Nineteen of the 31 channel managers compared here are already inside a property system, so check the one you are paying for before you shop. If you do have to buy, what you sell narrows the field fast. Where a vendor publishes a rate per unit, it is worked out again at twelve units further down, because nearly all of them quote for one. For rooms with a front desk, Little Hotelier starts at $39 a month plus a 1% booking fee, eviivo at $50 and SiteMinder at $135 for a five room property. Systems for whole apartments and cabins charge per unit: Hostex runs $4.9 to $10.5 a unit and Smoobu 28 euros plus 9.60 for each extra unit. Guesty and Hostaway will not give you a figure until you call them.
| System | Built for | What it publishes | Whether to shortlist it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Little Hotelier | Rooms, 1 to 30 of them | From $39 a month plus a 1% booking fee | Cheapest published way into a real hotel channel manager |
| eviivo | Rooms | From $50 one property, $125 multi property, extras per room | Included in every subscription, so no tier to get caught out by |
| Cloudbeds | Rooms | No figure on any tier | Takes no commission through its own booking engine. Expect a sales call |
| SiteMinder | Rooms, on top of your system | From $135 at 5 rooms, $179 with a booking engine | For keeping your current system and buying only the platform connections |
| Hospitable | Whole units | $29, $59 and $99 a month, and a free tier | Every plan carries every channel, the free one included |
| Smoobu | Whole units | From 28 euros plus 9.60 an extra unit | You can work out your own bill before you call anyone |
| Guesty | Whole units | $9 a listing on Lite, capped at 3 listings, plus 1% a reservation | Its calendar counts free units per day, which matters if yours are pooled |
| Hostaway | Whole units | Nothing. The page opens a quote flow | Worth a call, but you cannot compare it on price until you make one |
| OwnerRez | Whole units | $40 covers the first property, each one after costs less | Gets cheaper as the count climbs. Ask which tier you land in |
| Rentals United | Whole units, on top of your system | From $330 at 10 to 50 listings | The one vendor here that publishes a price at your size outright |
Start with the one you may already own
In most cases the channel manager comes with the software you already run the place on. Its job is to keep one set of rates and open dates in front of every platform you sell on, so a night sold on one stops being offered on the others. Nineteen of the 31 include it in the subscription, six charge extra for it or keep it behind a particular plan, and five are sold on their own to bolt onto whatever you run. Mews sells its own, built into Mews and powered by SiteMinder.
Vendors rarely say on the pricing page which plan the channel manager starts on, and it is often not the cheapest one. Cloudbeds bundles its channel manager from the second tier up, so somebody on the entry Flex tier is expected to bring an outside partner. Hospitable puts access to all booking channels on all four of its plans, the free one included. Sirvoy keeps it on the Pro plan, which means a Starter subscription connects to no major booking site at all.
Some vendors sell somebody else’s under their own name. WebRezPro lists SiteMinder on its integration partners page. Checkfront routes hotel style channel management through myallocator, and only for its Accommodations customers. Mews sells one built into Mews and powered by SiteMinder, claiming more than 400 channels, and also publishes a Channel Manager API so an outside one can connect instead. You are buying the same underlying product either way, so ask whose support desk answers when a rate stops moving.
If you run rooms
Eleven of the 31 are built for properties that sell rooms: hotels, inns, guest houses, small lodges. If your searching keeps turning up Hostex, Tokeet, iGMS and Smoobu and none of them feels right, this is why. Those are made for whole units and they price by the unit.
Prices below are monthly, as each vendor states them.
| System | Where the channel manager comes from | Published price |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudbeds | Bundled, second tier up | None on any tier |
| eviivo | Bundled, every subscription | From $50, or $125 multi property, extras priced per room |
| ThinkReservations | Built in house | None published |
| ResNexus | Built in, its Direct Connect | None published |
| Little Hotelier | Bundled, cheapest plan | From $39 plus a 1% booking fee |
| RMS Cloud | Native, built in | None published |
| innRoad | Paid add on | About $150 for the core system, nothing for the add on |
| Sirvoy | Pro plan only | $50 as shown to a US visitor, $23 an extra property |
| freetobook | Charged per booking | Core system free |
| WebRezPro | A partner product, SiteMinder | $10 a unit, $100 minimum |
| Mews | Built in, SiteMinder under the name | None published |
A five to ten room property usually sells on fewer platforms than a twenty room one. Its rooms also tend to be sold under their own names, so the calendar handling that an apartment group needs, where several identical units share a single listing, hardly comes up. What does come up is the room type map. Booking.com's own help page on double bookings says an overbooking can still arrive with a channel manager in place, from a missing mapping or a difference between your system and the Extranet, and no amount of sync speed repairs that. Our page on what actually changes at five to ten rooms works the whole decision through at that scale.
