Camp Playbook is the operations-first camp management platform built for directors. Schedules, lodging, staff, registration, and Color War — all in one modern, affordable system.
Built for camps of every kind
Directors spend 20+ hours a week wrestling with spreadsheets, PDFs, and legacy tools that were never designed for the operational reality of camp — schedules, cabin swaps, staff shortages, rainy-day pivots, and the 300 tiny decisions between flagpole and taps.
Schedules in Excel, rosters in Sheets, staff assignments on a whiteboard. Nothing talks to anything.
Two full days, a wall of sticky notes, three markers, and someone still ends up in the wrong pottery class.
CampMinder starts at $2,500/season. CampBrain requires annual contracts. Small camps can't justify the spend.
Legacy platforms feel like it. No mobile app, no real-time sync, no modern UX. Staff training is its own workshop.
Most camps duct-tape together a dozen tools to get through summer. Camp Playbook is the SUPER APP that replaces all of them — built for day camps, overnight camps, multi-site orgs, and everything in between.
Twenty-one integrated modules, one login, one source of truth. Works online, offline, or in full device-free campus mode. Day camps, overnight camps, multi-site orgs — turn on what you need, hide the rest.
Drag-and-drop weekly grid with 50+ built-in activities, auto-balanced swim rotations, and click-to-swap.
Visual floor plans, gender-aware assignments, check-in logs, housekeeping queue — building to bunk in one view.
Custom forms, waitlists, multi-session discounts, Stripe checkout. Parents register in under 4 minutes.
Forms, payments, photos, announcements, and bus alerts — branded to your camp, zero app download.
Roster, certifications, shift scheduling, group-to-counselor mapping, RBAC down to the module.
149-activity Color War library, Amazing Race, Olympic tournaments. Live scoring, team standings, automated brackets.
Built-in 5-level, 9-week swim curriculum ready day one. Lane assignments, lifeguard rotations, auto-rotating pool periods across divisions.
Auto-optimizes routes from camper addresses — shortest drive, fewest transfers, balanced loads. Live SMS "10 min out" alerts. Re-routes on the fly when a stop changes.
Allergy flags, medication logs, clinic visit notes. HIPAA-aware role permissions keep records tight.
Weekly menus, allergen views, headcounts by session, dietary tags visible to kitchen staff only.
Auto-tagged delivery by cabin & camper number (no biometrics), parent portals, moderation queue, watermark presets. No more "where are the pictures?" emails.
Enrollment funnels, capacity utilization, payment status, YOY retention. Export to PDF or push to Google Sheets.
Campers rank their choices, our solver assigns them in seconds. Live capacity caps, conflict auto-resolution, fairness across weeks. No more five staff in a room with spreadsheets.
Counselor out sick at 9:07am? Drag them off the ropes course, solver rebalances the hour in 3 seconds. Live updates propagate to parents, staff tablets, and the kitchen — no refresh needed.
Wristbands, name-tag QR codes, or camper-app swaps. Kids line up at the activity they want, tap in, and the schedule auto-adjusts. Auto-attendance, auto-headcount, zero clipboards.
One platform, two operating models. Day camp: AM/PM sessions, bus rosters, pickup auth. Overnight: cabins, evening activities, OD staff rotations. Hybrid camps run both side by side.
1-week, 2-week, 4-week, full-season — mix and match however your camp runs. Per-session pricing, deposits, discounts, and rollover logic for multi-week families.
Run 2, 5, or 20 locations from one login — each with its own activity library, staff pool, pricing, and calendar. Share rosters when a camper swaps sites mid-summer. Roll up reporting to org level.
Plan, permission, and run full-day or overnight trips. Route optimizer, driver manifests, e-signed permission slips, allergy-aware headcounts, check-in/check-out at every waypoint.
Photo-verified pickup list per camper. Parents add/remove authorized adults from the app. Staff check ID on a tablet, log the handoff, done.
