If you own ten units and you are asking whether to put them on Buildium or AppFolio, there is a third option you should price first, and it is the one you are already using.
This is not a feature comparison. Both products are good, both will do what they say, and the feature grids are near-identical anyway. The useful question is a different one: at your size, does either of them earn its cost?
Who these products were built for
Both are aimed at management companies rather than owner-operators. That shapes everything about them: the accounting assumes trust accounting and owner draws, the workflows assume staff with defined roles, and the pricing assumes a business charging a percentage of rent to somebody else.
AppFolio has historically set a minimum monthly spend that makes it plainly uneconomic below a few dozen units — worth checking current terms, but the shape of the offer has been consistent. Buildium reaches further down and has an entry tier aimed at smaller portfolios, which makes it the more common answer in the ten-to-fifty range.
Neither is being unreasonable. They are simply not built for someone with eight units and no staff.
What a 10-unit landlord actually needs
Strip away everything sold on a comparison page and the genuine requirement list is short:
- A ledger that reconciles. Who owes what, on any given day, without reconstructing it from a bank statement.
- A way to collect rent that does not depend on people remembering.
- Maintenance requests captured with dates and photos, in one place.
- Notices issued consistently, with a record.
- Year-end numbers your accountant will accept without a reconciliation exercise.
That is the list. Applicant screening marketplaces, marketing syndication, and owner portals for owners who are you are all real features that you specifically do not need.
The honest case for the spreadsheet
A spreadsheet does four of those five things adequately and one of them badly.
The one it does badly is the ledger — not because a spreadsheet cannot hold a ledger, but because keeping it current is manual, and manual means it is accurate on the day you update it and drifting every day after. That is the actual failure, and it is worth being precise about, because it points at the cheapest fix.
If you connect the bank feed to the rent schedule and let payments match themselves, the spreadsheet’s one genuine weakness disappears. We wrote up exactly that in how I automated rent reconciliation. It costs a fraction of a platform subscription and it addresses the thing that was actually going wrong.
What a spreadsheet cannot give you is a tenant portal, and that matters more than people expect. If tenants are paying by cheque or transfer and messaging you personally about repairs, you are the interface, and no amount of back-office tidiness changes that.
Where the calculation flips
Roughly ten units, though it is really about three things happening rather than a number:
- Somebody other than you touches the process. A partner, a bookkeeper, a part-time helper. Shared spreadsheets fail at exactly this point, and they fail silently.
- You want tenants self-serving. Paying, reporting issues and retrieving documents without going through you. This is the single strongest argument for a platform.
- The consequences of getting it wrong have grown. More units means more disputes, and a platform’s audit trail is worth real money in one.
Below that, the subscription buys you capability you will not use. Above it, the manual work compounds faster than the fee does.
If you are choosing between the two
Ask about behaviour rather than features, because features are identical and behaviour is not. In particular:
- What happens with a partial payment? Real tenants pay short, late, in instalments, and sometimes from an account in another name. A system that cannot cleanly express “paid $900 of $1,400 on the 3rd” will quietly corrupt your ledger.
- Can you hold properties in more than one entity? If you might, ask now. Retrofitting it is painful.
- What does the export actually contain? Not “is there an export” — whether maintenance history and notice records come with it. They frequently do not, and those are what you need in a dispute.
- What is the bill at double your current unit count? Model the portfolio you expect, not the one you have.
The short answer
Under ten units: fix the ledger, keep the spreadsheet, revisit in a year. Ten to fifty: a platform is probably right, and Buildium is more often the fit at the lower end. Above fifty: you are choosing between platforms rather than deciding whether to have one, and migration cost starts to dominate the comparison.
We take no commissions from any platform, which is worth asking of anyone who advises you on this — plenty do, and it changes the advice. More on how we approach it on PropTech consulting, or tell us your unit count and we will tell you which band you are in.
