Five teams is great for league formats and rotation stations. Paste names, hit generate, share the result.
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
Common in school PE classes (5 stations), retreat workshops (5 breakouts), and small recreational leagues. Five teams plays well with a round-robin format where every team faces every other team once.
Up to 200 names handled comfortably.
Pre-selected on this page.
Run the algorithm a few times until the result feels right.
Five teams in a round robin makes 10 matches in total — each team plays four games. Use this generator for the team split, then assign matches manually or use a round-robin schedule. Round robin is fair when there is no strict knockout deadline.
When we say a split is fair we mean two specific things. First, team sizes differ by at most one — never by two — regardless of how the headcount divides. Second, in skill-balanced mode the total rating per team stays within roughly one rating point of the average. Those are mathematical guarantees of the algorithm, not marketing language. If you want to verify, generate the same input twice with different seeds: the per-team totals will land in the same narrow band each time. Pure-random mode trades that balance for surprise — useful when the ratings are noisy or the activity is recreational. Read the full algorithm description on the methodology page if you want the snake-draft maths.
Three small habits make the output noticeably better. (1) Strip leading numbers and bullets from your list — paste plain names, one per line, so the parser doesn't treat '1. Alex' as a name. (2) If you have ratings, append them after the name with a space, e.g. 'Alex 4'. The generator accepts integers and decimals from 1 to 10. (3) Decide up-front whether absentees should be excluded or kept as ghosts. Excluding gives tighter teams; keeping them lets you swap names back in later without regenerating. The 'Copy as text' button preserves your line order so you can edit and re-paste.
Because your group size is not divisible by 5. The tool spreads leftovers one at a time so no team is starved.
No. The team generator runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript. The names you paste are kept in component memory only and are never transmitted, logged, or persisted unless you explicitly export them. Closing the tab clears the data. See the privacy and methodology pages for the technical detail.
Yes. After generating, click any name to swap it with another, or use drag and drop in the team panel. For one-off groupings (siblings, carpool partners) this is the fastest path. For repeated locks across many regenerations, give the locked group a shared rating that's slightly above average and use balanced mode — they'll cluster together most of the time.
On very small inputs (under ~10 names) there are only a handful of mathematically distinct splits, so repeats are inevitable. The shuffle is cryptographically random — it's just that the space of valid outputs is small. Either add more names or accept the duplicate; either is fine.
Three-way splits made painless. Paste names, pick three teams, and we distribute everyone evenly with one click.
OpenSix teams suits bigger events: classrooms of 30, summer camp groups, esports leagues, conference workshops.
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.
OpenRound-robin guarantees every team plays every other — but it eats time. For one-afternoon events, a bracket is usually the better call.
OpenMix departments fairly so every breakout group has a mix of design, engineering, sales, and ops — without picking favourites.
OpenFree forever for basic use. No signup required. The free version really does do the job.
Want prettier prints? See the optional template pack