Runs in the woods, in a gymnasium, or on a no-phones campus. Staff tablets, kiosks, and printed daily sheets work offline; changes queue locally and sync the second wifi returns. Centralized elective selection via paper forms, kiosk, or a single shared counselor device — campers don't need their own.
Build a conflict-free weekly schedule for 400+ campers across 12 divisions in under an hour. Auto-balance swim periods, honor staff certifications, lock key activities, and regenerate everything else with one click.
Every camp does electives differently — and every camp does them painfully. Kids rank their choices. Someone transcribes to a wall. Someone else color-codes with markers. By day two everyone's yelling about capacity caps and best-friend conflicts.
Camp Playbook's solver does it in under three seconds — and adjusts in real time when a counselor calls out, a kid arrives late, or the ropes course goes down for maintenance.
Electives aren't a one-time ranked form from April. Give campers four safe, anonymous ways to pick, swap, and join activities — from self-service on the app all the way to "director shouts who's coming to ropes!" — and watch the solver rebalance the whole camp in seconds. No face scans, no biometrics, no required camper devices.
A stripped-down, chat-free, social-feed-free mobile app. Campers pick their electives, see today's schedule, and swap slots — with parent-configurable guardrails and director-approved windows.
A camp-owned tablet, iPad, or kiosk on a stand at the dining hall. Campers walk up, tap their NFC wristband (or enter cabin + camper number), and pick their elective. No biometrics, no photos stored. Perfect for camps that don't want kids on personal phones.
Campers wear NFC wristbands or carry a printed QR badge — keyed to an opaque camper number, no names or faces on the chip. They literally line up at the activity they want and tap in — the solver accepts them if there's room, offers alternates if not, and updates the schedule live.
Half your campers forget to make their choices ahead of time. Their parents forget too. Our answer: no device, no scan, no login required. The program director stands on the porch, calls out "Who wants ropes? Who wants archery? Who wants lake?" — and fills each activity by raised hands or a lineup at the door. The director enters the count on one staff tablet (or a paper clipboard if they'd rather), and Camp Playbook back-fills the assignments, updates attendance, and keeps every downstream system — meals, safety check, parent digest — in sync.
The software can manage freedom-of-choice elective programs without locking campers into their group, division, cabin, or any parameters you set. Flip it on for young campers who need to stay with their counselor. Flip it off for older campers who've earned free-choice. Or run both in the same block — cabin-grouped swim lessons and open-enrollment arts in the same hour.
Real-time schedule access on iOS and Android. No more paper printouts. No more "I had the old version." No more "where am I right now?" at the dining-hall door.
Each counselor sees exactly their assignments — filtered, clean, and instantly readable for the day ahead. No scrolling past other cabins, no hunting for their name on a wall chart.
The moment admin publishes a change, every device updates. Ropes swapped to arts because of lightning? Staff know before the campers finish lining up. Everyone is always on the same page.
Staff get viewer-only access — they see everything they need and nothing they shouldn't touch. Directors get edit rights. Nurses see health flags. Kitchen sees headcount. One app, scoped per role.
Loses signal at the waterfront? The app already has today's schedule cached. Attendance, incident notes, and swim-buddy checks queue locally and sync the second wifi returns.
Most camp software forces you to pick. We don't. Flip the mode per session, per division, or per week — and the whole platform adapts.
Forms, tuition, bus ETAs, daily photos, menus, and announcements — branded to your camp, on any device, with zero app store downloads.
Ship a full 3-day Color War with a 149-activity handbook, live scoring, team rosters, and leaderboards — without a single spreadsheet. Built from hundreds of hours of real camp tournaments.
Color War, Olympic Games, Amazing Race, Cup Tournament — or build your own.
Balance by age, division, skill, or historical stats. Override any assignment.
Refs enter points at the field. Leaderboard updates instantly on the dining hall TV.
