The Best Daily Fantasy Sports Sites

Daily Fantasy Sports are growing in popularity every single year. Whether you like pick’em contests or daily drafts, DFS is a great way to get in on the action and win real money while watching your favorite sports and the teams you care about the most.

But not all DFS sites are created equal. Some stand out far above the rest when it comes to user experience, range of offerings, amount of pick’em possibilities and much more. So how do you sift through the muck to find your piece of gold?

This page will help you compare and contrast various DFS apps to make the choice (or choices) that is right for you. Our DFS experts have spent thousands of hours playing pick’em contests, setting lineups, drafting best ball teams and more to ensure we know what we’re talking about when we dole out grades and give recommendations.

Let’s take a look at 4 of our favorite DFS sites:

Underdog Fantasy

When you think DFS, you think Underdog. This is an elite DFS site and is only getting better with time. Pick’em contests? They have hundreds on a daily basis, ranging from big-time sports like the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, college football and college basketball to more niche sports (at least here in the United States) like the CFL, KBO, NPB, Esports and more!

If drafts are more of your thing, you can do daily drafts involving NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and PGA action. Season-long best-ball tournaments are also available on the Underdog Fantasy site.

I personally am a big fan of NFL, NBA and MLB daily drafts. Even though I already love watching games in all those sports, it makes it even more exciting when I have an Underdog team to root for. Normally I wouldn’t be so invested in a midweek game between the Detroit Pistons and Charlotte Hornets, but when I have LaMelo Ball and Cade Cunningham on the team I drafted, I’m tuned in and watching every possession!

Overall Grade: A

Sleeper Fantasy

Sleeper is well-known in fantasy football circles for its season-long leagues. It’s one of the best sites out there for fantasy football enthusiasts, and it has also quickly become one of the top DFS sites, as well.

While it doesn’t have the daily draft options of a site like Underdog, Sleeper does do a lot around the NFL season (hey, football is their forte, after all). And Sleeper’s pick’em options are elite. Dynamic multipliers make it so players can manipulate their contest multiplier to be whatever they want it to be. Do you play it safe with a 4-5x multiplier or go big with a 10x or higher multiplier? That’s the question you have to ask yourself when making picks on Sleeper!

Personally, I really enjoy Sleeper because I’m able to have both my season-long fantasy team (which is doing really well, thank you very much) and my picks contests all on the same site. That makes for a fun, user-friendly Sunday experience. I’ve got multiple TVs tuned in to the best NFL games and I only need 1 site pulled up on my computer to monitor my fantasy league and my DFS picks.

Check out this Sleeper Fantasy Promo Code today to get started on one of our favorite DFS sites.

Overall Grade: A-

PrizePicks

PrizePicks is an OG when it comes to DFS contests. Founded in 2015, it has been a leader in the DFS space ever since. Frequent promotions? PrizePicks has them. Picks contests for everything you can imagine? Well, it’s not called “PrizePicks” for nothing.

PrizePicks lays things out very simply. Pick a sport, pick a game, pick a stat and then pick a player. There are numerous stat options and plenty of players to choose from.

One downside for players with smaller bankrolls? PrizePicks has a minimum contest entry fee of $5. At Underdog, Sleeper and most of the other DFS sites out there, the minimum entry fee is $1. But if $5 entry fees aren’t a hindrance for you, PrizePicks is a great option.

Overall Grade: A-

Vivid Picks

This one took a little while for me to get used to, but once I really dove into the site, I grew to love it. In my personal opinion, Vivid Picks leans a little too heavily into the eSports picks contests. But I’m not a gamer, so take my thoughts on that with a grain of salt.

If you are a gamer, this is definitely the DFS site for you. And there are plenty of more traditional sports available for picks, too! NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, college hoops, college football – there are contests for fans of everything.

Vivid Picks is interesting because if you, let’s say, enter a contest with 4 picks and only get 3 right, you’ll earn Vivid Bucks that you can apply toward future contests. Vivid Bucks contests have smaller multipliers, but it’s still a great way to maximize every cent of your first deposit.

Overall Grade: B

Types of DFS Contests

We’ll divide this section up into 3 parts – tournaments, cash games and pick’em contests. These types of contests involve different strategies, so it’s important to know what kind of contest you’re entering when you log in to your favorite DFS site.

Let’s start with tournaments:

DFS Tournaments

Guaranteed Prize Pools (GPPs)

These are some of the biggest tournaments you’ll find, especially on Underdog and DraftKings. The prize pool is fully guaranteed, so even if the maximum number of entries isn’t hit, the prize money remains the same.

GPPs can be single-entry contests or contests where you can enter hundreds of different lineups. The multi-entry tournaments with the biggest prize pools can often draw “sharks,” aka some of the top DFS players in the country. Sharks have the biggest bankrolls and use all the tools at their disposal to optimize the hundreds of lineups they enter.

My favorite tournaments to enter are single-entry events. Yes, the prize pool is often smaller in these contests, but there’s a more even playing field for everyone who enters.

Small-Field Tournaments

On Underdog and DraftKings, there are also plenty of options to play against a smaller group of people rather than in GPPs with hundreds or thousands of players. Want to play in a tournament of 8 people? That’s a possibility. Want a field of a couple dozen players? Also doable. These tournaments aren’t guaranteed, so you’ll receive a refund of your entry fee if your tournament field doesn’t fill prior to the start of the slate of games.

