You're looking for a GooseChase alternative. The usual reasons: the pricing is per-event ($299 for a single Experience covering up to 40 participants, as of July 2026), every participant has to download an app before they can play, and for a lot of events — booth crawls, orientation tours, office hunts — the full missions-and-judging machinery is more product than the event needs.
The good news: the market has real options at every level, including free ones. The right pick depends on one question, so let's ask it first.
What GooseChase Actually Is
GooseChase is the market leader in app-based scavenger hunts, and it's genuinely good at what it does. Organizers build an "Experience" from 250+ templates or from scratch; participants complete missions — photo and video submissions, GPS check-ins, text answers — and a real-time activity feed plus leaderboard keeps the competition visible. Teachers, camp counselors, and event teams have run millions of hunts on it.
The structural facts to know before committing:
- Pricing is per event. The free tier allows 3 participants for 24 hours — a demo, not an event. A single Experience is $299 (up to 40 total participants, 30 days to launch and run). Subscriptions for unlimited Experiences exist, but prices aren't public. Education (K-12) and non-profit pricing are separate.
- The app is mandatory. Every participant installs GooseChase from the App Store or Play Store and creates or joins via the app. For a class that's fine; for a conference crowd, the install step is where participation goes to die.
- Submissions are the product — and the pain point. A decade of Android reviews tells one consistent story: photo and video uploads failing mid-event. Capture is camera-only (no gallery uploads), there's no offline queue, and when a submission fails during a one-shot live event, there's no second chance. iOS fares better.
When GooseChase makes sense: photo/video missions are the point of your event, you want the template library, and the budget supports per-event pricing. When it doesn't: you mainly need to know who visited which places, your crowd won't install an app, or $299 per event doesn't fit what the event is.
The Real Question Before You Pick
Scavenger hunt platforms bundle two different jobs:
- Missions and judging — participants do things (photos, videos, answers) and someone scores them.
- Checkpoints — participants visit places, and the game is completing the circuit.
GooseChase and Scavify are built for job 1. If your event is actually job 2 — a booth passport at a trade show, a campus orientation tour, an office hunt, a pub crawl — you don't need the missions machinery at all, and the alternatives get dramatically simpler and cheaper.
The Best GooseChase Alternatives
1. Scavify
Scavify is the closest like-for-like alternative: an app-based scavenger hunt platform with photo, QR, and GPS challenges, points, and analytics. Where GooseChase leans self-serve and event-shaped, Scavify leans enterprise — its marquee customers are large organizations, and the product is pitched at multi-week programs like employee onboarding, wellness challenges, and campus engagement as much as one-off hunts.
The trade-offs: participants need the app and an account, and pricing isn't published — you talk to sales. For a large org rolling out a program with procurement involved, that's normal. For a one-off event on a deadline, it's friction.
Best fit: corporate HR and engagement programs at organizations big enough to buy through a sales process.
2. Actionbound
Actionbound is the European standard, especially in German-speaking countries — a Berlin-based platform where organizers build "Bounds": guided interactive tours mixing quizzes, media, GPS stages, and challenges. It's strong in education and museums, with a freemium model (free for private use, paid licenses for schools and businesses — check their site for current rates).
Like GooseChase, it's app-based. One structural difference to know: results are tallied and shown after the Bound is played rather than as a live leaderboard during the event — great for guided tours, less so for a room that should be buzzing about who's in first place right now.
Best fit: schools, museums, and city rallies — especially in Europe — where a guided tour matters more than live competition.
3. Leaderboarded (QR Checkpoint Hunt)
Leaderboarded's QR Checkpoint Hunt takes the checkpoint job and strips away everything else. You add a checkpoint for every place you want people to visit, print one QR poster per checkpoint (plus a how-to-play poster), and tape them up. Participants scan any poster with their phone camera — no app, no account — enter their name once, and every scan after that is a one-tap check-in that earns points on a live leaderboard.
Three things GooseChase users notice immediately:
- Setup is about five minutes. Add checkpoints, print posters, open the hunt. There's nothing else to configure.
- Lead capture is built in. The first-scan form collects each participant's email and organization by default — visible only to you, never on the public leaderboard, and exported to CSV. At a trade show, every player is a lead.
- The pricing isn't per event. Free covers up to 25 participants and 10 checkpoints per hunt; paid plans add custom branding and higher limits.
The honest limitation: there are no photo/video missions, no GPS challenges, and no judging — deliberately. It's one mechanic done well, not a game-building studio.
Best fit: trade show booth passports, conference and campus tours, office and team-building hunts — any event where "visit all the places" is the game and nobody wants to install anything.
4. Classtools QR Treasure Hunt Generator
The free classroom classic. Classtools (a long-running teacher-tools site) generates printable QR codes from a list of questions — students scan each code to reveal a question, write answers on paper, and the teacher marks them afterward. Completely free, no accounts for anyone.
What it doesn't do: any scoring, tracking, or leaderboard. You're the scoreboard. For a single lesson with one class, that's often fine; for anything bigger it turns into admin.
Best fit: teachers running a one-off lesson activity with zero budget.
5. DIY: Google Forms + a Free QR Generator
The fully manual route: create a Google Form (or Doc) per stop, generate a QR code per link with any free generator, print, and tally responses yourself. Free and infinitely flexible — and fiddly beyond a handful of checkpoints or players, with no live ranking to build excitement. Our QR code scavenger hunt guide walks through this method step by step, alongside the live-leaderboard way.
