The Best Fantasy Sports Apps of 2024
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Fantasy sports take the impulse to armchair-manage your favorite team and turn it into a dare: You think you’re such a tactical genius? Okay, then draft the players, choose who plays each week, and see how you do. Do you have a better game plan than Andy Reid? Is your baseball IQ on a par with Joe Maddon’s? Or, at the very least, do you have a better sense of sports than your friends?
After 15 hours of research and two seasons’ worth of testing (the 2023 MLB and NFL seasons, to be precise)—in which we tried six different platforms with a panel of 11 sports fans of various experience levels—we’ve found ESPN Fantasy Games to be the best entry point for most people.
But most fantasy-sports platforms work just fine, with little to differentiate them. So if you and your leaguemates already love the service you’re using, there’s nothing game-changing enough to justify the work it takes to switch.
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Useful notifications
Getting relevant news quickly and consistently as possible can help you have a more successful season.
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Free (or very cheap)
You really don’t need to spend money to have an excellent fantasy-sports experience.
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Clearly displayed info
A huge part of the fantasy sports experience is the way an app organizes and displays information you need to make decisions.
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A stable app
The increasing popularity of fantasy sports means more stress on an app’s servers each year.
Our pick
The ESPN Fantasy Games platform has an easy-to-understand interface and a robust slate of analysis and data that’s both well organized and clearly delivered. It quickly surfaces relevant information, including injury notifications, playing time, and projected performance. And it allows for a broad amount of league customization, so you’ll likely be able to set up the rules of your league exactly as you want.
It’s also the longest-running online fantasy-sports platform (though, as a hobby, fantasy-sports leagues have existed in analog form since the 1960s), and it’s by far the most widely used. So chances are good that you or your friends who want to start a league have either played in an ESPN league before or know someone who has.
This familiarity is likely to outweigh any of the user-interface or feature differences other sites may offer, and the giant user base means it’s easy enough to get matched up with a new league if you don’t have a big enough group of friends.