Best-Ball Contests

Best-ball contests are something Underdog specializes in, specifically around football season. This is the DFS take on a season-long fantasy football league, but there are some very important differences.

In a best-ball NFL league on Underdog, you draft a team of 18 players and … that’s it! You don’t have to set your lineup every single week like you would for a traditional league. The DFS site will automatically put your top-scoring players into your lineup each week, making second-guessing your start/sit decisions a thing of the past.

Best Ball Mania IV was Underdog’s biggest best-ball NFL tournament ever this year. The prize pool was a whopping $15 million, with first place set to take home $3 million. You can bet Best Ball Mania V next year is going to be even bigger and better. Is a $25 million prize pool in play? We’ll find out soon enough!

DFS Cash Games

Head-to-Head

This is exactly what it sounds like – 1-on-1 DFS competition. You draft a team or put together a lineup, choose what entry fee you want to play for (I prefer $5 contests) and go head to head with 1 other DFS player for all the marbles. In a $5 draft or lineup competition, the winner will usually get $9 (with the DFS site taking a $1 rake).

These contests are great for beginners, as they’re very straightforward and don’t have a ton of players in them. It’s just you against one other person with a chance to win the entire pool of money.

50/50s and Double-Ups

These are also great contests for beginners. Basically, in 50/50s and double-ups, you draft your team or set your lineup and the top half of the field doubles its money. If you’re in a 1,100-person 50/50 with a $5 entry fee, the top 500 finishers will each win $10. That’s not exactly 50% of the field winning, but you have to remember that the DFS site will take a rake, usually around 10% of the total entry fees.

Multipliers

These contests are very interesting. I’ve had a bit of success playing them, and it’s worth it if your team has a big week. In a $5 multiplier contest, there might be 50 players, with the top 5 finishers all winning $50 and the bottom 45 finishers all finishing with $0.

DFS Pick’em Contests

These are simple. Pick a player, pick a stat and choose higher or lower for that particular stat. For example, if Atlanta Hawks star Trae Young is projected at 24.5 points for a game against the Indiana Pacers and you think he’s good for a big night, you’d pick the “higher” option.

To make a DFS pick’em contest legitimate, you must make at least 2 picks and those players involved must be on at least 2 separate teams. You can, of course, pick more than 2 players from more than 2 teams for a contest, if you so choose.

This is where multipliers come in. While Sleeper uses a dynamic multiplier system, meaning each pick has its own value, Underdog has a more set multiplier setup:

Some DFS sites have multipliers that go all the way up to 100x, but 20x is pretty standard. These contests help make every game more exciting. Following your players, hoping for that key catch, the clutch hit, a big-time rebound – nothing is better than that!

DFS Tournament Strategies

1. Stacking

Stacking is a strategy where you target players who will feed off of each other throughout the course of a game. For example, if you want Miami QB Tua Tagovailoa in your lineup, you should also target star WR Tyreek Hill. It stands to reason that if Tagovailoa has a big performance, Hill will have big numbers, too.

The most common game stacks involve a quarterback and a wide receiver or tight end. Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs don’t just make great State Farm commercials together – they’re also an elite stack to play in DFS tournaments.

The examples mentioned above are both single stacks – a QB and his top pass catcher. But you can also “double stack” games. If you like San Francisco QB Brock Purdy and think the 49ers will have a huge offensive output in a game, you could double-stack Purdy with Brandon Aiyuk and George Kittle, for example.

2. Correlation

Even if you’re not stacking a particular game, you can still get value from it by correlating a couple of players. For example, let’s say the Dallas Cowboys are playing the Las Vegas Raiders. You think the Cowboys will win big, so you don’t want to stack Dak Prescott with CeeDee Lamb because it’s possible Dallas will be running the clock out for much of the game.

You can still get DFS tournament value from that game. If you predict the above game script will happen, then it might make sense to get Dallas RB Tony Pollard on your team since you think he’ll be getting a lot of work. If Dallas is up big, that means Las Vegas would have to throw a lot. Thus, correlating Pollard with Raiders WR Davante Adams would be a great play.

Many of the lineups that end up winning the most cash in the biggest tournaments not only have a game stack – they also have correlated players elsewhere in their lineups.

DFS Cash Strategies

1. Target high-volume players

While a guy like Arizona WR Marquise “Hollywood” Brown might not be a great play in tournaments because his ceiling is limited, he’s a solid option in cash games because he gets targeted more than 8 times per game, on average. On DFS sites where you get a full point-per-receptions (PPR), that volume of work is what we’re looking for.

No, he’s not likely to put up an elite amount of points on any given week, but the fact that he’s a steady performer is exactly what makes him a viable play in cash games.

2. Find value in players with lower roster percentages

You have to get different with your lineups in DFS contests – both tournaments and cash games – to maximize your chances at winning money. If 1 player has a projection of 15 fantasy points and another player has a projection of 14.5 fantasy points, but the second player will only be rostered in 3% of contests, it’s potentially worth drafting player 2.

That gives your lineup variance from the “chalk” plays every week. In order to maximize your chances of winning, lineup differentiation is important.