The best Master Tour alternative for bands running their own business

If you've looked at tour management software, you've run into Master Tour. It's the tool a lot of professional tour managers swear by, and for good reason — it's been road-tested on more than 150,000 tours and it's genuinely deep at the thing it does: moving a touring party through a day. But "the tool your tour manager uses" and "the tool your band needs" aren't always the same thing. If you're a band running your own business — booking the shows, settling them, tracking whether the run actually made money — Master Tour leaves a lot of that to you. Here's an honest look at where it shines, where it doesn't, and a band-first alternative.

What Master Tour is genuinely great at

Give it credit: for tour-day logistics, Master Tour is a serious tool.

• Day sheets and schedules — minute-by-minute itineraries, load-in to curfew, pushed to everyone.
• Crew coordination — assign roles and tasks across a large touring party, with a built-in contact database of industry professionals.
• Travel and logistics — accommodations, transport, and venue details, all centralized.
• Real-time collaboration — the whole crew editing the same day, live.

If you're a production tour manager running a big operation with a road crew, this is purpose-built for you, and it's good.

Where it leaves a band wanting

The catch is who it's built for and what it costs.

• It's priced for professionals. Master Tour's Professional plan starts at $59.99/month (mobile-only viewing accounts are free). For a working band, ~$60 a month for logistics is a real line item.
• It's a logistics tool, not a business. Master Tour runs the day. It doesn't run your money — the guarantee vs the settled net, the deductions, splitting take-home fairly between members, or whether the whole tour cleared a profit. That's the part bands most need help with, and it lives in a different app (or a spreadsheet).
• No merch, no releases. Your merch inventory and per-head sales, your release rollout and royalties — all outside its scope.

So a band using Master Tour still ends up running the actual business somewhere else.

Where ArtistHQ fits

ArtistHQ is built for the band, not just the road crew — and it connects the day-of logistics to the business behind it. You still get the show workflow (advancing, day sheets, itineraries, crew), but every show also carries its deal and settlement, so the fee minus the venue cut, agent, and costs resolves to a real take-home. That flows straight into Money, splits fairly between members, and rolls up into a per-tour P&L so you can see what the run actually cleared. Merch inventory and point-of-sale, release milestones and royalties, contacts, gear, and tasks live in the same place. And the pricing is transparent: free to start, then $19 or $39/month — a fraction of a single Master Tour seat.

None of this makes Master Tour a bad tool — if you're a production TM who lives in day sheets and needs the deepest tour-day tooling, it earns its price. But if you're a band that wants one place for the shows and the money and the merch, without a $60/month starting point, that's the gap ArtistHQ was built for. (New to settlements? Our guide to reading a settlement sheet is a good start.)

The short version

Master Tour is the pro standard for tour-day logistics, built for tour managers and priced like it ($59.99/mo to start). If you're a band that needs to run the whole business — settlements, member splits, tour profit, merch, releases — in one place, and start for free, ArtistHQ is the band-first alternative.

Run your whole tour business in one place — start free with ArtistHQ. No card required.