Best ball fantasy football season is heating up, and whether you’re new to the best ball format or a veteran, you’re likely trying to decide where to complete the majority of your drafts for the 2024 season.
So, what is the the best best ball site? To be honest, it’s not an easy question to answer.
Game formats, scoring, roster sizes, and tournament prize pools vary across best ball sites.
In any case, three options stand out as the top best ball sites & apps this year: Underdog Fantasy, Drafters, and DraftKings. Let’s take a closer look at each.
Top Best Ball Sites and Apps
1. Underdog Fantasy
- Play for Real Money: Yes
- Scoring: Half-Point PPR
- Flagship Tournament: Best Ball Mania V
- Promo Offer: 100% Deposit Match up to $100
Underdog Fantasy is the premier destination for best ball drafts, there’s no doubt about it.
Founded in 2020 by industry veterans, Underdog Fantasy first took the fantasy football space by storm and have since parlayed its success to disrupt the DFS and sports betting spaces — but this page is about our favorite best ball sites, so we’ll stick to that.
And when it comes to best ball, no one does it bigger or better than Underdog Fantasy
Since the company’s inception, Underdog Fantasy has turned fantasy football participants into millionaires with their marquee Best Ball Mania tournament.
On top of that, Underdog Fantasy is constantly improving and innovating their product offerings.
Last year they introduced a new concept called Best Ball: Weekly Winners. This is a hybrid best ball fantasy format in which, during the regular season, contestants competed with others outside of their original draft group, and each week had individual winners and prizes.
Underdog also has an eliminator format, with a tournament fittingly titled The Eliminator.
The bottom line is Underdog has the largest fantasy football contests, the best app and drafting experience, and they stay vigilant to maintain their integrity so that you can draft confidence knowing your league is legit.
New users can sign up with the Underdog Fantasy promo code LABS to get their first deposit matched up to $100. The bonus funds can be used for best ball contests or fantasy pick’em.
2. Drafters
- Play for Real Money: Yes
- Scoring: Full-Point PPR (Total points, no playoffs)
- Flagship Tournament: Drafters Million III
- Promo Offer: 100% Deposit Match up to $100
Drafters is a smaller site than the others on this list but they come in at #2 because, similar to Underdog, they are a company whose primary focus is their best ball product even though they provide other DFS offerings.
And while lesser known than the DraftKings of the world, Drafters still serves the potential of a massive payday to best ball fantasy football players. In fact, with the announcement of Drafters Million III, Drafters was the first site to launch 2024 best ball fantasy football drafts.
Drafters Million III puts forth $2.5M in guaranteed prize money, $500K of which goes to the champion, and 28,000 places are paid. All it takes to enter? $15.
What makes Drafters a unique best ball site is their cumulative scoring format. You still draft your team with 11 other participants, but as soon as the draft is over you’re competing with every other person in the contests — in the case of Drafters Million, that means over 186,000 other teams. At the end of Week 17, the team with the most total points is crowned champions.
Drafters best ball contests are fairly straightforward but do require a different strategy than those with a playoff format.
Users can draft and desktop or mobile, and have the option to choose between fast (30 seconds per pick) and slow drafts (8 hours per pick). If I’m being honest, the overall UX of the app is inferior to its competitors but it still gets the job done.
The Drafters bonus for new users is just as good as Underdog’s — you can get up to a $100 deposit match when you use the Drafters promo code LABS.
3. DraftKings
- Play for Real Money: Yes
- Scoring: Full-Point PPR
- Flagship Tournament: TBA
The top DFS site didn’t sit on the best ball sidelines for long. DraftKings best ball was born one year after Underdog launched and, to no one’s surprise, DraftKings immediately became a major player in the space.
DraftKings best ball uses DraftKings’ standard NFL DFS scoring (PPR), which includes 3-point bonuses for 300 passing yards, 100 rushing yards and 100 receiving yards.
DraftKings is a great place to play best ball because there tend to be more casual players in the lower stakes tournaments, making draft rooms a bit softer than what you see at Underdog and Drafters. Additionally, there are more tournament options for high-stakes players.