If you run whole apartments, cabins or houses
Thirteen are built for whole units. Nearly all of them charge per unit or per listing, so the small figure on the pricing page is the price of one apartment. Multiply it by your own count before you compare anything.
| System | Where the channel manager comes from | Published price |
|---|---|---|
| Hostaway | Bundled | None; a quote flow that asks your listing count first |
| Guesty | Bundled | $9 a listing on Lite, up to 3, plus 1%; Pro covers 4 to 199 on a quote |
| Lodgify | Bundled, cheapest tier | At one property, $14 to $62 billed yearly and $18 to $77 billed monthly |
| OwnerRez | Bundled | $40 for the first property, then $15, $10, $8, $7, $6, $4, $3 and $2 a property by tier |
| Hostfully | Built in | From $15 a property, $25 on Pro |
| Hospitable | Bundled, all four plans | $29, $59 and $99 base, plus a free tier |
| Smoobu | Bundled module | From 28 euros, plus 9.60 an extra unit |
| iGMS | Bundled, all three plans | PRO $38, PRO+ $56 a property |
| Uplisting | Bundled | 16 pounds a listing, with a 90 pound floor |
| Hostex | Included, all three tiers | $4.9, $7 and $10.5 a property |
| Lodgix | The base subscription is the connectivity | From $79.99 at 1 to 7 properties |
| Hosthub | The product itself | A slider, no static figure |
| Tokeet | The product itself, sold now as AdvanceCM | $15.99 a rental at 1 to 5 |
Guesty and Hostaway compete for the same buyer constantly, and we put them side by side at boutique size in Guesty against Hostaway.
Either kind, or bought on its own
Seven do not sit on one side of that line. Two work for rooms or whole units, and five are sold separately to run on top of whatever you already have.
| System | Suits | Where the channel manager comes from | Published price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beds24 | Either | Paid add on | 0.55 euros a channel link, base from 15.50 euros |
| Checkfront | Either | A partner product, myallocator | $99 plus 3% on online bookings |
| SiteMinder | Rooms | Standalone | From $135 at 5 rooms, $179 with a booking engine |
| Rentals United | Whole units | Standalone | From $330 at 10 to 50 listings |
| NextPax | Whole units | Standalone, on the system you run | $10 a property, on an April 2025 support article |
| STAAH | Rooms | Standalone | None found anywhere |
| Channex | Either | Wholesale, inside another vendor's product | $130 plus $7 a hotel property |
Every figure on this page comes from the vendor's own page, checked on August 2026, with the Guesty, eviivo, Lodgify and OwnerRez rows checked again in September 2026.
Channex sells wholesale, through other software companies, and its own pricing page tells a single hotel operator to go and buy a channel manager directly instead, because it will cost less and work out of the box.
What you need on a channel list is Booking.com, Airbnb, Vrbo and Expedia. Cloudbeds says 450 or more, NextPax 150 or more and Rentals United over 90, while iGMS names its channels one by one instead of totaling them and Lodgix lists roughly two dozen with a fee percentage beside each. All five carry your four. Anything past them is almost certainly a channel you will never sell a night on.
