As a band nerd and robotics kid in high school, sports have always been more fantasy than reality for me. I joined my first fantasy football league around 2010 (via Yahoo!) and have been playing off-and-on ever since. I’ve also been writing for Wirecutter for six years, and I have tested everything from toilet brushes to podcast apps. But I have been reporting on and testing games and hobby gear for the past two years.

To supplement my experience, I also spoke with Nando Di Fino, managing editor for fantasy and sports betting at The Athletic, and Paul Charchian, former president of the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association (FSGA) and owner of Guillotine Leagues. (Guillotine is another modified-format fantasy platform that we didn’t consider for this guide due to its unique structure.)

Fantasy sports started with obsessive sports fans scraping together whatever information they could find in local newspaper sports pages and then mailing (or faxing) one another to adjudicate scores and trades. Now, thanks to the internet, this is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and millions of people across the globe play fantasy sports. And its reach has grown to include all sorts of sports, from football to F1 to esports.

The platforms that facilitate these games are much more user-friendly than the pen-and-paper systems of the 1990s. And since the information that powers them is seamlessly integrated into their interfaces, even people who don’t follow a given sport can play the fantasy version, provided they have a basic understanding of statistics.

But the reason fantasy-sports platforms have stuck around is that they provide people an opportunity to socialize and have fun with friends, regardless of distance or time. These platforms have become gathering spaces that bind friend groups for years (and sometimes decades), even after they’ve lost touch in the real world.

Fantasy sports are for everyone, and these apps make it easier than ever to get started.

With the rise of daily fantasy- and online-sports betting, it’s becoming harder to define where fantasy sports end and gambling begins. For the purposes of this guide, we have focused on traditional, season-long redraft leagues.

These leagues feature a draft day at the beginning of each season, when each person forms their team. Once the teams are in place, you compete week to week to earn the highest point totals, which accrue based on the performance of the players you choose to start. Each week, lineups can change, and players can be dropped, added, and traded among the teams.

A number of these platforms also provide support for Dynasty leagues, in which players keep their lineups static from year to year and draft only from a pool of rookie players each new season. But we opted not to include this sort of play in our testing. There are a few newer formats, including a set-it-and-forget-it style called Best Ball. We didn’t include this either because our research indicates that weekly maintenance—which encourages interaction with leaguemates—is one of the most rewarding parts of the fantasy experience.

To get an idea of which apps to test, we spent 15 hours researching and reading about the different platforms. We also spoke with Nando Di Fino, managing editor for fantasy and sports betting at The Athletic, and Paul Charchian, former president of the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association (FSGA) and owner of Guillotine Leagues. (Guillotine is another modified-format fantasy platform that we didn’t consider for this guide due to its unique structure.)

To get an idea of which apps to test, we spent 15 hours researching and reading about the different platforms. After our research and discussions with experts, we came up with a list of qualities and features that we think constitute a great fantasy-football app:

• Reliable push notifications: A lot can change over the course of a season—players get injured, lineups shift, and formerly uninteresting players can suddenly become appealing prospects for your team. Getting relevant news as quickly and consistently can help you make better decisions and have a more successful season. Every app has news feeds and will notify you when conditions change, and there are third-party apps and news sources that do this too. But we compared platforms to see whether any were more informative than others.
• A low price point (usually free): There are so many great free apps that you really don’t need to spend money to have an excellent fantasy-sports experience (unless you want specific features or are picky about how your league is set up). Some of these platforms offer additional analysis and assistance behind subscription paywalls, but these features are nice-to-haves, not necessities.
• A polished user interface: This is a largely subjective aesthetic evaluation. But a huge part of the experience is the way that these platforms organize and display information, since they’re all shiny skins over what is essentially a spreadsheet. Our testing group rated each app’s interface to see whether any stood out from the pack.
• A stable app: More people are playing fantasy sports every season, and that means more stress on the apps’ servers each year. Inevitably, this leads to hiccups. If you’re up next in a draft, the last thing you want is to be kicked out of the room or not be able to submit your pick due to bandwidth issues.

Armed with our research, we found six apps for our first round of testing:

• CBS Sports Fantasy
• ESPN Fantasy Games
• Yahoo Fantasy
• NFL Fantasy
• Sleeper
• Fleaflicker

To get some sense of how each platform worked, I spun up fantasy baseball and football leagues on all of the platforms. And I tested them myself, to become familiar with the tools and feel of each app. Then we set up an 11-person testing panel and assigned each person to at least two platforms (though many joined more). We went through live drafts for each platform and played through the full NFL season, to get more real-world experience. Over the course of the season, I checked in with our test panel—in between the game-related smack talk—to gauge their opinions and reactions to each platform’s aesthetics, ease-of-use, notification relevance, and more.

