Battlefy is a tournament platform. You create your event on it, players register through it, and it handles the machinery of running the competition. It is a mature product used for real esports events.
Tanitar is the layer underneath a platform rather than the platform itself. You either call the API from your own front end, or fork a template and ship it on your domain. What the player uses is yours.
Platform or infrastructure
This is the whole decision, and it is worth being precise about it, because the feature lists look similar while the model underneath is not.
| Tournament platform | Tournament infrastructure | |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | An account on their product | A system you build your product on |
| Player-facing surface | Their application | Yours |
| Customisation ceiling | What the platform exposes | Whatever you build against the API |
| Multi-brand | Multiple events or accounts | Isolated tenants, separately branded |
| Front end | Provided, configurable | Template you fork, or build your own |
| Audience | Partly the platform's | Entirely yours |
A useful test: if the campaign brief says the experience must be unmistakably the brand's, a platform account will not satisfy it however well it is themed. That is a requirement about ownership, not about styling.
Where a platform is the better answer
- You are a tournament organiser and running events is your actual business.
- You want to benefit from an existing audience rather than bring your own.
- You have no engineering resource and no plans to acquire any.
- You want to be live this week with no build at all.
Where infrastructure is the better answer
- You are the brand, and the event is a channel rather than the product.
- You need several isolated, separately branded environments.
- You want the registration and match data inside your own systems.
- You have requirements — data residency, SSO, a signed DPA, an uptime SLA — that come from procurement rather than from the events team.
- You want to extend the product rather than request features.
The engineering question
Infrastructure implies you are building something, and that is a real cost worth stating plainly. The mitigation is the front-end templates: you fork one, apply your brand, and ship — which is where the 48-hour figure comes from. Going fully custom against the API takes longer and is a deliberate choice, not a requirement.
If you have no engineering resource at all and no appetite to buy any, a platform is the honest recommendation.
The honest summary
If running tournaments is your business, use a platform built for running tournaments. If tournaments are how you reach an audience for a different business — subscribers, campaign engagement, student retention — then the platform being someone else's is the problem, not a detail.