What it costs at 12 units
The prices on this page are quoted at one unit. Where a vendor publishes a rate per unit, the right hand column multiplies it out to twelve. Every one of these vendors discounts, so the figure there is the most you should expect to pay. Ask for your own number and get it in writing.
| System | Published rate | Twelve units a month |
|---|---|---|
| Sirvoy | $50 on Pro, $23 an extra property | $50. It prices by property, so the room count does not move the bill |
| eviivo | From $50 one property, extras per room | From $50, plus per room extras it does not publish |
| Little Hotelier | From $39 plus a 1% booking fee | $39, plus a dollar in every hundred the platforms send |
| Hostex | $4.9, $7 or $10.5 a property | $58.80 to $126 |
| Checkfront | $99 plus 3% on online bookings | $99, plus three dollars in every hundred booked online |
| WebRezPro | $10 a unit, $100 minimum | $120 |
| NextPax | $10 a property | $120 |
| Smoobu | 28 euros plus 9.60 an extra unit | 133.60 euros |
| Hostfully | $15 a property, $25 on Pro | $180, or $300 on Pro |
| Uplisting | 16 pounds a listing, 90 pound floor | 192 pounds |
| Channex | $130 plus $7 a hotel property | $214, though it will not sell to you directly |
| Rentals United | From $330 at 10 to 50 listings | $330, published for this bracket outright |
| iGMS | PRO $38, PRO+ $56 a property | $456 or $672 at the published per property rate |
Seven publish no dollar figure for any plan at any size: Cloudbeds, Hostaway, ThinkReservations, ResNexus, Mews, RMS Cloud and STAAH, where we could find no price anywhere. Another eleven publish something that stops short before it reaches you. Guesty's $9 is capped at three listings and its Pro tier, the one that covers 4 to 199, is quoted by a salesperson. Lodgify's range is a single property figure. Lodgix publishes up to seven properties, Tokeet up to five, and SiteMinder's $135 is a five room price.
Thirteen of the 31 let you work out your own bill without picking up the phone. If you are short of time, start your shortlist there. Not one of the 31 publishes its support hours, its setup fee or its minimum contract, so ask for all three in the same email as the price. None of them says much about its phone app either, and most of your calendar changes will happen on a phone, so run the demo on your own. NextPax's $10 a property is worth an extra question: it sits on a support article from April 2025 and the vendor publishes nothing newer, so confirm it before you plan around it.
The fee underneath the subscription
Several of these take a percentage of your bookings on top of the monthly fee.
| System | The fee under the monthly price |
|---|---|
| Little Hotelier | A 1% booking fee on its cheapest plan |
| Hostfully | 1% card processing and 0.85% on direct bookings, both on Growth only |
| Checkfront | 3% on online bookings, on top of $99 a month |
| Lodgix | 0.5% on Airbnb and Vrbo, nothing on your own website |
| eviivo | $0.50 US and $0.75 Canada a booking, on its optional payment services |
| Beds24 | None; it charges no commission at all |
| Cloudbeds | None through its own booking engine or channel manager |
At 8 to 25 units, a percentage taken off bookings your own website generated will usually cost you more in a month than the subscription does. Hospitable's help center carries base prices of $29, $59 and $99 that its marketing page does not show plainly, so read the help pages as well and get the figure confirmed in writing before you sign.
What each one does when an update goes missing
Every vendor here calls its sync real time or instant. Messages still go missing, and when one does Airbnb never hears that the night has just sold on Booking.com and carries on selling it. Ask each vendor whether its system spots a message that did not arrive and sends it again. Most of them publish no answer to that at all.
| System | What it does when an update fails to arrive |
|---|---|
| Guesty | Tries again at once, then after 5 seconds, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 2 hours, 5 hours, 10 hours and 10 hours again, about 27 hours in all. Five days of failures and it switches the connection off |
| Hostaway | Tries three times, then stops and emails you an alert. Five days of failures and it turns the connection off |
| Cloudbeds | Waits a minute and tries again, five attempts in all |
| STAAH | Checks availability live as the guest clicks Book Now, and posts the reservation back within 30 seconds |
| Hospitable | Calendar link connections run on a schedule, and one older Vrbo connection refreshes every 4.5 hours |
| Lodgix | Sends Vrbo its updates once a day, at 2am Eastern |
| Rentals United | Uses no calendar link fallback at all; every connection is a certified one |
| Hosthub | Pays out if a double booking happens anyway, up to 150 USD on Standard and 500 USD on Pro |
Most of the rest publish nothing at all. Smoobu's documentation is the ordinary case: it describes how updates are sent and says nothing about what happens when one does not land. Hostfully publishes nothing either, so we asked as paying customers, and it confirmed in writing that it does not send a failed update again at all. Any vendor will answer that question by email, and you should make them.
