An honest look at what each tool is actually built for, so you can pick based on what your team needs rather than just what's already popular.
If you've been in competitive policy debate for any length of time, you've probably used or at least heard of Verbatim — the free, open-source tool built by and for the policy community. It's a genuinely established piece of the circuit's infrastructure. This isn't a takedown of it; it's an honest look at what it's built for compared to what RoundFlow is built for, since the two tools solve different problems more than they compete head-on.
Verbatim's core strength is case files and speech documents — cutting cards, organizing evidence, and managing the documents a policy team produces and trades throughout a season. It's desktop software, free and open-source, and it has years of adoption behind it in the policy community specifically. If your team's biggest daily need is evidence management, Verbatim is a proven, established option, and there's no real reason to abandon a workflow that's already working for that purpose.
RoundFlow doesn't try to manage your case files at all. It's built specifically for the live flow — the notes you're taking during the round itself, across any format, not just policy. Concretely, that means: the correct speech-column layout for five formats (Public Forum, Policy, Lincoln-Douglas, Parli, and World Schools) built automatically when you pick one; color-coded sides; individual argument cards you can link to whatever they're responding to instead of a plain text grid; a shared Preflow page across every round of a tournament; a citation field on any card's evidence link; and live, real-time co-flowing between debate partners on the same round. It runs in the browser with no install, and a paid tier adds a fully offline, downloadable version of a flow for tournaments that don't allow internet access during a round.
If your team's main pain point is organizing and cutting evidence across a season, that's Verbatim's core use case, and it has a real head start there. If your main pain point is the flow itself — keeping a legible, well-linked record of the round as it happens, in a format that isn't policy-only — that's what RoundFlow was built around from the start. Public Forum, Lincoln-Douglas, Parli, and World Schools debaters in particular tend to find fewer tools built specifically for their format's structure; RoundFlow treats all five as first-class, not just policy.
These aren't mutually exclusive tools solving the same problem. A policy team could reasonably keep using Verbatim for case files and evidence while flowing live rounds in RoundFlow — the two don't overlap in what they're actually doing, and there's no lock-in on either side that would stop a team from using both.
Free, no account needed — try it against a real round and see for yourself.