The best NIL platforms for brands in 2026 are MarketPryce, Postgame, 98Strong, NIL Club, Opendorse, MOGL and Teamworks Influencer (formerly INFLCR). We sent a survey to thousands of college athletes, and among athletes who'd used both, MarketPryce came out ahead of every other platform on deal flow, payment speed and ease of working together. The two places it lost: Postgame beat MarketPryce on best brands, and 98Strong beat it on pay.
Last updated November 10, 2026
An NIL platform connects your brand with college athletes who get paid to promote you, then handles some or all of the work in between: finding athletes, contracts, payments, content and reporting. Since the NCAA started allowing name, image and likeness deals in 2021, dozens of companies have popped up to do this.
They don't all do the same job, though. Most fall into one of three groups:
Knowing which group you need gets you most of the way to the right answer.
We sent a survey to thousands of college athletes and asked them to rate the platforms they've actually worked with. Here's what they said.
First, platforms matter. Two out of three athletes said most of their NIL deals come from NIL platforms, compared with 16% who mostly pitch brands themselves and 9% who mostly get deals through their school or collective. Most are experienced, too: 63% have finished four or more platform deals.
To keep the comparison fair, we only counted athletes who had used both platforms in each matchup. Here's how MarketPryce stacked up:
Percentages don't add up to 100 because some athletes picked a third platform.
When we asked which platform they'd recommend to a teammate and why, the same themes kept coming up: who does the work, how clear the deal is, and how fast the money shows up.
We also asked what they'd change about NIL platforms. The biggest requests were better brand fit, fair pay for the work involved and clearer briefs:
That's useful for brands. Athletes do their best work on campaigns that fit their lives, pay fairly and tell them exactly what you want. The platform you pick shapes all three.
Here's a quick look, based on what each company says on its own website as of November 2026.
If nobody on your team has time to recruit and manage athletes, look at the managed platforms.
We built MarketPryce for brands that want athlete content and results without recruiting or managing hundreds of athletes themselves. You tell us the goal and the customer you want to reach. We match you with athletes from our network of 6,000+ vetted college athletes, you approve the shortlist, and we handle opt-ins, shipping, content coaching, deadlines and payouts.
Athletes get paid after they post, so you aren't paying for content that never shows up. Typically 70 to 80% of athletes who opt in end up posting. Every video lands in a shared content library, ready to run as paid ads. A few results:
McKinley Stephens, head of marketing at PHX, put it this way: "If you're a brand and you need content at volume, at scale, you'll be hard pressed to find another way outside of maybe a TikTok affiliate program where you can get as much content as cost effectively as working with NIL athletes, specifically through MarketPryce."
The tradeoff: our network is smaller than the big marketplaces because every athlete is vetted, and we're built for brand campaigns, not autograph signings or appearances.
Postgame is a full-service NIL agency that says its network includes 75,000+ college athletes with 200M+ combined followers. It runs everything from quick-turn UGC campaigns with thousands of athletes to premium productions with well-known stars, plus events and retail activations. In our survey, athletes who'd used both Postgame and MarketPryce gave Postgame the edge on brands. It's a strong fit for national brands with bigger budgets that want name-brand athletes.
98Strong runs managed, white-glove campaigns across a verified national network of student athletes. It leans into awareness and retail launches, using athletes' local audiences to drive foot traffic in college markets, and works with brands like OLIPOP and C4. In our survey, athletes who'd used both 98Strong and MarketPryce gave 98Strong the edge on pay. It's a good match for beverage and CPG brands launching in new stores.
If you have a marketing team with time to browse athletes, send offers and track posts, a self-serve marketplace gives you the most control.
NIL Club says it reaches 650,000+ verified college athletes with 1.7B+ combined followers. It offers several partnership models: marketing to athletes as customers (you pay on verified conversions), athletes sharing your product with fans for a commission, product reviews and UGC, and matched campaigns built around impressions. Athletes in our survey called out its direct payouts. It's a strong fit when your goal is app downloads or sign-ups from college students.
Opendorse is one of the oldest NIL companies and says its network includes 175,000+ college athletes and 1,000+ brands. Brands can browse athletes, build a deal brief, pitch it in under a minute and manage the deal through payment. It works well for brands and agencies running lots of individual deals, including appearances and local endorsements.
MOGL is a marketplace and software platform that uses AI to match brands with athletes, with contracts, payments and deliverable review built in. It also runs athlete ads, where brand creative runs through athletes' handles on paid social. It suits brands that want a self-serve tool with matching help.
Teamworks Influencer, which used to be called INFLCR, is mostly used by athletic departments. Many schools run a Teamworks Exchange, a registry where a business can search that school's athletes, message them about a deal, pay them directly and have the deal disclosed for compliance.
It's a good option if you're a local restaurant, car dealer or alumni-owned business that only wants athletes from one school. It's less useful for a national brand that needs hundreds of athletes across many campuses.
TikTok Shop and affiliate programs can get you a lot of content cheaply, so they're the main alternative brands weigh. Here's where an NIL platform pulls ahead, based on what PHX's McKinley Stephens told us after 1,000+ athlete posts for PHX:
Affiliate programs still make sense for pure sales-driven brands. If you care about how your brand looks and want content you can reuse in ads, athletes are the stronger bet.
Ask these five questions before you sign anything:
We help brands get videos from college athletes without having to recruit or manage everyone themselves:
We've done this across 50,000+ NIL deals with 350+ brands, including PHX, SoFi, Proactiv and Jams.
It depends on how much work you want to do. In our survey of college athletes, MarketPryce led on deal flow, payment speed and ease of use among athletes who had used both platforms. Postgame beat MarketPryce on brands and 98Strong beat it on pay. NIL Club, Opendorse and MOGL are self-serve marketplaces.
MarketPryce. In every head-to-head matchup in our survey, most athletes who had used both platforms said MarketPryce paid them faster. NIL Club came closest.
A marketplace gives you an athlete database and tools, and your team runs the deals. A managed platform like MarketPryce, Postgame or 98Strong picks the athletes, runs the campaign and delivers the content for you.
Yes. INFLCR was renamed Teamworks Influencer. It's mainly a tool for athletic departments, and its school Exchanges let businesses find and pay that school's athletes.
Start with at least 30 athletes, and about 100 if you want a clear read on what works. Typically 70 to 80% of athletes who opt in end up posting.
Tell us your goal and the customer you want to reach, and we'll put together a test with athletes who fit. Start your campaign with MarketPryce.
About the survey: run by MarketPryce in spring and summer 2026. Athletes chose from a list of NIL platforms or wrote in their own. Head-to-head results only include athletes who had used both platforms. Quotes are anonymous and lightly trimmed.
