Playmaker vs FastDraw
FastDraw is the best-known play diagramming tool in basketball. Since Hudl acquired it there is no published price and no self-serve purchase. This is what changed and what your options are.
We make one of these. Playmaker is our own product, so read this the way you would read any vendor's comparison. What we can offer instead of neutrality is checkable: every figure below was read off the other tool's own pages on , those pages are linked at the foot of this one, and anything we could not verify says so instead of carrying a number.
FastDraw is very good, and this page is not going to tell you otherwise
If you diagram basketball professionally, FastDraw is the tool. That is not a courtesy: its own site names FIBA, the NBA, the WNBA, the G-League and NCAA programs among its users, with testimonials from named institutions. There is a community play bank running into the thousands of plays and drills, coach-to-coach play sharing, video attached to diagrams, and diagrams that flow straight into FastScout scouting reports. It has desktop applications, an iPad app and a web build. Nothing on this page is better than FastDraw at diagramming basketball at a high level, including us.
What changed is not the product. It is how you buy it.
What we could and could not verify, on 21 August 2026
Hudl acquired FastModel Sports in March 2025. We went looking for the current price and found this instead:
- The FastModel home page is a landing page whose banner repeats "FastModel is now a part of Hudl".
- Its pricing page returns a 404.
- Its Shopify storefront lists zero products, and the "all products" collection is empty.
- Every product and solution URL we tried — the FastDraw product page, and the youth, college, professional, international, football, soccer, volleyball and hockey pages — issues a permanent redirect to Hudl's Fastmodel product page, whose only call to action is a form for the sales team.
- The FastDraw web application itself is live and behind a login.
So: FastDraw's current price is not published anywhere we can find, and there is no longer a checkout. That is a fact rather than an accusation, and it is a perfectly normal thing to happen to a product acquired by an enterprise company.
We also could not verify a figure we had been carrying ourselves. A commonly quoted individual-coach price of $89.99 a year does not appear in any archived version of the page we could read. The last self-serve prices that can be read are from an archived copy of FastModel's own store in November 2023 — FastDraw Essentials at $129.99 a year and Premium at $179.99 — and by August 2025 the same pages had already been replaced with "reach out to us to learn more". We are not putting either number in the table below, because neither is what FastDraw costs today and we do not know what does.
How they compare
FastDraw's row is mostly blank on purpose. Every empty cell is something we could not read on a vendor page on 21 August 2026, and we would rather publish a gap than a guess.
| Tool | What it is | Sports | Free tier | Published price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PlaymakerThis is us | A browser play designer with animated playback | Soccer, basketball, field hockey, rugby, baseball | Unlimited plays drawn, animated and shared by link with no account; 3 saved plays per free account | $6/month or $50/year USD |
| FastDraw | A professional basketball diagramming and playbook suite, now part of Hudl | Basketball and ice hockey | None found, and no self-serve signup | Not published — storefront empty, pricing page 404, product pages redirect to a Hudl sales form |
Scroll the table sideways to see every column — the tool's name stays put.
What FastDraw does that we do not
Depth of library. Thousands of community plays and drills, searchable, forkable. We ship 44 formations and set pieces across six sports. That is a different order of magnitude and it is the single biggest gap.
Playbook and scouting workflow. FastDraw is one half of a pair; FastScout turns your diagrams into opponent scouting reports with video attached. We have no scouting product and no plans for one.
Desktop and iPad applications. Real installed apps with the file handling and the keyboard-driven speed that a coach diagramming forty plays a week actually needs. We are a web page.
Institutional trust. If your program has to justify a purchase, "the tool the NBA uses" is an argument. "A free thing in a browser" is not.
What we do that FastDraw does not
You can use it right now, for nothing, without talking to anybody. No quote, no demo, no purchase order, no account. That is the entire point of the comparison and it is the only column where we win outright.
Six sports. FastDraw diagrams basketball and ice hockey. If you also coach the school's soccer, rugby, field hockey, baseball or American football side, the same Playmaker page draws all of them to scale.
The play animates in a link. Copy the URL and send it. Whoever opens it — a player, a parent, an assistant on a phone in a car park — watches the runs, the passes and the shot play back, with no app, no login and no account on our side or theirs.
It is honest about being small. Three saved plays free, $6 a month for unlimited. There is nothing to negotiate.
Who should use which
If you are a college or professional staff, or a high-school program with a budget and a procurement process, talk to Hudl about FastDraw. Do not choose a free browser tool to save $300 on a job that is part of your livelihood.
If you are a volunteer, a youth coach, a parent who got handed a team, or a high-school assistant paying out of your own pocket, the thing that changed in March 2025 is that your route to FastDraw now goes through a sales conversation. That is the situation this whole category of tool is answering, and there are several good answers — us, CoachCanvas, which notably offers a one-click FastDraw library import on its free tier, and The Hoops Geek.
If you are leaving FastDraw and want your plays out, CoachCanvas's importer is the specific tool for that job and we do not have one. We would rather tell you than have you find out after switching.
Try the free one first
It opens on a real basketball pitch, there is nothing to install, and you do not need an account to draw a play and send it to your team as a link.
Open the play designerCommon questions
How much does FastDraw cost in 2026?
We could not find a published price. FastModel's pricing page returns a 404, its storefront lists no products, and every product page redirects to a Hudl page whose call to action is a sales form. Pricing appears to be by quote.
Is FastDraw still available?
Yes. The web application is live and the product is sold, but through Hudl's sales team rather than a self-serve checkout.
What is a free alternative to FastDraw?
For basketball specifically: CoachCanvas, which gives 30 plays free and imports a FastDraw library; The Hoops Geek, which gives 5 plays free with rotations and practice plans; and Playmaker, which is free with no account for drawing, animating and sharing plays. None of them is as deep as FastDraw.
Can I import my FastDraw plays into Playmaker?
No. We have no FastDraw importer and no way to read its file formats. CoachCanvas advertises a one-click FastDraw import on its free tier, which is the right tool for that particular job.
What we checked, and when
Read on . Vendors change their pricing without telling us — if one of these pages now says something different, believe the vendor and tell us so we can fix ours.
Other comparisons
- Best free basketball play designers in 20266 tools · checked 21 August 2026
- Playmaker vs The Hoops Geek2 tools · checked 21 August 2026
- Best free football play designers in 20269 tools · checked 22 August 2026
See what it draws
- Basketball inbound plays that actually work2 interactive plays
- How to build a flag football playbook: six plays, and how to install them2 interactive plays
- Five soccer set pieces for U12s that actually work3 interactive plays
Coach another sport?
The same designer draws every one of them, which is the thing the table above is really about.
Page updated · figures checked