The test worth running before you spend anything
- Pick one room or unit and a date that is open everywhere you sell, your own site included.
- Block it in whichever system you treat as your master calendar, and write down the time.
- Visit each platform in turn and note the minute it stops offering that night.
- Unblock the date and time the return trip. If a night takes two days to come back on sale, nobody can book it for those two days, and nothing in your reports will show you the loss.
- Email every vendor in the chain one question: what happens to an update that never arrives, and do you send it again?
If every platform clears the night and puts it back within minutes, your current channel manager is working and you have nothing to buy. If one of them lags for hours, or never puts the night back on sale, you now have a specific fault to take to the vendor or to use as your reason for changing. The longer version of this test, and what a failure looks like on each platform, is in what a channel manager actually does.
One host on Airbnb's community forum, posting as Mafus0, has built a routine out of that doubt: "A hard lesson learned: never assume a sync updated instantly. When listings are on multiple platforms, I sometimes add short manual blocks as a buffer until I'm sure everything has synced correctly." Angela Venger has the most popular reply on a BiggerPockets thread about three of the systems above: "Guesty, Hospitable, Hostaway, they all do the same core job."
The question that decided it for us
I co-own MINT @Naschmarkt, 18 serviced apartments in five apartment types in Vienna, and I run Fullstreak, which builds direct booking websites for small lodging businesses. We build on top of whichever property system you already run. We went through this comparison for ourselves over the summer.
Our units are pooled, which is how most aparthotels and serviced apartment groups are set up. Several identical apartments share one listing, so the calendar has to hold a count of how many are free on each date. Ours was holding a booked or open flag for the whole listing instead. One apartment type showed 5 of 30 June nights as bookable when 26 of 30 were free. We only found it by reading the calendar data. Nothing looked wrong on the calendar screen, and no guest calls to report a night they were never shown.
We put one question to both vendors. Does your calendar store a number for each date saying how many units are free, or a booked flag for the listing? Guesty's calendar reference answers it in public: availability on a date is worked out from a per day count of free units. Hostfully, our vendor at the time, told us its under reporting is deliberate. Its system holds no availability count and no per unit calendar, and there was no fix planned.
Our channel sync has been live since May 2026 and we have had no double bookings since. In August we decided to move off Hostfully and onto Guesty, and both will run beside each other before anything switches over. The case sits with its caveats on our results page. If any of your units are pooled, make a vendor open a listing with some of its units already booked and show you what the calendar reports for the rest.
So which do you buy
Find the one that matches your property. If it is the first, your answer is to keep what you have.
Rooms, and you already have a property system. Run the test above before you shop. Nineteen of the 31 bundle a channel manager, and if yours is one of them and it passes, you have nothing to buy.
Rooms, and no property system yet. Little Hotelier, eviivo, Cloudbeds. Little Hotelier specializes in properties of 1 to 30 rooms and publishes the lowest entry price. eviivo includes the channel manager in every subscription. Cloudbeds needs a sales call but takes no cut through its own booking engine.
Rooms, and you are keeping the system you have. SiteMinder, STAAH, or whichever partner your own vendor already resells. SiteMinder's FAQ names its core product for large independent hotels and chains and points small properties at Little Hotelier, so ask which of the two they will actually sell you.
Whole units, and some of them are pooled. Guesty, Hostaway, Hospitable, and ask all three the counting question before you ask anything else. A switch is most likely to pay for itself here, because a calendar that cannot count free units keeps nights off sale that you could have sold.
You want your own website to take the booking. Ask what outside access you get before the demo, because it varies more than the price does. Uplisting includes full access on every plan, RMS Cloud keeps it for its upper plan and Sirvoy states plainly that it offers none. If you are on Mews or on Cloudbeds' entry tier, you are buying a standalone either way, and SiteMinder, Rentals United and STAAH are the list.
If you would rather not run the block and release test on your own, we will run it with you on the system you already have.
