If you have spent any time looking for a tool to replace the spreadsheet, the WhatsApp thread, and the half-broken Strava club page, Heylo has probably shown up in your research. It is one of the more visible group-management apps right now, and on paper it looks like it could solve a lot of what running club founders are juggling.

But running clubs are not the same as parent groups, book clubs, or D&D meetups. The pain of running a running club is not just "we need a place to chat". It is the fragmented stack: Strava clubs for activities, WhatsApp for the day-to-day, Google Forms for waivers, Eventbrite for big events, Mailchimp for newsletters, Venmo for dues, and a spreadsheet that only one person knows how to update.

This is an honest comparison of RunLink and Heylo, written for the person who actually runs the club. The answer is not always RunLink. Heylo is a real product with real strengths. The goal here is to help you figure out which one fits the way your club operates, not to talk you into anything.

What Each Platform Is Built For

The biggest difference between RunLink and Heylo is who they are designed for.

Heylo is a general-purpose community app. It is built for any kind of recurring group: parents in a co-op, hobby clubs, book clubs, faith groups, neighborhood meetups, and yes, some running clubs too. It is broad on purpose. That breadth is its core selling point, because it can serve a lot of different community types without locking into the language or workflow of any single one.

RunLink is a running-club operations platform. Every screen, every feature, every default assumes you are running a running club. Group runs, RSVPs for a 6 a.m. tempo, route maps, distance and pace metadata, recurring weekly schedules, member dues, attendance over time. The vocabulary is "members" and "runs" and "captains", not "events" and "people".

That difference is not just cosmetic. It shows up in how fast you can set things up, how much explaining you have to do to new members, and how much friction shows up in the recurring tasks you do every week.

Side-by-Side: Where Each Platform Wins

Job to be done	Heylo	RunLink
Group chat and announcements	Strong, built-in	Strong, built-in
Recurring weekly group runs	Generic events, manual setup	Native recurring runs, GPS routes
Route library with maps	Not built for this	Yes, attached to every run
Member roster with run history	Generic member list	Full attendance and miles per member
RSVP for group runs	Yes	Yes, with waitlist and pace groups
Public club page for discovery	Limited	Yes, runnable city directory
Newsletter to non-members	Not the focus	Built in for prospects
Multi-club support	One community at a time	One app for runners, members of multiple clubs
Brand specificity	Multi-purpose	Running-only
Tracking integration with Strava or Garmin	No	Aware of the runner identity, complements Strava
Free tier	Yes	Yes

The honest read on this table is that Heylo and RunLink overlap on the "group chat and basic events" layer. Both will get you off WhatsApp. Where they diverge is on the running-specific operational layer that takes up most of a club founder's actual week.

What Heylo Does Well

Heylo gets some real things right and it is worth naming them.

The onboarding is easy. The app is clean. The group chat works. The reminders and RSVPs work for any kind of event, whether it is a Sunday morning run or a happy hour. Members do not need a lot of hand-holding to join. For a brand new club that meets once a week and has not yet developed any complexity, Heylo is a perfectly reasonable starting point and a clear upgrade from a WhatsApp group.

It also gets the social side right. Posts, polls, and announcements feel natural in Heylo. If most of what you do is keep your members in the loop and gather everyone for a single weekly meetup, you can run a club on Heylo and probably enjoy it.

The free tier is generous. For a small club still figuring out what it wants to be, that matters.

Where Heylo Starts to Strain for Running Clubs

The breakdown shows up when a running club grows past the first 30 or 40 members and starts running more than one thing per week.

Most active clubs have a Saturday long run, a Tuesday tempo, a Thursday social run, and a once-a-month race meetup. Some of those splits into pace groups. Some need an A-route and a B-route. Some have a waitlist when a coach can only handle 20 runners. Some require a waiver before someone shows up the first time. Some collect a small monthly fee.

In Heylo, every one of those needs is an event you build from scratch on a generic event template. There is no concept of a recurring weekly run with a route attached. There is no concept of a pace group inside an RSVP. There is no concept of attendance over time, which means there is no way to know that Maria has shown up to 14 of the last 16 long runs and probably deserves to be a captain.