Most platforms hand you empty fields. Camp Playbook arrives with the playbook already written — swim progressions, arts project ladders, Color War brackets, supply shopping lists, safety protocols, staff training paths. Upload your enrollment and location; the software adapts the plan to your camp.
That's the real cost savings. One director and Camp Playbook do the work five-to-ten specialists used to do with binders, Pinterest boards, and tribal knowledge — and the quality goes up, not down.
Enrollment roster, staff list, location address, session dates, division ages. Five minutes. CSV or manual.
Swim ladders, activity progressions, Color War games, supply lists, permission slips, and staffing suggestions — tailored to your ages, site, and session length.
Rain day? Swap to indoor plan. Staff called out? Rebalance. Camper skill-jumped swim level? Progress updates across the roster automatically.
Aquatics specialist. Electives coordinator. Color War planner. Supply manager. Transportation coordinator. Safety officer. Most camps hire 5–10 people to do what Camp Playbook does automatically — with better documentation, fewer mistakes, and no July resignations.
Each location gets its own activity library, staff pool, pricing, calendar, and brand. Share a roster the second a camper swaps sites. Roll every metric up to the org level — no spreadsheet exports, no double entry, no "which login am I supposed to use again?"
Your day camp runs swim + arts. Your overnight runs sailing + horseback. Your specialty runs filmmaking. Each site's library is its own — no cross-contamination, no "archery at the art studio" accidents.
A family with three kids across two camps? One household record, three enrollments, one invoice. Mid-summer swaps sync instantly — allergies, permissions, pickup auth, all of it.
Board meeting Monday? Enrollment, revenue, retention, staff utilization — rolled up across every site in one dashboard. Drill down to a single camper. Export to PDF in one click.
Each site gets its own pricing tiers, discount codes, branded parent portal, domain, and email sender. Org admins see everything; site directors only see theirs.
Org owners, site directors, program heads, counselors, nurses — scope each role to a site, a division, or a module. HIPAA-aware for health, read-only for seasonal staff, full control for the people running the show.
Route optimizer handles pickup stops that feed multiple sites. Kids going to Lakeside and Pine Ridge can share a morning bus — one driver, one manifest, two drop-offs.
Not every camp needs — or can afford — the CampMinder enterprise stack. Run us as a full-stop alternative, or layer us on top of what you already have.
Replace your registration, parent portal, staff scheduling, bunk assignments, photo sharing, and billing with one modern platform. Pay 80% less than CampMinder and get to summer faster.
Love your registration system or not ready to migrate? Keep CampMinder, CampBrain, or UltraCamp for enrollment. Use Camp Playbook to actually run the summer.
20+ integrations across registration, payments, communications, photos, HR, and accounting. Sync bi-directionally with CampMinder, CampBrain, UltraCamp, and ACTIVE — or replace them outright.
We ship small and often. Here's what's in flight — what directors and parents have told us they want next, in the order we're building it.
Today you bounce parent comms through Mailchimp, staff comms through Gmail, and emergency blasts through whatever app the registrar opened first. That ends. Camp Playbook's email module will send, schedule, segment, and measure — natively, from the same login that already knows every camper, parent, cabin, dietary note, and waiver status. No more CSV exports. No more stale lists. No more "did that message actually go out?"
Until it ships, the Mailchimp / Twilio / HubSpot integrations keep doing the job. The module is a replacement — not a dependency.
Reply to parent texts inside Playbook. Log against the camper. Escalate to the director on call. No more shared burner phone in the office.
"Move Week 2 swim tests to Tuesday morning." The copilot proposes the reshuffle, shows conflicts, and applies it — no dragging cells around.
A camp-grade med log: dosing, allergy flags, incident reports, parent auto-notify, and a handoff note for the next nurse's shift.
Driver manifest on the tablet, real-time GPS to the parent app, auto-"we're 10 min out" SMS at each stop. Replaces Here Comes The Bus.
