GooseChase vs Actionbound vs Hide & Sleuth: Scavenger Hunt Apps Compared (2026)
GooseChase and Actionbound are mission and quiz platforms: you write the challenges ahead of time, and teams complete them for points. Hide & Sleuth is a different kind of game — a live people-hunt. A handful of volunteers, the suspects, disguise themselves and hide in plain sight around a mall, a campus or a neighborhood, and teams of sleuths go find them. That difference is why the price looks so different, too: the platforms sell a tool for writing and running your own content, billed by subscription or by event, while here one Hunt Pass covers one night because the suspects are the content. This page is for a youth pastor or coordinator who has an evening booked and needs to pick the right tool before the group shows up — what each one actually costs today, what you get for it, and which kind of night each is built for.
Price
GooseChase is free to try: the free tier allows up to three people per Experience, one Experience running at a time, for up to twenty-four hours, as listed on their pricing page on September 12, 2026. Its lowest paid tier is a single-event upgrade priced at $99, one time, for one Experience with up to ten people, as listed on their pricing page on September 12, 2026. GooseChase also sells ongoing subscriptions for running unlimited Experiences at once, with separate pricing for educators and non-profits — pricing not listed publicly on September 12, 2026.
Actionbound is free for personal, non-commercial use, as listed on their pricing page on September 12, 2026. Its EDU plan, for campuses and museums, and its PRO plan, for company events, are shown only as “Discounted Pricing” and “Plans for Pros” with no figure attached — pricing not listed publicly on September 12, 2026 — and both direct you to contact their sales team for a quote.
Hide & Sleuth is free to build: the group, the suspects, the boundary map and the print kit cost nothing. Pressing Start needs one Hunt Pass, sized to the group, from $19 for up to 30 sleuths to $79 for up to 200. Nobody else pays anything, and one pass covers the whole night. See pricing for the full ladder.
What the hunt actually is
On GooseChase you write Missions ahead of time — photo, video or text tasks people complete around a location from their own phones — and the app scores submissions for points as they arrive. A single event upgrade is built around one specific Experience; a subscription is for running many Experiences, or one longer than thirty days, at once.
Actionbound calls its hunts Bounds: GPS-triggered stops mixed with quizzes, audio, video and short tasks. Its own site describes the same format as a treasure hunt app, a tablet tour and an Amazing-Race-style game depending on how you build it — a campus tour, a museum guide and a team competition all come out of the same authoring tool, the Bound Factory.
Hide & Sleuth has no Missions and no Bounds to write. The suspects are the content: they disguise themselves and hide, and a find is a selfie together plus the suspect’s pass phrase, not a submitted answer — see how a hunt plays for the full sequence. Scores update live on a shared board as finds land, and after the reveal a gallery and slideshow replay every selfie. If what you actually want is teams answering questions about your campus, GooseChase and Actionbound do that and Hide & Sleuth does not — there are no missions, quizzes, photo-challenge lists or multi-day programs here, and no reporting dashboard beyond the live board and the gallery.
Setup time and group size
Both platforms ask for an evening of writing before the group ever shows up — enough Missions or Bound stops to fill the run time, tried once so nothing breaks live. Hide & Sleuth skips that step: recruit five to eight suspects, draw the boundary on the map, open the lobby, and the hunt is ready to start in about twenty minutes. The boundary is informational rather than a fence — it shows every sleuth the same line on their own screen, but nothing locks anyone out for crossing it. Once the hunt is running, an organizer can post a bulletin to every screen at once or adjust a score by hand; there is nothing to configure ahead of time beyond the boundary itself.
Sleuths join Hide & Sleuth in a browser with a join code and a first name; no account is needed to play, though the free iOS app is optional and adds push notifications and a native camera step. GooseChase’s free tier caps an Experience at three people; its $99 single-event plan raises that to ten, as listed on their pricing page on September 12, 2026. Actionbound licenses by Bound rather than by headcount, and its pricing page does not publish a group-size ceiling for any plan. A single Hide & Sleuth hunt scales up to 200 sleuths on the Large pass.
Who should pick which
None of the three is the wrong answer in general — the mismatch shows up when the format doesn’t fit the night:
- A multi-day orientation program with tasks spread across a week — GooseChase or Actionbound.
- Quiz-heavy content or a guided museum trail — Actionbound.
- Corporate onboarding that needs a reporting dashboard afterward — GooseChase.
- One night with a youth group in a mall — Hide & Sleuth.
- A college game night that needs no advance prep — Hide & Sleuth.
- A mixed program — a platform for the week, and a people-hunt for the closing night.
Questions
Which scavenger hunt app is cheapest for one event?
For a single evening, a per-event pass is cheaper than an annual plan. Check each pricing page for the current numbers; they change.
Can I use Hide & Sleuth for a photo mission hunt?
Not really. It is a people-finding game: suspects hide in disguise and teams find them. For mission lists and quizzes, GooseChase or Actionbound fit better.