AMS Alternatives
Most elite clubs are choosing between four or five systems. They are not the same kind of product, and the differences that matter are not on a feature list.
This page sets out what each one is and what it is genuinely good at.
Every claim about another vendor links to their own published material and carries the date we checked it. If something here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will fix it.
Last verified: 9 September 2026.
Spotted something out of date? Email info@axonperform.com and we'll fix it.
AT A GLANCE
How they compare
| Vendor | What it is at heart | Medical system of record | Direct query access to your own data | Natural-language querying, live today |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Axon Perform | A dedicated data warehouse with an AMS and an AI layer on top | Injury, availability and return to play. Not currently a full EMR | Yes. Full read and query access to your warehouse | Yes. Ask Axon, plus connect your own AI tool |
| Teamworks AMSformerly Smartabase | Athlete management and EMR inside a wider operations suite | Yes, AMS+EMR | Documented API, and an official R package. No warehouse or SQL | Over documents you upload, not over your performance data |
| Kitman Labs iP | Athlete management, sports EMR and an embedded BI layer | Yes, purpose-built sports EMR | API is a paid add-on, and it states it "does not support direct connections to external analytics or BI tools" | Not found. AI language is roadmap-shaped |
| Apollo AMS | Medical-led, no-code athlete management | Yes, medical and rehab led | Power BI and Tableau connectors. No public API documentation | Not found |
| EDGE10 / ARMS | Athlete management with an EHR, strong on league-wide deals | Yes, ARMS Health | Not documented in anything we could reach | Not found |
| Build it yourself | Your warehouse, your engineers | Whatever you build | Total | Whatever you build |
How to read this. "Not found" means we looked and could not find it published, not that it does not exist. Sources and dates are in the sections below. Ask every vendor directly, including us. Verified 9 September 2026.
VENDOR BY VENDOR
Teamworks AMS
What it is. The athlete management system formerly sold as Smartabase, acquired by Teamworks in January 2023 and rebranded Teamworks AMS. It sits inside a much wider Teamworks suite covering operations, scheduling, communications, nutrition and staff workflow. The older interface is still available as Smartabase Classic.
What it is genuinely good at. It is the deepest configuration engine in the category. If your requirement is bespoke forms, event structures and workflows built exactly to your protocol, it goes further than anything else on this list, and that is why it stays in evaluations after fifteen years. It carries a documented API and an official R package, which is more openness than most systems of record offer. In rugby, AFL, NRL and Olympic sport it is often the incumbent, and the wider Teamworks suite solves problems no analytics product touches, like travel, scheduling and squad communications.
One thing to know. Teamworks publishes a claim about being the preferred technology partner for every club in several major leagues. That claim is about the Teamworks operating system, not specifically about the AMS. Worth separating when you compare like for like.
On AI, they have made a deliberate and different choice from ours. Ask Teamworks answers questions over documents you upload to it, not over your performance data, and natural-language querying of athlete data is described by Teamworks as a future state. Their CTO published a piece in 2026 arguing against the bring-your-own-AI model.
Kitman Labs
What it is. The iP: Intelligence Platform, covering athlete management, a purpose-built sports EMR under Performance Medicine, league operations, and since May 2026 an embedded BI layer called My iP built on Google Cloud. They have moved away from the AMS label and now describe themselves as an intelligence platform.
What it is genuinely good at. Performance Medicine is a real sports EMR, with the injury lifecycle, medication and stock, TUEs, screening and surveillance export, certified against ISO 27001 and ISO 27701. Kitman's other proven pattern is league-wide and pathway deployments, standing up one system across every club in a competition, which they have done for Premier League academies, the RFU, the IRFU, the NWSL, the WSL and others. Their integration catalogue is the widest published in the category. Onboarding is run by ex-practitioners who travel, migrate your data and train your staff, and support is the single most praised thing in their customer reviews.
