Assistant Coach Volleyball alternative: own it or subscribe?

Short answer: Assistant Coach Volleyball is a buy-once iPhone and iPad toolkit for the coach personally — practices, drills, player profiles and match logs, with PDF export and no subscription. Koach is a subscription app on iPhone, Android and the web that your players and parents are in too, with live scoring and rotations. So you are not choosing between good and bad, but between a private notebook for the coach and a shared team environment.

Comparison checked on 5 August 2026, based on the public App Store page for Assistant Coach Volleyball (version 3.7.6, updated 14 February 2026) and the maker's site. We make Koach. So read this as a comparison written by the maker of one of these two apps — which is exactly why the sections below spell out where Assistant Coach Volleyball does it better, and who it is the better choice for.

What Assistant Coach Volleyball is, and what it costs

Assistant Coach Volleyball is made by Valerio Lo Giudice and has been in the App Store since December 2011 — making it one of the oldest volleyball coaching apps in existence. The same app exists for basketball, football, rugby, handball and water polo. In the Dutch App Store it costs €5.99 as a one-off ($4.99 in the US store); the App Store page lists no in-app purchases and the maker states there are no ads and no in-app purchases. So you pay once, not monthly. Rating in the US store: 4.5 out of 5 from 59 ratings.

What you get for it, according to the App Store description: teams per season with season statistics, player profiles with a photo and contact details, practice plans with drills you sketch out with your finger on a drawing board, a drill archive you reuse across teams, video recordings attached to drills, match logs whose totals the app calculates for you, group messages to your roster, backup and sync through an Assistant Coach account, and PDF export of practically everything.

Two practical things to know. It is an iPhone and iPad app (the App Store page also lists Macs with Apple silicon); there is no web version. An Android version has existed, but on 5 August 2026 that Google Play page returned an error while other Play pages loaded normally — so do not count on it. And the app is available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish; Dutch is not among them.

Where Assistant Coach Volleyball does it better

Fair is fair: on four points Assistant Coach beats us.

• The price, if you use it for years. €5.99 once is already cheaper than Koach Coach after two months, and after a season the gap is wide. If you use an app purely as your own tool, you pay more with us.
• PDF export. Practice plans, player profiles and stat reports export to PDF in one tap, ready to email or print. Koach does not have that; we share digitally.
• Video and a drawing board with drills. You record a drill on video and store it with the drill, and you sketch a formation or a run with your finger. Koach has deliberately no video analysis.
• Several sports in the same shape. If you coach a basketball or handball side alongside volleyball, you work with the same tool everywhere.

Where Koach goes further

The big difference is in who uses the app. Assistant Coach is built for the coach: your device, your archive, your PDFs. Koach is a shared environment — your players get their own free account, parents can follow along, and attendance, the team calendar, announcements and the carpool schedule for away matches all run through the same app.

On match day itself, Koach is also more specific. You build your lineup with rotation charts in 5-1, 4-2 or 6-2 including libero swaps, and you score live with point types per player instead of entering the totals after the final whistle — although entering afterwards is possible with us too. And you do not start with an empty drill archive but with a library of 200+ drills.

Where we come off worse: age. Assistant Coach has been running for fourteen years; Koach has only been in the App Store since July 2026. That means fewer users, fewer years of bugs ironed out and a shorter track record.

Who is Assistant Coach Volleyball the better choice for?

Pick Assistant Coach Volleyball if you recognise yourself in this list:

• You coach on an iPhone or iPad and need no Android or web — and your team does not need to follow along.
• You do not want a subscription and would rather pay once for a tool that is then yours.
• Reading English is no problem for you or your team.
• You like working on paper: printing or emailing practice plans and reports as PDFs.
• You want to keep videos of drills with your practice plan.
• You coach several sports and want the same app across all of them.

Pick Koach if you want players and parents inside the app, if you want rotations and points per player on match day, or if you also need it on Android and in the browser. See also the full overview of sports team apps and the comparison of volleyball apps.

The honest conclusion

These two do not do the same thing. Assistant Coach Volleyball is a solid, cheap, fourteen-year-old notebook for the coach; Koach is a shared team environment with volleyball-specific match features and a monthly fee. If you are hesitating, the cheapest test is simple: buy Assistant Coach for €5.99 and try Koach free for 14 days without payment details. For under six euros you will know within two weeks which of the two fits the way you coach — and which one you will never open again.

Sources: Assistant Coach Volleyball in the App Store and assistantcoach.co, checked on 5 August 2026. Prices and features can change; check them yourself before you buy.

Frequently asked questions

Further reading

Sports team apps for volleyball: the complete overview (2026) The best volleyball apps for coaches (2026): an honest comparison Volleyball app for Android: install it and use it courtside