Whether you’re a fantasy veteran or you’re gearing up for your rookie season, ESPN Fantasy Games is the service we recommend. It’s a robust, full-featured fantasy-sports platform with an easy-to-use interface and plenty of customization options.

It’s the most widely used platform, by far. According to a poll commissioned by the FSGA and released in June 2023, 43% of fantasy-sports players regularly use ESPN Fantasy Games; that’s 13% more than for Yahoo Fantasy, the next-closest service in the poll.

Normally, popularity isn’t a huge factor in Wirecutter pick-making. But fantasy sports are inherently social, and it’s much easier to convince friends to commit to a months-long season if they have at least some familiarity with what you’re using. ESPN has the best chance of providing that familiarity.

It’s easy to see why it’s so popular, too. ESPN Fantasy’s readily accessible analysis, information, and advice make it a great platform to start with. And because it has a huge user base, you likely already know someone who plays it and can use their knowledge to help you get started. You’re also more likely to find helpful information or external tools from current users online.

And this is not a platform you’ll grow out of—it has the tools to keep you and your leaguemates satisfied for years, as you develop your team-management skills.

It delivers quick, relevant notifications. During our testing n, this platform delivered notifications that were both quick to cross my transom and relevant to the team and league. It also delivered general MLB and NFL news on par with league specific news sources.

The user interface is good-looking and functional. ESPN Fantasy’s app and web interface put vital information at your fingertips, and they do so in style. In addition to raw numbers, you get a mix of player photos and graphics, which help round out the experience.

It makes advanced predictions free for everyone. This is one of the few free programs we tested that doesn’t hide more-advanced predictions behind a paywall. Testers said these predictions generally helped them feel informed when building their lineups, even if they didn’t follow the sport particularly closely. Extra expert analysis is also available behind an ESPN+ paywall.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

• This is a free platform, so there are ads throughout the experience, both in the ESPN mobile and desktop apps. But they’re no more intrusive than most media website ads. And almost none of the ads are gambling-related, which is a welcome difference from those on many other, newer apps we tried (though we’ll see how long that lasts).

If you want a platform that feels fresher, with a more modern user interface, and you don’t mind gambling options: Sleeper might be ideal for you. It currently offers season-long leagues for football and basketball, but not for baseball. Of the services we tested, it feels the most like a modern mobile app (the desktop browser implementation looks good too). And it has one of the draft-day interfaces our testing panel liked best, finding it colorful and active.

It also has a customizable in-app news feed, which we found useful. Also, the chat feed feels more like a modern group chat than the other platforms’ built-in social features.

Although it’s free to play, Sleeper heavily advertises its own pay-to-play daily fantasy games. For instance, an ad for its “Picks” gambling option was sent to the chat feed immediately after our season wrapped up. That feels more like something you’d find at DraftKings, so that may be off-putting for some.

CBS Sports Fantasy has two tiers: a free level, with no customization options (you’re stuck with a 12-team league and bog-standard scoring rules), or a $150 paid tier, which gives you the customization options found in platforms like Yahoo or our pick. Considering how many services offer these options for free, we can’t recommend spending that kind of money.

Fleaflicker is a basic, football-only program, but it provides most of the same functions you get from our pick. The platform is perfectly functional (albeit in an Excel-spreadsheet kind of way), with a bare-bones interface that might be intimidating for some players. One of our testers described it as “The Drudge Report of fantasy apps (minus the sirens and screaming headlines).” In addition, a ton of analysis is hidden behind a $25 paywall, which could limit its beginner-friendliness even further.

NFL Fantasy seems like it should have a leg up on the competition simply because it’s owned by the real-life league, but it doesn’t quite match up to our pick. On the plus side, it offers a feature-rich platform with ample customization, and it provides up-to-date information. It also has some (paywalled) automation features that allow players to auto-set lineups and optimize based on projected scores, but these features aren’t necessary for most commissioners or players. It was also the only platform in our testing that had technical issues on draft day, locking out two teams that (thankfully) had already set up their auto-draft. In the end we simply liked ESPN’s interface more because it seemed fresher and more informational.

Yahoo Fantasy is the second-most-popular fantasy-sports platform, according to data from the FSGA, and it provides a robust, customizable platform much like ESPN’s. It presents useful information in an extremely well-organized and easy-to-navigate interface. And it has paywalled automation features and projections, including draft tools that supposedly highlight players who are uniquely positioned to fill holes in your lineup. It also had AI-generated draft report cards, which our testers found to be equal parts charming and weird. We didn’t think these features were significantly more useful than the free projection tools it provided, and we found ESPN’s interface slightly more engaging. But otherwise this is a great option.

This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.