A club or a group: which of the two you actually want
Both are free at any size and both run tournaments, leagues and ladders. The difference is authority and memory: a group has one administrator and belongs to that person, while a club has a committee, an owner it cannot lose, a register of members and one ranking per sport across everything it owns.
Both free, both run events. The difference is authority and memory.
What a group is
A group is a set of people who play together, with one administrator. It can hold tournaments, leagues, ladders and competitions, it can have as many members as you like, it costs nothing, and it is the right answer for most of the racket sport being played in the world: a Tuesday evening, a work team, twelve friends with a ladder.
What a group does not have is a register that means anything beyond itself, a second person with authority over it, or a way of surviving its administrator. Nothing is lost if a group is the right size for you: a group of eighty is as free as a group of four.
What a club adds
A register of members, with membership types you name yourself because every club does it differently. A committee of as many administrators as you like. One owner who cannot leave and cannot be removed. Its own identity: a logo, a cover photograph and one of four colour themes. And a public page it may publish or keep to itself.
And one ranking per sport across everything the club owns. That is the feature committees notice first: a member who plays in the Tuesday group, the winter league and the summer ladder appears in the club’s ranking for that sport once, with all of their results in it, rather than three times in three places.
A club owns groups, and that is how the authority travels
A club does not replace groups. It owns them. The Tuesday group, the youth group and the veterans’ group are still groups, with their own members and their own events, and the club sits above all three. Everybody on the committee administers all of them without being added to each one by hand.
An existing group can be handed over to a club rather than rebuilt inside it, and a group, a club or a competition can be handed to a new person when the committee changes. Nothing moves until the person receiving it accepts, so a handover cannot leave anything ownerless halfway through.
Pick a group unless one of these is true
Make a club when more than one person needs to administer everything, when the register has to mean something outside one event, when there is more than one sport under one name, or when whoever runs it will not be the person running it in three years.
Otherwise a group is not a lesser thing: it is the same tournaments, the same draws, the same ladders and the same ratings with less to administer. And if you get it wrong, the group can be handed over to a club later without anybody re-entering a result.
Where to read next
More on the subjects you have just read about.
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Free for players. Clubs get a register, a park map, court bookings and lessons.