of finances and one place to send messages from. Coaches only see their own squad. Both platforms cope with multiple groups; what Row HQ adds is default templates already cut to the way a typical Canadian rowing club is organized.
Members sign in to a portal wearing your club's branding. They can see their upcoming sessions, the boats they are booked into, crew sheets, dues and notifications. See the member portal or the white-label setup. LoveAdmin's JoinIn is a shared member app that carries their branding by default; check their site for whatever white-label options they offer now.
Free for clubs with up to 20 active members, then flat monthly bands based on member count - every band listed openly in Canadian dollars on our pricing page. No setup fee, no card needed to begin, and the full feature set on every band.
Their pricing is quoted per club and depends on your size, setup needs and the modules you take. Ask loveadmin.com for a current figure. Because it is priced in the UK, a Canadian club should confirm CAD billing, a payment processor that clears Interac and local cards, and how GST, HST or PST would be handled before signing anything.
Yes. Export your members, your payment history and any class or session data and send it over. We load the lot into Row HQ during onboarding, so nothing gets left behind. Most clubs are fully live on Row HQ inside a week of handing the data across.
On rowing workflows - boat booking, crew selection, regatta entries, coxswain handling, on-water versus erg sessions - Row HQ goes considerably deeper. On breadth across other activities (gymnastics, dance, soccer, drama, swim) it does not compete, because we only build for rowing. The shared membership basics - CRM, payments, comms, attendance - are covered properly on both.
There is no clean headline number, because LoveAdmin quotes per club against your size and chosen modules. Row HQ is free up to 20 active members and then posts flat monthly bands by member count in CAD, right there on the pricing page. Get a live quote from LoveAdmin and set it against ours for the size of club you actually run.
Yes. Book a demo from the demo page and we will walk your real workflow through Row HQ live - boat booking, crew selection, sessions, payments, all of it. Or spin your club up yourself on the get-started page and have a play - free up to 20 active members, no card required.
Then LoveAdmin's wider coverage may fit you better, since you would get a single platform spanning rowing and everything else. Row HQ is the wrong pick if you need to run non-rowing activity in the same system. Where rowing is clearly the main event and the rest is minor, some clubs run Row HQ for the rowing and a lighter tool for the odds and ends.
Still weighing it up? If your club currently lives in a Google Sheet or an Excel workbook, read Row HQ vs spreadsheets. For a wider read on the market, our best rowing club management software 2026 roundup lays out the options. And OTRC members wrote up how they switched in full.
Free for clubs of up to 20 active members. No card. Bring your data and we will import it for you.
Use every Row HQ feature with your own boats, crews and sessions. No card. No time limit.
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