Same raid night. A verified roster underneath it.
GoodBot takes signups by class and spec under the player's actual in-game character name, runs your soft reserves, and exports the roster to a sheet. That is close to this. Closer than any general scheduler gets. Hootus starts one step earlier, at the Blizzard armory, and keeps going long after the raid ends.
GoodBot is not a generic scheduler, and pretending otherwise would be cheap.
Most comparison pages get to line up against a game-agnostic calendar. Not this one. GoodBot was built for WoW Classic, it shows signups by class and spec under the player’s real character name, it links alts to mains, it runs soft reserves in the bot, and it exports the roster to a spreadsheet your officers already know how to read. Its own site calls it free, open source and widely used. All of that checks out.
So this is not a page about GoodBot doing raid night badly. It does raid night. The argument is about either side of raid night: who the character on that signup actually is, whether the roster behind it is still true a week later, and where recruitment, access and loot end up living once the raid post is gone.
A good chunk of this page is agreement.
Both bots know a Druid from a Mage. Both work from the name your character actually has. Both were built for Classic rather than adapted to it, and both cost nothing to add. If the part you already like is the signup post, swapping one for the other is not an upgrade.
Worth saying plainly, because the usual move on a page like this is to flatten the competitor into a straw man and hope nobody has used it. Plenty of Classic guilds have.
- Class and spec on the signup. Not a generic RSVP with a tank emoji bolted on the side
- Real in-game character names. The name on the armory, not a Discord nickname with the class in brackets
- Alts linked to a main. One raider, several characters, one history behind them
- Locking a raid once the roster is set. Signups close, the list stops moving, the raid leads stop refreshing
- Free to add today. Neither of us is charging you to post Karazhan on a Tuesday
Signups are the easy half. The roster underneath them is the hard half.
Five things that begin where the signup post ends. Each one ships today, none of it is a promise.
- Identity
The character gets checked, not just typed
A name in a signup is a name in a signup. Hootus looks the character up on the Blizzard armory, confirms it is really in your guild, and checks the race against what Blizzard returns, so a borrowed name does not walk in wearing someone else’s reputation. Three strictness modes, from roster-only to officer trust, so a guild that wants the door left open can have it. Connected realms are handled too, which matters when Mirage Raceway is five realms sharing one name and a bot that guesses the realm comes back with nothing for a large slice of your roster.
- Roster
The roster keeps itself honest
Every hour Hootus pulls the guild roster from Blizzard: new members, alts, respecs, and the ones who quietly gquit on Tuesday. Nobody has to remember to update anything, which is the only reason roster data ever stays true for longer than a week. The web roster and every signup list read the same synced copy.
- Roles
Class roles are derived, not declared
Nobody picks their Discord class role off a menu here. Hootus reads the class from the verified character and reconciles the roles to match, so the colour next to a name is a fact rather than a preference. Server transfer, new main, changed mind: the roles follow without an officer touching anything.
- After the pull
Attendance and loot land on the same record
Attendance comes from who was actually sitting in the raid voice channel, so nobody reads out a roll call. Loot logs import from Gargul, and the analytics put items won next to raids attended, main spec split from off spec, with the name of whoever is overdue. Soft reserves themselves stay on softres.it: paste the link on the raid and Hootus carries it onto the signup post, into the reminder nudge, and into the DM that lands when the raid locks.
- Off raid night
The guild is bigger than Tuesday
A public apply page with a Blizzard character lookup, an officer review queue behind it, and an approve-and-slot action that drops a recruit into the next raid. PUG access that is scoped to the raid they were pulled in for and expires on its own, never by kicking anyone, because a PUG who lingers is a recruit nobody has asked yet. LFG for the runs that are not raids, scoped invite links so a raid can be advertised in trade chat without opening the whole Discord, and a public guild page for the people who have not found you yet.
None of that replaces a signup post. It sits behind one, which is why running both for a tier is a perfectly sensible way to try this.
All of it, in detailA signup says who intends to show up. A verified roster says who can.
- Verification modes, strict to trusting
- 3Verification modes, strict to trusting
- Between roster syncs from Blizzard
- 1hBetween roster syncs from Blizzard
- Class roles anyone picks by hand
- 0Class roles anyone picks by hand
Four times GoodBot is the right call.
Switching cost is real and so is fit. These are not softeners. They are places where GoodBot does something Hootus does not do as well, or does not do at all.
You can also just run both while you make up your mind. Let GoodBot keep posting the raid and running reserves, and let Hootus handle verification, the roster, attendance and recruitment alongside it. Same raid night, much smaller decision.
- Reserves belong inside the bot for you. GoodBot runs soft reserves itself, with a reserve list your raid leads can pull up in Discord. Hootus carries your softres.it link to where people trip over it, and the built-in list is an untested beta, not something to plan a tier around.
- Your officers think in a spreadsheet. GoodBot exports the raid roster straight to Google Sheets, laid out for assignments. If that sheet is where your raid leads actually do the thinking, that is a real workflow and not a workaround to be argued out of.
- You raid across two Discord servers. GoodBot can cross-post a raid to a second server and keep one shared signup list, which is exactly the shape of an alliance run between two guilds.
- You want to read the source. GoodBot is open on GitHub and free, and a guild that would rather host its own copy can go and do that. Hootus is one hosted bot run by one person, which is a different kind of trust to extend.
Keep the signups. Add the roster behind them.
Armory-verified characters, a roster that resyncs every hour, class roles read off the character instead of a menu, attendance from raid voice, Gargul loot logs with items won next to raids attended, and recruitment that outlives the officer who set it up. Add Hootus, walk the wizard, keep whatever already works.