Used to use MFL and loved it. Now using Sleeper and I'm shocked at how little I miss everything else. App and website both work fine for the past three seasons.
I do think MFL is priced reasonably, even with the increases. It's still not even $10 a team, even for a 10-team league. Good value and I support anyone who pays the increase. Only issue I have is, if the free product is that good, why bother with anything else?
How does Sleeper deal with blind bid waivers, then back to first-come-first-serve and then back to blind bid waivers, both during the offseason and in-season? What about locking of players whose games have started on Thurs, but allow pickups of players before other players games have started? What about custom players for a DEVY league? Someone already said they don't retain league history.
Sleeper does retain league history. You can view previous league years in their entirety, including the chat. They don't track some of the fun things like MFL like "highest scoring week ever in league history" etc. but I'm sure it would not be hard for them to do seeing as all the data is there. They just have a list of priority things they try to implement every offseason, so something like that is probably further down the list.
They have numerous waiver settings and you can change them throughout the year. We do FCFS after draft, blind waivers once a week for the later portion of the offseason, then blind bid waivers 3 times a week during. There are options for player locks. We have players lock at kick off of their games and FCFS starting one hour prior to kickoff of Sunday games so people can replace late declare injuries or outs for later games/Monday games.
I don't know about creating custom players. I do know DEVY is on the aforementioned short list of additions. This past year it was auction draft capabilities. A few years before that it was adding Dynasty.
I used MFL for years and I'm not intending this as a knock against them; but Sleeper started hosting leagues in 2017 and have added more features and options in the past 6 years than MFL did as long as I used them. People with hyper complicated leagues and tons of unique settings would most likely not find what they need there. But I would comfortably throw a "yet" at the end of that sentence. For the size of the team they've had working there, and they fact they started as, and still remain, free to use I'm super impressed with what they've implemented in such a short time and more or less done so with 0 major hiccups (which I think is something supremely understated considering they have very short implementation and testing windows before new league years start and are doing it for two fully functioning platforms in desktop and mobile app. IMO, they've already lapped basically every other fantasy host site other than MFL. And about half of my old MFL friends have transitioned already to sleeper and are happy they did.
Their growth rate every year is crazy, and they've implemented some revenue generating things in the app (that you don't have to use or even interact with if you don't want), so I think it will only get better even faster moving forward. Fact is, majority of fantasy players primarily play from phone apps, and Sleepers is the best hands down. And MFL doesn't have one they run. And the ones I used when I was in MFL were janky AF with huge headaches for me as commish like not saving line up changes. Was a nightmare for me. If that isn't important to you or any of your league mates, just stick with MFL. Or like I said, if you have some crazy convoluted settings, but outside DEVY (which tbh still isn't really that popular in the community) they pretty much have everything covered settings wise. And I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's an option in another 2-3 years.