Custom team names tip
Open the 'Custom' name option and paste your project codenames or themed names ('Wolves', 'Ravens', 'Foxes' or 'Apollo', 'Gemini', 'Mercury'). Custom names dramatically increase how memorable a team feels.
Mix departments fairly so every breakout group has a mix of design, engineering, sales, and ops — without picking favourites.
The free version does the job. The optional template pack just makes brackets look beautiful for events, classrooms and clubs.
Free forever for basic use · No signup required
For internal hackathons, retreats, away-days, and quarterly off-sites. Custom team naming lets you align with brand colours, project codenames, or department in-jokes.
Names from your HR roster or invite list.
4 is the sweet spot for hackathons.
Project codenames or department themes.
Drop into Slack or Teams.
Open the 'Custom' name option and paste your project codenames or themed names ('Wolves', 'Ravens', 'Foxes' or 'Apollo', 'Gemini', 'Mercury'). Custom names dramatically increase how memorable a team feels.
Run the generator separately for each department, then merge one entry from each into a master team list. The tool's randomness is per-list, so this manual step is the easiest way to guarantee cross-functional teams.
There's a temptation to think a sport-specific or classroom-specific tool would be 'better' than a generic generator. In practice the opposite is true: the rules of fair team-splitting are the same whether you're dividing a Year 7 PE class or a Sunday-league football squad. What changes between audiences is the framing — the language used in the guide, the typical group size, the kinds of ratings people record. The underlying maths (Fisher–Yates shuffle, snake-draft balancing) is identical. That's why this site uses one generator across many audience-specific pages: the same engine, with copy and presets tuned to the context.
If you'll regenerate teams from the same roster repeatedly — every Tuesday training, every Friday game night — paste the names once, click 'Copy as text', and save the result in a note app or a pinned message. Next session, paste it back. There's no account system to maintain and nothing to forget; the names live wherever you keep your other notes. For coaches managing multiple squads, prefix each name with a one-letter squad tag (e.g. 'A Alex', 'B Sam') and use the filter step to keep only the relevant tag before generating.
Yes — it never leaves the browser. No analytics, no servers.
Use the 1–5 rating with seniority as the proxy: 5 = senior, 1 = junior.
Yes. The generator doesn't ask for personal information, doesn't display ads inside the tool itself, and runs entirely client-side. Many teachers use it weekly. See the trust and safety page for the full position on under-16 use.
Yes — the 'Export CSV' button gives you a two-column file (team, name) that opens cleanly in Excel, Google Sheets, and Numbers. From there you can pivot, filter, or merge with attendance records.
Add their name to the textarea and regenerate. If you want to preserve the existing teams and just slot the latecomer in, use the 'Add to smallest team' shortcut instead of regenerating — it places them on whichever team currently has the fewest members.
Four-team splits are the sweet spot for tournaments — enough variety for a real competition, small enough to fit in one afternoon.
OpenStop one team carrying the whole game. Rate each player 1–5 and we'll split them into teams whose total skill is as even as possible.
OpenRandom pairings for the dreaded 'now go talk to someone you don't know' moment. Make it painless.
OpenHand-picking hackathon teams turns into a popularity contest. Randomise it instead — and use ratings to balance senior engineers across teams.
OpenMatch givers to receivers in seconds. No emails collected, no third-party lists. Re-roll until everyone is happy.
OpenFree forever for basic use. No signup required. The free version really does do the job.
Want prettier prints? See the optional template pack