Best fit: small one-off hunts where free matters more than polish.
Comparison Table
| Tool | Pricing | Usable free tier | App required | Live leaderboard | Photo/GPS missions | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scavify | Sales-gated | No | Yes (+ account) | Yes | Yes | Enterprise engagement programs |
| Actionbound | Freemium; paid edu/business licenses | Private use only | Yes | After play, not live | Yes | Education & tours, esp. Europe |
| Leaderboarded | Free tier; flat paid plans | Yes (25 participants) | No — browser | Yes | No | Check-in hunts: trade shows, campus, office |
| Classtools QR Generator | Free | Yes | No — browser | No | No | Single-classroom activities |
| DIY (Forms + QR) | Free | Yes | No — browser | No | Manual | Tiny one-off hunts |
| GooseChase (reference) | $299/event (40 participants); subscriptions unlisted | 3 participants / 24h | Yes | Yes | Yes | Mission-based hunts with judging |
Pricing accurate as of July 2026 — confirm on each vendor's site before committing.
Why Leaderboarded Wins the Check-In Use Case
If your event is missions and judging, buy a missions platform. But most "scavenger hunts" at business events aren't — they're circuits. Visit every booth. Find every station. Complete the tour. For that shape of event, the QR Checkpoint Hunt is built to be the shortest path from idea to running game:
- Five-minute setup, printable posters included — one page per checkpoint plus a how-to-play poster for the entrance
- Zero participant friction — phone camera, browser, first name; nothing to install and no account to create
- A live leaderboard made for a big screen — put it on a TV at the entrance and watch people route themselves to the checkpoints they're missing
- Lead capture on every first scan — email and organization collected by default, private to you, exported to CSV for follow-up
- An honest free tier — 25 participants and 10 checkpoints per hunt, enough for a real event
Start with the QR scavenger hunt page, see the step-by-step guide, or read how it fits a booth strategy in trade show lead capture.
The Bottom Line
GooseChase is the right tool when photo and video missions are the event and the budget fits per-event pricing — with Scavify as its enterprise-program sibling and Actionbound as the European education pick. But if your hunt is really a checkpoint circuit — a trade show passport, an orientation tour, an office hunt — you don't need an app, a mission library, or a $299 ticket. A browser-based QR checkpoint hunt does that job in five minutes, captures a lead with every first scan, and starts free.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a free GooseChase alternative?
Yes. Leaderboarded's QR Checkpoint Hunt is free for up to 25 participants and 10 checkpoints — enough to run a real event, not just a demo. GooseChase's free tier caps at 3 participants for 24 hours, which is a trial in practice. If you only need printable QR question sheets with no scoring, Classtools' QR Treasure Hunt Generator is completely free.
Does GooseChase have a free version?
Technically yes, practically no. The free tier allows up to 3 participants, 1 concurrent Experience, and 24 hours of runtime — fine for testing the product, unusable for an actual event. The first paid step is the single-Experience plan at $299 (up to 40 participants, 30 days to launch and run).
How much does GooseChase cost?
As of July 2026: a single Experience costs $299 one-time and covers up to 40 total participants with 30 days to launch and run it. Subscriptions for unlimited Experiences exist but prices aren't shown publicly. K-12 education and non-profit pricing are handled separately. Confirm current numbers on their pricing page before budgeting.
Is there a GooseChase alternative without an app download?
Yes — that's the biggest structural difference between the options. GooseChase, Scavify, and Actionbound all require participants to install an app. Leaderboarded's QR Checkpoint Hunt runs entirely in the phone browser: participants scan a QR poster with their camera, enter a name once, and they're playing. For mixed crowds — conference attendees, campus visitors, office guests — removing the install step removes most of the drop-off.
How does GooseChase compare to Scavify?
They're the two big names in the same category: app-based scavenger hunt platforms with photo/video missions, GPS challenges, and points. GooseChase is self-serve with published per-event pricing and a huge template library; Scavify is enterprise-oriented — pricing is sales-gated and the product leans toward corporate programs (onboarding, wellness, multi-week campaigns) rather than one-off events. If you want to buy without a sales call, GooseChase; if you're rolling out a program across a large org, Scavify.
What's the best GooseChase alternative for schools?
It depends on the hunt. For mission-based hunts with photo evidence, GooseChase's own K-12 pricing is competitive and teachers like the template library. In Europe — especially German-speaking countries — Actionbound is the education standard, with paid licenses for schools. For a simple stations-based hunt where students scan, answer, and climb a live class leaderboard with no logins, a browser-based QR checkpoint hunt is the lightest option — see our classroom scavenger hunt guide.
Can Leaderboarded do photo or GPS missions like GooseChase?
No, and that's deliberate. A QR Checkpoint Hunt does one mechanic — scan a checkpoint, earn the points, climb the live leaderboard — which is why setup takes five minutes instead of an afternoon. If judged photo and video missions are the heart of your event, GooseChase or Scavify will serve you better. If you're running a judged photo or talent contest alongside your event, that's a job for ScoreJudge, our judging platform.
Try Leaderboarded Today
No app for participants. No per-event pricing. Print a QR poster for each checkpoint and be live in five minutes — free for up to 25 participants.