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How to compare competition sites

The best competition site isn't necessarily the one with the biggest prizes or the cheapest tickets. Comparing operators properly means looking at several separate things and deciding which of them actually matter to you — not collapsing everything into one number.

Last reviewed 20 Aug 2026 · Reviewed by Prize Scout editorial

Six things worth comparing separately

• Value. Median value ratio and odds per £ across an operator's live draws, not the price on the tin.
• Field size. The typical maximum ticket pool, and how large the field tends to be by the time a competition actually closes.
• Transparency. Whether sold count, entry list, a winner archive, a stated draw method and clear terms are actually published.
• Player protections. Age checks, entry controls, and voluntary-code participation where applicable.
• Reliability. How fresh the published data is, whether there's a real draw history, and evidence that prizes get awarded.
• Prize fit. Whether the site regularly runs the category of prize you actually want, rather than occasionally.

These pull in different directions. An operator can be strong on transparency and unremarkable on value for a specific draw, or the other way round — that's normal, and it's exactly why folding all six into one score would hide more than it reveals.

Where Prize Scout applies this today

The competition sites hub lists every operator Prize Scout tracks in a live table: current live draw count, the categories it's currently running, and a median value ratio recalculated from those actual live draws rather than a fixed rating. From there, each operator's own dossier page — for example, Rev Comps — adds what Prize Scout has directly checked about that operator (whether we reviewed its robots.txt and terms, and whether tracking permission was explicitly confirmed where required), its stated draw method and free-entry route where known, and, kept separate, whatever live winner announcements we've actually recorded — or an explicit note where none have been recorded yet.

None of this rolls up into a single operator score. Prize Scout deliberately shows the individual pieces of evidence — value, transparency, what's verified and what isn't — rather than averaging them into one rating, because a blended number would flatten a real difference between, say, an operator that's transparent but pricier and one that's cheap but largely unverified. Only individual live draws get a single number, CompSignal, and that's a per-draw relative value score — see how CompSignal works — not a rating of the operator running it.

What's still missing

A few of the six dimensions above aren't fully built out yet. Player protections and voluntary-code participation aren't independently checked per operator today — the dossier page says so directly rather than guessing at it. And reliability, in the fuller sense of "does this operator's history show prizes consistently awarded on schedule", needs closed-draw history Prize Scout has only just started collecting. See if a competition doesn't sell out for the same gap from a different angle.

Deciding what matters to you

Once you can see the six dimensions separately, "best for" becomes a personal question rather than a universal ranking. Someone chasing the sharpest odds should weight value heavily and treat the rest as a floor to clear. Someone entering for the first time might weight transparency and reliability far higher than raw value. Prize Scout's job is to lay out the evidence for each dimension plainly on every tracked operator — which one should decide your choice is up to you.