Daily fantasy sports are the perfect types of games for mobile players. Being able to track your handpicked team, make trade decisions and watch how your chosen team performs makes it tailor made for people on the go. However, finding a good fantasy sports app can be hard.
That’s why, in this review, we’re going to cover some of the best daily fantasy sports apps that you’ll find anywhere online. We’ll be telling you the criteria that helps us decide what makes a great fantasy sports app. We’ll also give you a rundown of three of the best fantasy sports apps, and why those apps stand out from the rest. Let’s get stuck right into it.
What is Daily Fantasy Sports?
Daily fantasy sports is essentially a condensed, accelerated form of traditional fantasy sports play. So, instead of playing a fantasy sports league for an entire sports season, daily fantasy sports competitions are condensed into weeks, or weekends of competitions, so players can enjoy fantasy sports play on a much shorter basis.
The actual regulations and formatting of DFS (daily fantasy sports) is similar to that of your regular fantasy sports seasons. You are given a salary cap, you can pick several players within that salary cap to set up your team and then you enter some competitions. Each competition will pit you against other players, and the winners of these competitions will win a cash prize.
We go into more detail into the differences in daily and regular fantasy sports in our DFS legal states review, but those are the major differences between the two. There are other fantasy sports variants you can wager on, but none have grown in popularity quite like DFS has. The popularity of the DFS format means that many popular sportsbooks have adopted a DFS into their platform. On mobile, especially, because it makes setting up a fantasy sports team, making trades and tracking your players results much easier.
What Makes a Great Daily Fantasy Sports App?
In truth, there are a lot of factors that we consider while choosing the best daily fantasy sports apps. Making a great DFS platform by itself is a task, but when you consider a mobile experience, it’s a whole different ball game. However, there’s a few different major points we consider when deciding what makes the best daily fantasy sports app.
Usability and feel
What we mean by this is how the mobile app performs. We expect all sports betting apps, of any kind, to perform at a high quality, especially when you are relying on a DFS app experience. The app should feel smooth to use, must have very little lag, have an easy to navigate platform and has to be aesthetically pleasing. We talk about this in our eSports fantasy app review, but the app itself must be high quality so that the user can enjoy the process.
Variety of sports
There are plenty of DFS apps that offer a DFS section with only a couple of sports available to the player. But, the best daily fantasy sports apps will offer a variety of popular sports that a player can choose from. You want to put together a football team before the NFL season starts? Or, you want to focus more on college football? Maybe, you’re more of a basketball fan? You’ll find that the better DFS apps offer all of these sports, and plenty of leagues within them to play with. Football, soccer, basketball, baseball, hockey. Some even offer you the chance to put together a fantasy MMA team? Variety is the spice of life, as they say, and it’s also the spice of great DFS apps.
Real time updates and transfers
We expect a truly immersive experience when we play on a DFS app, so once we set up our team, we expect that there will be plenty of customisation features available. There should be real time updates on ongoing games, or on specific players in your team. You should also be given the real time opportunity to transfer and change parts of your team at points in the competition. There also should be different forums, and leaderboards so that players can engage with each other, and allow for a fully immersive DFS experience.
News and analysis
Users should have full access to news, updates and analysis about their chosen DFS sport, so that they can make educated decisions about their DFS teams, and what competitions they enter. This includes injury reports, rankings and player projections, which can greatly educate a player about facets of the game they may not be aware of. You’ll find every great DFS app will make all of these tools available to the users.
The Three Best Daily Fantasy Sports Apps Out There Right Now
With all of that in mind, let’s dive right into some of our favourite daily fantasy sports apps that we’ve tried out ourselves. Here’s our top three DFS apps, based on the criteria above.
DraftKings – The Kings of DFS
DraftKings have been an industry goliath in sports betting for years now. When it comes to DFS, they have taken this market by the horns, and made it their own. They were the sportsbook that popularised the whole DFS variant, and completely revolutionised it.
They offer DFS play across most popular sports, as well as some of the best competitions you’ll find anywhere. These competitions include popular choices like Best Ball, Tiers, Flash Draft and plenty more. From large million dollar tournaments, to head to head matches, DraftKings offers something for everyone interested in DFS.
Their unique Flash Draft is one of a kind. This gives you the opportunity to draft different players to your team in the middle of any live game, across most sports. This neat little feature can completely change the complexion of a DFS competition, and gives an air of unpredictability to your DFS play. We discuss DraftKings’ superiority more in our DraftKings review, but DraftKings are by far the best DFS app right now.
Underdog Fantasy – Pure Variety
Underdog is a fantasy exclusive website, and is one of the newest names in the DFS world. However, they have soared to popularity with the fantasy DFS app that they are offering their users. With the backing of huge celebrity names like Mark Cuban and Kevin Durant, the reason Underdog is so popular in particular is it’s the perfect variety platform.
It offers DFS competitions that’s a day long, a week long, and a month long, all with different stakes and lengths. It’s very rare to find a DFS app that offers that complete range of games, but Underdog excels at it. They are probably most well known for their infamous Best Ball Maia tournament, which essentially allows you to compete for a huge cash prize under an umbrella on several different shorter DFS plays. So, it’s like a fantasy sports league of DFS leagues! They also offer regular Pick’em play, which means you can bet against the house. As we cover in our Underdog fantasy review, Underdog offers it all.
Fanduel – The Industry Standard
Being in the game since 2009, Fanduel has always been a presence in the sports betting world, particularly when it comes to DFS. They offer a great variety of DFS competitions across all sports, including daily, weekend, weekly and monthly. They also offer their own range of unique DFS games, along with daily snake games, head to head matchups, beginners only competitions, Beat the Score and other competitions that are completely exclusive to the Fanduel platform.
Their mobile app is also one of the easiest apps to use. You can connect with your banking app, meaning that all your payments will be secure and regulated. One thing that Fanduel also does is that it offers a loyalty program especially for DFS players, called the Fanduel players club. This club offers daily and weekly memberships, Fanduel merchandise and priority customer support for their players. We talk about at length in the DraftKings vs Fanduel analysis, but Fanduel excels by bringing plenty of ‘exclusives’ to the table for the users. That’s why we rate them so highly as DFS apps.
Summary: Plenty of Brilliant DFS Options Out There
All in all, there are some great daily fantasy sports apps for you to choose from: DraftKings, Fanduel and Underdog all offer immense value to players. It all depends on what you want from your DFS play, as each platform is a little different in terms of value. We offer individual reviews on each if you are looking for further details.
However, we do recommend that you follow the criteria we have laid out on this page before you decide what DFS platform you play with as it does make a huge difference to your experience. So what are you waiting for? Sign up to one of these great platforms and see what the fuss is all about!
