Choosing the right club management software is crucial for your Toastmasters club's success. Here's an honest, comprehensive comparison between Easy-Speak (the market leader) and Toastmanagers (the modern alternative).
Quick Summary
| Feature | Toastmanagers | Easy-Speak |
|---|---|---|
| Price | FREE | $100-200/year |
| Setup Time | Under 10 minutes | 1-2 hours |
| Mobile Support | Mobile-first | Desktop-first |
| Role Scheduling | Algorithmic + manual | Manual |
| Email Reminders | Locked meetings only | All meetings |
| Meeting Agendas | Branded PDF | HTML printout |
| Pathways Tracking | Yes | Yes |
| Years Active | New (2024) | 15+ years |
Detailed Feature Comparison
Pricing
Easy-Speak: Costs $100–$200 per year depending on club size. Modest on its own, but a recurring line item on volunteer-run budgets.
Toastmanagers: Free, with no premium tier or paid add-ons today.
Best fit: Clubs where the annual subscription is meaningful relative to dues will likely prefer Toastmanagers; clubs that already budget for Easy-Speak comfortably may not see this as a deciding factor.
User Experience
Easy-Speak: A long-running web interface that has remained stable over the years. Returning users find it familiar; newer members sometimes need extra orientation.
Toastmanagers: A more recent build using contemporary web conventions, with real-time updates, dark theme, and animated transitions.
Best fit: Clubs whose officers value continuity may prefer the familiarity of Easy-Speak; clubs onboarding lots of newer members may prefer the more contemporary interface.
Mobile Experience
Easy-Speak: Designed primarily for desktop. The interface works on a phone but isn't optimized for it.
Toastmanagers: Mobile-first design with full feature parity on phones and tablets.
Best fit: Officers who frequently make schedule edits from a phone will likely prefer Toastmanagers; clubs whose officers do all admin from a desktop won't notice the difference.
Scheduling Workflow
Easy-Speak: Officers assign each role manually per meeting. Lifetime balance is tracked by the officer team rather than the software.
Toastmanagers: A balancing algorithm distributes roles across your full historical record, then officers fine-tune as needed.
Best fit: Clubs that want algorithmic suggestions to start from will lean toward Toastmanagers; clubs whose VPE prefers full manual control may find Easy-Speak's workflow more comfortable.
Email Reminders
Easy-Speak: Sends reminders for any scheduled meeting, which gives officers flexibility in when reminders go out.
Toastmanagers: Sends reminders only for meetings the officer team has marked as locked, which reduces noise while a schedule is still being adjusted.
Trade-off: Both philosophies are defensible—the right choice depends on whether your officer team values flexibility (Easy-Speak) or noise control (Toastmanagers) more.
Meeting Agendas
Easy-Speak: Generates HTML printouts that cover the essentials.
Toastmanagers: One-click PDF agendas with branding, custom event structure, and a typeset look ready for sharing or printing.
Best fit: Clubs that share or print agendas widely (especially with guests) may prefer the polished PDF output.
Pathways Tracking
Easy-Speak: Full Pathways integration covering levels, projects, and progress reports.
Toastmanagers: Complete Pathways tracking with level, project, and speech-to-competency linking.
Trade-off: Both platforms offer comparable Pathways coverage; choose based on other factors.
Contest Management
Easy-Speak: Mature contest tooling—ballots, judges, scorecards, and winners.
Toastmanagers: No dedicated contest tooling today; on the roadmap. For the handful of contests most clubs run each year, officers track manually.
Best fit: Clubs that run frequent contests, or that lead area or division contests, will likely prefer Easy-Speak's mature tooling.
Setup Time
Easy-Speak: Roughly 1–2 hours to fully configure a new club, including settings, members, and meeting structure.
Toastmanagers: Most clubs are running in under 10 minutes—sign up, create the club, add members, generate the first schedule.
Best fit: New officer teams or coaches setting up many clubs at once will appreciate the shorter setup time.
Who Should Use Which?
Choose Easy-Speak If:
- You run frequent contests (contest management tools)
- You want battle-tested, established software
- You don't mind paying $150/year
- Desktop-only is fine
- You prefer the interface you're already familiar with
Choose Toastmanagers If:
- You want to save $150/year
- You need mobile access
- You want modern, beautiful design
- You want automated role balancing
- You value quick setup and ease of use
- You want Pathways tracking, speech requests, and role preferences
- You need timezone support and meeting patterns
The Honest Summary
Easy-Speak is a mature, feature-complete product. It has been serving clubs for well over a decade and includes contest management tooling that we have not built yet.
