Battlehorns vs Guildtag vs Shivtr vs Guildwork

Four names show up when a guild searches for a free site: Battlehorns, Guildtag, Shivtr, and Guildwork. They are not the same product, and treating them as one price table misleads people. This piece compares the model of each — hosting with your own files, or a closed builder — against what their public pages say about ads, domains, and control. Prices and feature lists change. Check the source on the day you choose.

Battlehorns is hosting for gaming communities (guilds, clans, esports), not the metal band. It is not a guild page builder. The model difference, without the other names, is in hosting versus builders.

Criteria that matter

• Where the site lives. In your files, which you can take with you, or in the platform's database.
• Ads. Is there a banner on the free plan, or not.
• Your own domain. Included, paid, or possible with DNS you configure.
• Code. PHP and a database of your choosing, or widgets inside the product.
• Guild tools. Forum, roster, calendar, and loot already built, or you build them or put them in another app.
• What happens if you stop. The site is deleted for inactivity, stuck, or you still have the files.

None of the four wins all six. A guild that needs a forum tonight and a guild that needs a PHP form are buying different things.

Price and ads, without theatre

Battlehorns. The reference free plan does not place an ad network on top of the HTML you upload by FTP. It includes a subdomain, PHP, one MariaDB database, one FTP user, Let's Encrypt, 700 MB, and 5 GB of monthly traffic, with ticket support. Your own domain and more quota are the paid step on shared hosting. Exact numbers are on the plans page and in free hosting. The terms allow the free plan to be changed or removed. A forum is not included.

Guildtag. A builder for guilds, clans, and esports. The brand itself describes the free plan as ad-free, funded by supporters, with the site inside their platform. On the pricing page, your own domain, custom CSS and JavaScript, and an HTML widget sit on the paid plan. Their domain certificate covers sites on the platform; a custom domain on the paid plan gets Let's Encrypt. It is not a public_html where you install whatever you want.

Shivtr. Also a guild site builder, with themes, multiple games, and community tools. The terms reserve Shivtr's right to show advertisements unless you buy ad removal or a premium plan. The plans page shows a tier with ads and paid tiers without them (the first paid tier listed on that page, at the time of writing, starts at 7.99 US dollars a month). You can use their subdomain or your own domain, pointed by DNS, and request the custom-domain certificate from support. The terms also say footer credits cannot be removed, even with upgrades, and that a free site with no member logins for more than a year can be deleted after a warning. Read that before you store years of posts there.

Guildwork. The public homepage again presents itself as free guild hosting, with forums, a calendar, recruitment, profiles, chat, albums, a wiki, and a raid log (attendance, loot, DKP-style systems). There is strong game-client integration, especially around Final Fantasy XI and XIV. It is a product with a long history and a long stretch, acknowledged by its own community, when little or nothing was updated. In 2026 the site showed signs of life again, including Discord login. That does not erase the years the tool was unstable. It is not FTP hosting. It is their platform, and continuity depends on them.

How flexible the code is

If you want to store an application in your own table, with the fields the guild invented, Battlehorns allows it: PHP and MariaDB on the free plan, as in the tutorial. The price of that freedom is that a forum does not appear by itself.

Guildtag lets you customize seriously — loose HTML, global CSS — on the paid plan, inside widgets. On the free plan you stay inside what the builder offers. Shivtr offers themes, a visual tweaker, and CSS; the site is still Shivtr, with their ad and footer rules. Guildwork offers their pages and widgets, not a server where you drop an arbitrary script.

Taking the site with you also differs. On Battlehorns you take files and a dump. On builders you take whatever the platform lets you export, which is often not "the whole site opening on another host tomorrow". If your guild has already been burned by a service that closed, this criterion outweighs a pretty theme.

Native tools

This is where builders win on purpose. A forum, applications, a calendar, and a guild look are the product. Shivtr and Guildtag are built for that. Guildwork adds the game trail and the raid log, useful if your community really is an MMO guild and accepts living inside that platform.

Battlehorns does not compete on that shelf. The public site is something you write. Members, events, loot, and resources, for people who want that panel off Discord, live in GuildOps, described in guild management in one app. It is not a Guildwork clone: it does not promise a game-client plugin or DKP. It promises the internal record next to the hosting.

Recruitment on the site — the page an applicant sees before they have an account anywhere — is still content work, whichever platform you pick. The design is in recruitment and the member panel.

Who each one is for

• Guildtag if you want a guild site with no ads on the free plan, plus a forum, and you accept that your own domain and free-form HTML are the paid plan.
• Shivtr if you want themes and modules already built and you accept ads on the free plan, or paying to remove them, and you have read the inactivity and footer rules.
• Guildwork if game integration and the raid kit matter more than owning the files, and the guild can live with the risk of a platform that has already gone quiet for years.
• Battlehorns if you want PHP, a database, FTP, and no ad bar on your files, and someone is willing to maintain pages. The technical map is in the web hosting guide.

You can mix them with judgment: GuildOps for operations and a builder for the public site, if nobody will open FTP. Or hosting for the site and Discord for chat, with GuildOps in between. The mistake is paying twice for the same job, or choosing hosting and leaving it empty.

When to choose Battlehorns

Choose Battlehorns when the true sentence is "we want the HTML and the database with us". Not when the sentence is "we want the forum and the theme before dinner and nobody will write a page". In that second case Guildtag or Shivtr do the job better, and saying so does not weaken the hosting.

If the first sentence is yours, the step is register and the plan on shared hosting. Keep a copy of what you publish. On any of these platforms, content that exists only inside the service stops being yours the day the service decides otherwise.

In this series: free guild hosting, hosting or a builder, the hosting guide, GuildOps, the setup tutorial, the platform comparison, and recruitment that converts.