Where the two products genuinely differ. Kitman's API launched in June 2025 as a paid add-on, gated by which solutions you have bought, and their own documentation states it "does not support direct connections to external analytics or BI tools". It is an export route into a warehouse you already own, not a query layer. Axon starts from the warehouse.
We work inside Kitman clubs. Several organisations we work with run Kitman as their system of record.
Apollo AMS
What it is. A medical-led, no-code athlete management system built by Dave Hancock, widely used in English football. Norwich City signed a multi-year deal with them in 2024 for the medical performance team, and their client list covers a large part of the EFL. It reports to Power BI and Tableau through connectors.
What it is genuinely good at. The Apollo planner is the standout, and buyers say so unprompted. It is a shared workspace where the medical team and the S&C staff work on one injury together, each adding their daily input, all of it stored centrally. A Head of Performance who ran a five-vendor AMS selection and chose Apollo named that module as the reason. Being no-code and medical-first also means a physio can configure it without a project.
What to check in an evaluation. They do not publish API documentation, and their strength-and-conditioning module was still listed as coming soon in 2026. Ask about both, and ask what your route to the raw data is if you later want to analyse across systems.
EDGE10 / ARMS
What it is. A London-based athlete management company formed by the 2019 merger of EDGE10 and Athlete RMS. Products are ARMS Performance, ARMS Health, which is an EHR, and ARMS Physical Testing. It claims more than 1,500 teams and sixteen league-wide partnerships including MLB, NHL, MLS and the ATP.
What it is genuinely good at. League-level deals, more of them than any other AMS vendor, and a health record built for human performance rather than adapted from clinical software.
What we could not verify. We could not reach EDGE10's product documentation directly, so we have not confirmed their data access model or their AI position. Both are marked unknown in the table above rather than guessed at. Ask them.
Hudl
What it is. The video incumbent. Sportscode is the tool most football and rugby analysts already live in, WIMU is the GPS line, and Hudl Signal is the newer data management layer pulling video, GPS and Wyscout together.
What it is genuinely good at. Video. Nothing on this page competes with Sportscode for coding and clip workflow, and Axon does not try. If your analysts already work in Hudl every day, adding their data layer is the lowest-friction option on your list.
Building it yourself
What it is. Your own warehouse on Snowflake or similar, your own engineers, your own pipelines. It is not a vendor, but it is a real option and increasingly a chosen one. Liverpool have advertised for a data engineer to develop Snowflake as the club's primary warehouse. Tottenham have advertised for Snowflake and dbt skills.
What it is genuinely good at. Everything, eventually. You control the model, the measures and the roadmap completely, and nothing is gated by a vendor's release cycle.
Our honest read. Twelve to eighteen months is our estimate for getting to a working environment. The clubs we have watched attempt this have not been short of engineering ability. They have been short of direction. That is worth knowing before you hire, because the failure mode is an expensive system nobody trusts, not an unfinished one.
WHAT AXON ACTUALLY IS
Where Axon Fits
A dedicated Snowflake warehouse per client, configured and run by us, with your source systems connected and kept connected. Axon HQ sits on top of it for athlete management, medical and availability, wellness forms and files. Axon Pulse is the athlete app. Ask Axon answers questions in plain English, and an AI gateway lets your analysts point Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini at your own data without ever holding warehouse credentials.
You build your own measures, reports and AI models on top. You own what you build. We run the platform.
Two things it does that a system of record structurally cannot.
The medical confidentiality model is enforced in the data, not in a settings screen. "Is he available" and "what is wrong with him" are separate permissions. A coach can hold one without the other, and there is a purpose-built medical staff role. The first question any Head of Medical asks is whether the coach can see the diagnosis, and the answer is built into the schema.
Injury incidence per 1000 hours is answerable. That number needs the injury record and the exposure minutes in the same place. In most setups the injury record is in the AMS and the exposure minutes are in the GPS system, which is where that reporting usually turns into a spreadsheet or stops. In Axon both sit in the same warehouse, joined on one player dimension, in every client database.