The club becomes a series of events sitting next to each other, not a club with a rhythm. That is the Heylo experience for running founders who outgrow the basic loop.

Where RunLink Wins for Running Clubs

RunLink starts from the opposite end of the problem. The unit is not the event, it is the club, and inside the club the unit is the recurring run.

A few specific places where that changes the experience:

Recurring runs with routes. Your Tuesday tempo lives at one URL with one route map. Members do not get a new event every week. New members joining in November can scroll back and see what the club has been doing.
Pace groups inside one RSVP. When 35 people sign up for a Saturday long run, the captains can see how many are in each pace group without juggling a side spreadsheet.
Attendance and miles per member. Founders know who is showing up. That is the single most important number in retention, and it does not exist in a general-purpose app.
A real public club page. People searching for a run club in your city can find your club, see your schedule, and join. Heylo communities are typically invite-only by design.
A runner identity that follows the member. A runner in your club might also be in two other clubs. RunLink treats that as normal. A general-purpose community app treats the person as starting from scratch in each community.
Built for the multi-tool replacement. RunLink is designed to consolidate the Strava clubs page, the WhatsApp thread, the Google Form waiver, the Eventbrite listing, and the dues spreadsheet into a single app. That is the explicit promise.

None of this matters until your club has enough rhythm to feel the difference. But once you do, you feel it every week.

When Heylo Is the Right Choice

There are a few situations where Heylo is genuinely the better fit, and a comparison post that does not say this is not being honest.

Your "club" is really a once-a-week social meetup with a run as the excuse, and the social side is the actual product.
You run a mixed-format group where the running is one of several activities, and you do not want a running-specific tool.
You are at the stage where you have 12 active members, one weekly run, and no real operational pain. Anything works at that size, and Heylo works as well as anything else.
You want one app for several different communities you organize, only one of which is a running club.

If any of those describe you, Heylo is a reasonable place to stay. The complexity of a running-specific platform is overkill for a 12-person social run.

When RunLink Is the Right Choice

RunLink is the better fit when:

You run more than one type of run each week and you want them to live in one place with their own routes and own RSVPs.
You want attendance data over time so you know who your core is and who is drifting away before they ghost the club.
You want a public club page that brings in new members organically when people search for a run club in your city.
You are tired of being the human integration layer between Strava, WhatsApp, Forms, Eventbrite, and a spreadsheet.
You have captains or co-leads and you need shared admin without sharing your personal phone for every "hey when are we meeting Sunday" text.

The threshold is not member count, it is operational complexity. A 40-person club with two weekly runs and a waiver requirement will feel the difference faster than a 200-person club that meets once a week.

How to Decide in 10 Minutes

Open a notebook or a notes app and answer four questions honestly.

How many distinct run formats does your club run per week, not counting one-off events?
Do you have any kind of waiver, intake form, or member application?
Do you, or will you, ever care about who is showing up and how often?
Do you want new members to be able to find your club without an invite?

If you answered "one", "no", "not really", and "invite-only is fine", Heylo is probably enough. If you answered "two or more", "yes", "yes", and "I want discoverability", you are going to outgrow Heylo, and the work of switching later is bigger than the work of starting on RunLink now.

There is no shame in either answer. The wrong move is to keep duct-taping the multi-tool stack together because none of the existing options feels exactly right.

A Note on Switching

If you are already on Heylo and considering a move, the migration is less scary than it looks. The roster moves by CSV. The schedule moves by recreating the recurring runs once. The chat history does not move, but the announcements that matter usually live in member memory, not in the app. Most clubs that switch find that the first two weeks are slow and the third week feels like the club they always wanted to run.

The Bottom Line

Heylo is a good product for general communities, and a reasonable starting point for a brand new running club that has not yet developed operational complexity. RunLink is a purpose-built club operations platform for founders who feel the weight of running a real club every week.

If your club is more than a once-a-week meetup, RunLink will save you hours. If it is not, Heylo is fine and you can revisit this later.

If you want to see what a running-specific operations platform actually feels like, you can set up a free club on RunLink in under five minutes at runlink.app. Bring your roster, your schedule, and a Saturday morning route. The first run is the test.

RunLink vs Heylo: An Honest Comparison for Running Club Organizers