Short version: this isn’t actually a fight. HowLongToBeat tells you how long a game will take. SavePoint tells you what to play and what your backlog is costing you while it sits there unplayed. Those are two different questions, and once you see them as two different questions, the “vs” in the title mostly falls apart.
I should say this before anything else: I built SavePoint. That’s not a footnote, it’s relevant to how I’m framing the second half of this piece, so weigh it accordingly. HowLongToBeat I have no stake in. I just use it every week, the same way I have for years.
Why People Keep Framing This as a Rivalry
Search for “howlongtobeat vs” anything and you’ll get a wall of comparison posts, most of them treating every game-tracking tool as interchangeable competitors fighting for the same job. I get why. They both show up when someone types “game tracker” into Google, and they both live in that general backlog-management space.
But put them side by side and the overlap is thin. HowLongToBeat has never tried to be a backlog manager. It doesn’t have a Decision Engine, it doesn’t score your backlog, it doesn’t track your tabletop shelf next to your Steam library. SavePoint, for its part, was never built to out-do HowLongToBeat’s core dataset. It doesn’t try to be the definitive source for how long Baldur’s Gate 3 takes to finish. It assumes you already know, or that you’ll go find out somewhere else, and then it asks what you’re going to do about it.
That’s the actual relationship. Not a rivalry. A handoff.
What HowLongToBeat Is Built For, and Does Better Than Anyone
HowLongToBeat launched in 2011 and has spent over a decade doing one thing: telling you how many hours a game will cost you before you commit to it.
The data is entirely crowd-sourced. A player finishes a game, submits their own elapsed time, and picks a category: Main Story, Main + Extras, Completionist, or the blended All Styles figure. There’s no developer-verified layer under any of it, just volume. On a major release with thousands of submissions, that volume makes the Main Story number genuinely reliable. On something obscure, you might be looking at an average built from a handful of entries, and one dedicated completionist can drag the whole figure sideways.
None of that costs you anything. HowLongToBeat is free, ad-supported, and doesn’t require an account to search. If you want one, you can keep basic status lists and log your own times, and the site will even pull your Steam library in automatically, a feature it’s quietly offered since at least 2021. GOG works too. No premium tier exists anywhere on the site. Everything it does, it does for free, including the imports.
The site itself looks like it hasn’t been touched since it launched, and in spirit it mostly hasn’t. Dense, ad-heavy, function over form. It’s owned by Ziff Davis now, sitting inside the IGN Entertainment stable since a 2021 acquisition, which explains the ad load without explaining any change to how the core tool works. It still does the one job it was built for, and it still does that job better than anything else I’ve used.
What SavePoint Was Never Trying to Compete With
SavePoint starts from a different assumption: that knowing how long a game takes isn’t the hard part. Deciding what to actually open tonight, and understanding what the other 200 games sitting in your library are quietly costing you, is the harder problem, and it’s the one HowLongToBeat doesn’t touch.
The catalog runs past 35,000 titles, roughly 33,000 video games and just over 2,000 tabletop games, all in one library instead of split across separate apps for your Switch backlog and your board game shelf. The Decision Engine takes your mood, the time you actually have, and which platform you’re sitting in front of, and hands you three picks instead of a scroll through everything you own.
The Backlog Score is the piece that doesn’t have an equivalent anywhere else in this category: a 0 to 100 health score for your backlog, recalculated every night, with a “dollar tax” sub-metric that puts a number on what you’ve paid for and haven’t touched. It’s not a shame mechanic. It’s the same instinct as checking a bank balance: not fun, occasionally useful, worth glancing at before you buy anything new.
Every December there’s a free Year in Gaming recap, cards you can actually share, not locked behind anything. And deliberately, there’s no XP, no login streaks, no badges anywhere in the app. I wrote up why we ripped that stuff out in Why We Ripped XP Out of SavePoint, and the short version is that gamifying the act of logging games trains you to open the tracker, not the game.
Free tier gets you the library, the Backlog Score, and BGG import. Pro is $9 a month or $99 a year for the Decision Engine and the automated Steam, Xbox, and PSN imports. Right now there’s also a time-limited Founding Member offer, $149 once or $79 a year, which is the better deal if you’re going to stick around.