Meal-count forecasts from the schedule, allergen flags per camper, printable tray-line cards, and a prep sheet the chef actually wants to use.
Customers vote on the next module. If it makes the shortlist, we publish a spec and invite you to shape it. Put your ask in →
Roadmap timelines are ambitious, honest, and occasionally wrong. Beta access on every item above is free for paying customers during the pilot window — we'd rather ship something your team helped break first.
The short version: Camp Playbook is built for operations. Incumbents are built for registration.
| Feature |
Camp Playbook
from $499/season
|
CampMinder
$2,500–$5,000/season
|
UltraCamp
Quote only
|
CampBrain
Annual contract
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Full drag-and-drop scheduler | ✓ | Basic | — | — |
| Auto-balanced swim rotations | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Lodging & visual floor plans | ✓ | Partial | ✓ | Partial |
| Color War / tournament engine | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Automated electives solver | ✓ | Manual | Manual | Manual |
| Real-time live adjustments | ✓ | — | — | — |
| NFC / QR camper tap-in | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Camper-initiated elective swaps | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Offline / device-free operation | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Day + overnight in one platform | ✓ | Separate products | Overnight focus | Separate modules |
| Online registration + Stripe | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Parent portal (mobile PWA) | ✓ | iOS only (Campanion) | Basic | Basic |
| Multi-camp / multi-location | Day 1 | Enterprise | Enterprise | Enterprise |
| API access (all tiers) | ✓ | Top tier only | — | — |
| Real-time sync across devices | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Onboarding time | < 2 weeks | 6–12 weeks | 8–12 weeks | 12+ weeks |
Comparison based on publicly available pricing and feature documentation as of April 2026. We'd love to be corrected if anything's outdated.
Different camps. Different sizes. Same story — told in the hallway between breakout sessions, over bad conference coffee, for more than a decade.
I've been going to the Tristate ACA camp conference for years. Somewhere between the keynote and the last breakout session, the same conversation would start up at a coffee station: a director pulling out their phone to show me another custom spreadsheet, another workaround, another 5–10 staff members burning two full days on elective assignments before campers even arrived.
The through-line was always the same. CampMinder, UltraCamp, CampBrain — those platforms do what they do well. Registration. Payments. Health forms. The parent experience. Our families already know them, our ACH batches already run through them, and nobody on a two-month runway is ripping them out this summer. They work for what they were built for.
But none of them were built to run the camp once the buses arrive. Schedules, swim rotations, electives, lodging, tournaments, transportation, daily attendance, supply lists, staff placements, Color War — those were always Excel, always paper, always tribal knowledge that walked out the door with whichever senior counselor left for grad school. I watched an aquatics director friend rebuild the same swim-group spreadsheet from scratch every June for ten years.
Camp Playbook is the tool I kept hearing described at those conferences — the one nobody was actually building. It plugs into the registration platform you already use, then takes everything you'd otherwise pay 5–10 coordinators to stitch together by hand and runs it in one login, one source of truth, for a fraction of the cost.
You keep what works. You replace what doesn't. That's the whole pitch.
And whatever you keep — registration rosters, payment batches, health-form data, camper history — Camp Playbook pulls it in and makes it visually appealing. Your registrar's CSV becomes an at-a-glance cabin board. Your accountant's payment report becomes a live revenue dashboard. Your health forms become a med-pass checklist counselors can actually read at 7am. Same data you already trust, rendered in a way your staff, directors, and parents want to look at.
A playbook — the sports kind — is a detailed plan, ready to put in anyone's hands. A new counselor. A rookie coordinator. A parent volunteer subbing in for a day. They don't need a two-hour training video. They open it, they see the play, they run it.
That's the software we wanted. Not a platform that requires certification to operate. Not a system that punishes turnover when your best coordinator leaves for grad school. A tool so intuitive that a 19-year-old head counselor on day one can look at the screen and run the rotation — swim, electives, lunch pivot, rainy-day Plan B, Color War — as if they'd done it for ten summers.