REPLACING, OR RUNNING ALONGSIDE
Which one you are doing
Both happen, and the honest answer depends on your competition.
Axon replaces the AMS when the system you have is doing athlete records, wellness, availability and injury tracking, and the analysis on top of it is not doing what you need. That is the common case and it is the one where a single line in your budget gets consolidated.
Axon runs alongside it when you cannot remove what you have. Premier League academies are mandated onto specific systems. EFL clubs run a mandated wellbeing app. Governing bodies standardise injury surveillance across member clubs. In those cases the system of record stays, and Axon becomes the warehouse and the analysis layer beside it. One of our England RFU contacts put it better than our marketing has: it is as well as, not instead of.
We will tell you which one you are looking at on the first call. Getting that wrong wastes a season.
WHAT TO ASK A VENDOR
Six Questions Worth Asking a Vendor
Can I create a measure that does not ship with the product, and does it then work everywhere a built-in one does?
Can I connect Power BI, Python or an AI assistant straight to the underlying data? Is that included, or an add-on?
What is live in production today, as opposed to in beta or on the roadmap? Ask for a date.
Which of my current systems do you integrate natively, and who fixes it when a vendor changes their API mid-season?
Can you produce injury incidence per 1000 exposure hours from this system, with the training load included?
How long does setup take and how long until we can analyse our full data set?
COMMON QUESTIONS
FAQ
Is Axon Perform an athlete management system? Yes. Axon HQ handles athlete records, squads and groups, wellness and RPE forms, files, medical and availability with proper permissions, and report distribution to the athlete app. Underneath it is a dedicated data warehouse with your other systems connected, which is what a traditional AMS does not give you. We do not currently offer an EMR.
Can Axon replace Kitman Labs or Teamworks? For many clubs, yes. For clubs mandated onto a specific system by their league or governing body, no, and in those cases Axon sits alongside it as the warehouse and analysis layer.
What is the best athlete management system for a professional rugby club? It depends on whether your analytical methodology is a competitive asset. If it is, you want data-layer control. If your edge comes from coaching and recruitment rather than analysis, a configurable system of record is likely the better commercial decision.
Is Kitman Labs or Teamworks AMS better? They solve overlapping problems differently. Kitman is stronger on league-wide standardisation and its sports EMR. Teamworks AMS is more configurable and sits inside a wider operations suite. Neither publishes pricing. Ask both for a reference in your league and your sport.
What do I lose if I switch to Axon? The clinical workflow depth of a full EMR, if you had one. Any communications tooling bundled with your current system. What you gain is direct query access to your own data and the ability to build your own measures and AI on top.
How long does it take? Live in days. About two hours of your own time, spread across the few days we spend building the warehouse: roughly thirty minutes of preparation and a ninety-minute onboarding session. Building the equivalent in house takes most organisations twelve to eighteen months.
Do you publish your pricing? Not on the site. Ask and we will give you a ballpark figure.
How is Axon Perform different from Kitman Labs or Teamworks? The core difference is control. With most athlete management systems you get the measures and reports the vendor decided to build, and you work the way their product works. With Axon Perform you get a dedicated Snowflake warehouse configured to your organisation, with full read and query access, and you define your own measures, reports and AI models on top. Axon runs the platform; you keep control of the analysis. Direct query access is the thing worth checking with any vendor, including us.
Does Axon replace existing tools like GPS platforms or video analysis software? No. Axon connects to the tools you already use, including Catapult, STATSports and Sportable for tracking, and Opta, Wyscout and Hudl Sportscode for match and video data, then centralises it into a single warehouse. Your collection tools stay where they are. Some companies on this page sit in both columns, because a vendor we compare against can also be a data source we connect to. Whether Axon replaces your athlete management system is the separate question answered above.
NEXT STEP
See it running on your own data.
Bring the question your current setup can't answer, and we'll show you what it looks like with your own systems connected. Live in days, so you'll know quickly either way.