Toastmanagers focuses on the workflows officers reach for in nearly every meeting— scheduling, reminders, agendas, Pathways tracking—at no cost, with some additions like speech requests, role preferences, meeting patterns, and timezone support.
If your club leans on contest tooling, Easy-Speak is the safer choice today. If your priorities are mobile access, automated role balancing, and zero subscription cost, Toastmanagers is likely the better fit.
5-Year Total Cost of Ownership
The price gap looks small annually, but it compounds. Here's what the average club pays over five years once you include the hidden costs of officer time spent on manual scheduling and email chasing.
| Cost Category | Toastmanagers (5 years) | Easy-Speak (5 years) |
|---|---|---|
| Software subscription | $0 | $500–$1,000 |
| Officer hours scheduling (~1.5 hr saved per schedule × 24/yr) | ~10 hours/year | ~46 hours/year |
| Manual reminder emails | Automated | ~30 hours/year |
| Agenda creation | One-click PDF | ~15 hours/year |
| Total officer hours over 5 years | ~50 hours | ~455 hours |
Even if you value officer time at $0/hour, that's still ~80 evenings reclaimed over five years that VPEs and presidents can put back into mentoring members rather than schedule maintenance.
Data Ownership, Privacy & Security
Member emails, attendance records, and Pathways progress are sensitive. Here's how each platform handles them.
Where your data lives
- Easy-Speak: Hosted on legacy infrastructure in the UK. Self-hosted option exists but requires LAMP stack expertise most clubs don't have.
- Toastmanagers: Modern cloud infrastructure with daily encrypted backups, TLS everywhere, and per-club data isolation.
Exporting your data
- Easy-Speak: Manual CSV exports for membership lists. Schedule history is harder to extract.
- Toastmanagers: One-click member export, schedule history download, and an open API roadmap. Your data is yours—leave whenever you want.
Member privacy
- Easy-Speak: Member emails are visible to other members by default.
- Toastmanagers: Member contact info is hidden from peers; only officers see it. Reminder emails go through us, not exposed inboxes.
Accessibility & Internationalization
Toastmasters is a global organization, so software needs to keep up.
- Mobile screen readers: Toastmanagers passes WCAG 2.1 AA contrast and keyboard nav checks. Easy-Speak's interface predates most accessibility standards.
- Time zones: Toastmanagers stores meetings in UTC and renders per-member timezone. Easy-Speak uses the club's stored timezone only—painful for hybrid/remote members.
- Date formats: Toastmanagers respects your locale (DD/MM vs. MM/DD). Easy-Speak uses a fixed UK format.
Migration Path: Switching in a Weekend
If you're moving from Easy-Speak, here's the path most clubs take. Total time: about 90 minutes split between two officers.
- Friday evening (15 min): Export your member roster from Easy-Speak as CSV.
- Friday evening (10 min): Sign up for Toastmanagers, create your club, and paste in the roster.
- Saturday morning (30 min): Define your meeting pattern (weekly Tuesday at 7pm, etc.) and let Toastmanagers generate the next 8 meetings.
- Saturday morning (15 min): Run the role balancer. It assigns roles fairly using your member count—past Easy-Speak history isn't required because the algorithm balances forward.
- Saturday afternoon (10 min): Lock the next two meetings and let automated reminders take over.
- Sunday (10 min): Send members a one-paragraph email pointing to the new schedule URL.
Most clubs run Easy-Speak and Toastmanagers in parallel for one cycle, then sunset Easy-Speak when members confirm they're getting reminders. No data is lost: your members' Pathways progress lives in Base Camp anyway.
Try Both
The most useful thing you can do is try both products with your own officer team for a week or two. Easy-Speak offers a free trial; Toastmanagers is free.
Whatever your team picks, picking it from direct experience is the right way to choose. Both products are built by Toastmasters for Toastmasters, and any club is well served by either.
Try Toastmanagers Free
No credit card. No commitment. Set up in under 10 minutes.
Get Started FreeYour data is always exportable. Switch back to Easy-Speak anytime if Toastmanagers isn't the right fit for your club.
See How Real Clubs Made The Switch
Comparison tables are useful, but the final decision usually comes down to what actually changed for real clubs.
Questions About Switching?
Can I import my Easy-Speak data?
Not yet, but manually re-creating your schedule takes about 15 minutes.
We're working on an import tool.
What if I need a feature you don't have?
Email us at managerstoast@gmail.com.
We build based on user requests.
Is it really free forever?
Yes. Core features (scheduling, emails, agendas) will always be free. We might add
paid premium features later, but you'll never lose what you have now.