Same name. Same promise. Every play in one place, every detail ready to hand off.
Representative quotes paraphrased from peer directors over multiple conference years. Being replaced with fully attributed testimonials as our Summer 2026 pilot camps go live.
"I love CampMinder for registration. I also have a shared Google Sheet with 42 tabs for everything it can't do. I'd pay real money for one tool that actually runs my camp instead of ten tools that just store it."
"We spend the first two days of staff week rebuilding the master schedule by hand. Every. Single. Year. UltraCamp is fine — it's not the problem. The problem is nobody else makes the thing that does the schedule."
"A tool that could take my roster, my pool capacity, and my Red Cross progressions and actually build the swim schedule for me? I'd line up for that in the parking lot. I've rebuilt the same spreadsheet ten Junes in a row."
Not a CampMinder or UltraCamp replacement. A layer on top that finally runs the operational side of camp — and, if you ever want to, can absorb registration too.
See what it costsA backyard nature program runs on Starter. A regional overnight runs on Professional. A fifteen-site YMCA district runs on Enterprise. The software is identical — you turn on the modules you actually use, and pay for the tier that fits.
Two age groups, outdoor classroom, morning electives. Backyard-scale, but tracks everything a big camp tracks — with no spreadsheets.
Red Cross Levels 1–6, auto-balanced by ability and pool lane. Makeup sessions, progressions, certification tracking — all automatic.
After-school, summer day camps, aquatics, teen leadership — one org dashboard, 15 site workspaces, cross-site roster sync, SSO, SOC 2.
Example profiles are composite representations illustrating how Camp Playbook fits camps of different sizes, seasons, and specialties. Small camps pay Starter. Most camps land on Professional. Multi-site orgs run on Enterprise.
Pay per season or per month. Annual plans save 16.7% (2 months free). Stripe fees of 2.9% + $0.30 pass through.
Beta promo: First 3 camps onboarded in Summer 2026 are free for the full season. Apply for beta →
Multi-location? Starter and Professional include one camp location with a nominal add-on for each additional site. Running 5+ locations? Enterprise is usually the better fit — unlimited locations, one flat custom rate.
Send us whatever you've got — a messy Excel workbook, last summer's PDF, a Word doc, a photo of the whiteboard in the office. We'll pull it into Camp Playbook and show it back to you live on a call.
Submitting opens your email app with the message pre-filled. You'll just need to attach the files listed above and hit Send. We reply within 4 business hours.
Book a free 20-minute screen share. We'll pre-load your divisions, sessions, and activities so you can see what Camp Playbook looks like with your data — not a generic demo.
Perfect for you. Camp Playbook was built with "the cabin in the woods" in mind — we don't assume every counselor has a signal or that every camper has a phone.
Offline-first staff tools. Tablets, phones, and laptops cache the day's schedule, rosters, allergies, and attendance. Staff can check kids in, log health-center visits, swap activities, and take bunk attendance with zero bars of service. Changes queue locally and sync automatically the second wifi or cellular is back.
Centralized elective selection — no personal devices required. For device-free campuses, the elective window runs from a single shared kiosk or counselor tablet. Campers (or cabin leaders on their behalf) enter choices in 10 seconds. You can also import selections from a paper sign-up and Camp Playbook will run the same auto-balanced solver.
Paper fallback, always. Every module prints a clean daily sheet — period-by-period schedule, cabin assignments, swim groups, health alerts, bus lists. If the power goes out, your day keeps moving and you scan the marked-up sheets back in when you're ready.
Wilderness camps, faith-based retreats, tech-detox programs, and camps in rural hollows all run on Camp Playbook today. Ask us about kiosk mode during your demo.
Join the Summer 2026 beta cohort. First 3 camps get the full Professional tier free for the season. Book your 20-minute demo today.