Where They Actually Overlap
There’s one honest overlap: both tools exist to help you decide what to commit to. They just come at it from opposite directions.
HowLongToBeat helps you decide before you own the game, or before you start it. It’s a filter at the door. SavePoint helps you decide after you already own it, when it’s one of 150 things competing for your Tuesday night, and the question isn’t “should I buy this” anymore, it’s “should this be tonight’s game, and what’s it doing to my score if it isn’t.”
Neither one replaces the other at that job. HowLongToBeat has no concept of your existing library. It’ll tell you Elden Ring runs long whether you own four other 60-hour games or none. SavePoint doesn’t try to independently verify completion times, it assumes you’ve either checked HowLongToBeat or you already know.
The Actual Workflow: Using Both Together
Here’s how the handoff plays out in practice. Say you’re deciding whether to start Baldur’s Gate 3. You check HowLongToBeat first: Main Story is somewhere in the 70 to 80 hour range, Completionist pushes well past 150. That’s the number you needed before committing, and it’s the number HowLongToBeat exists to give you.
Now the second question shows up, the one HowLongToBeat was never built to answer: is that worth it, given everything else already sitting in your backlog? That’s where the Backlog Score comes in. Adding a 150-hour completionist run to a backlog that’s already carrying a dozen unstarted 40-plus-hour games is going to move that dollar-tax number, and seeing it move is a genuinely useful nudge before you decide, not after you’ve already sunk twenty hours in.
Run it the other direction too. Open SavePoint’s Decision Engine on a night you’ve got 90 minutes and no idea what to touch. It surfaces three picks based on your mood, your time, and your platform. If one of them is unfamiliar, a quick HowLongToBeat check tells you whether it’s a 90-minute session or the start of a 40-hour commitment you don’t have room for this week. One tool narrows the field. The other tells you what the field actually costs.
The One Place They’re Not Actually Equal
I want to be straight about this instead of glossing over it, because it’s the one spot where the comparison isn’t flattering to SavePoint.
HowLongToBeat’s Steam and GOG imports are free to every single user. No account tier, no paywall, because there’s no paywall on the entire site to begin with. SavePoint gates its Steam, Xbox, and PSN imports behind Pro. BGG import is free for anyone, and there’s a separate one-time Backloggd CSV import also on the free tier, but if you’re coming from Steam specifically and you want it to sync automatically, that’s a Pro feature.
That’s a real asterisk, not a minor one. HowLongToBeat can afford to give the import away because the whole product is ad-supported and has no subscription business to protect. SavePoint’s imports fund the parts of the product that HowLongToBeat doesn’t attempt at all, the Decision Engine, the Backlog Score, the tabletop catalog. Whether that trade is worth it depends on how much you value the rest of what Pro unlocks. It’s not something I’m going to pretend away just because I built the thing.
Who Should Skip SavePoint Entirely
Some people genuinely don’t need this. If you only ever want the completion-time number and nothing past it, if you don’t play tabletop games, if the idea of a backlog “score” sounds like one more app nagging at you instead of helping, stay on HowLongToBeat. It’s free, it’s fast, and it does that one job without asking anything else of you. Not every backlog needs a management layer. Some people are genuinely fine with a list and a gut check.
Why I Still Keep Both Tabs Open
I check HowLongToBeat before almost anything goes on my list, the same habit I’ve had for years and I don’t see it changing. I open SavePoint most nights I actually have time to play, because “what should I open” is a harder question than “how long will it take,” and it’s the one my backlog actually needed answered.
If you’ve read HowLongToBeat vs Backloggd, you already know I think HLTB pairs well with almost any second tool, because it was never trying to be one thing and also everything. SavePoint just happens to be the version of that second tool built for people who also play tabletop games and want the “what tonight” question answered instead of just logged. For the full lineup of what’s out there, the Letterboxd for Games roundup covers every tracker worth your time in one place.
Most people asking “HowLongToBeat or SavePoint” are asking the wrong question. It was never an or.
TAG Pro launches December 1: ad-free reading on everything we publish, for people who’d rather spend their limited hours on a game than on a page full of pop-ups. Founding seats are open now at twoaveragegamers.com/founding.
Got a backlog you want roasted, or a completion time you don’t believe? Come argue about it in the TAG Discord.
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