Small hotel booking software keeps your rooms and rates in one place, updates Booking.com and Expedia the moment a room sells, and gives you a booking engine, the checkout screen where a guest pays you on your own website. At 8 to 25 rooms the published starting prices are $39 a month plus 1% of what you book at Little Hotelier, $50 a month at eviivo, $100 a month for ten rooms at WebRezPro and $179 a month at SiteMinder with the booking engine included. Cloudbeds, Mews, ThinkReservations and ResNexus publish nothing at all and quote you on a call.
What the systems publish
| System | Published price | What that price covers |
|---|---|---|
| Little Hotelier | Basics from $39 a month plus a 1% booking fee, Pro from $179 | Property system, channel manager and booking engine in one, sold for properties of 1 to 30 rooms |
| eviivo | From $50 a month for a single property, a minimum applies | Channel manager at no extra cost, booking engine on your own site. Payment and messaging add $0.50 a confirmed booking in the US, $0.75 in Canada |
| WebRezPro | $10 a unit a month with a $100 floor, so $100 at ten rooms, and no setup fee | The property system. Free third party integrations only begin in the 15 to 24 unit band, and its partner page lists SiteMinder for channel management |
| SiteMinder | From $135 a month at five rooms, $179 with the booking engine, single property only | Channel manager, plus the engine from the higher plan. Its own FAQ sends small properties to Little Hotelier |
| innRoad | Around $150 a month, its own estimate, priced per property | All in one system with a booking engine you paste into your site. The channel manager is sold as an add on |
| Sirvoy | $0 for a single unit, and 0% commission and fees on every plan | Starter has no channel manager. Only the Pro plan connects to Booking.com and Expedia |
| Beds24 | From 15.50 euros a month, pay as you go, no contract and no setup fee | Property system, channel manager and booking page. Showing your own web address on the booking page costs 19 euros a month more, and each channel link 0.55 euros |
| RoomRaccoon | Entry at $236 a month, or $197 billed annually | Payments included, though card and terminal fees are billed separately and no rate for them appears |
| Checkfront | One plan at $99 a month plus 3% of online bookings | Hotel style channel management only inside its Accommodations line |
| freetobook | Booking engine, diary and property system free | The channel manager is priced per booking |
| Cloudbeds | No figure on any of its four plans | No added commission on its own engine or channel manager. The cheapest plan, Flex, expects you to bring a channel manager of your own |
| Mews | No figure on any of its three plans | A booking engine you can restyle sits in the middle plan. Mews sells a channel manager built into Mews and powered by SiteMinder, and also connects through outside apps |
| ThinkReservations | No figure anywhere on the pricing page | Property system, a channel manager it built itself across 20 or more channels, an engine restyled to match your site, an account manager and training |
| ResNexus | No figure. Priced on units and season | Its commission free booking engine is inside the subscription |
| Hotelogix | No published figure | Markets its web booking engine as zero commission |
Every price here comes off the vendor's own pricing page, checked on August 2026, with eviivo and Guesty checked again in September.
If you rent out apartments, cabins or whole units, four more belong on your list. OwnerRez charges $40 a month for the first property and less for each one after, with no commission and no guest fee. Lodgify runs $14 to $62 a month at one property billed yearly, shown against $18 to $77 monthly, with a 0% booking fee. Hostfully opens at $15 a property a month on Growth, which adds a 1% payment gateway fee and a 0.85% direct booking fee, and $25 on Pro, which has neither. Guesty publishes $9 a month plus 1% a reservation on Lite, and Lite stops at three listings, so ten rooms lands on Pro and Pro is quoted. I put thirty one of these side by side in the channel manager comparison.
The quoted number does not always cover all three jobs
Ask which of the three pieces a price includes before you weigh two quotes against each other. Little Hotelier's own comparison page is straight about it: a property system and a channel manager are separate tools meant to work together. Cloudbeds bundles its channel manager from the second plan up and leaves it off the first. Sirvoy puts it on Pro. innRoad sells it beside the property system. WebRezPro does not build one and points at SiteMinder. Mews does not build one either.
One monthly bill tells you nothing about how many of the three tools are inside it. Before you hold two prices side by side, look down each plan sheet for the words channel manager. A plan without one will let the same room sell twice. If you have never watched your own sync work, the afternoon test is here.
Where the booking page actually lives
The payment step is where these products differ most. Plenty of engines move the guest onto a page carrying the vendor's name, and a guest who reads an unfamiliar company name in the address bar will occasionally abandon the booking and go back to Booking.com, where the name at least means something to them. A few keep the whole reservation on your own site.
Cloudbeds publishes both behaviors. Its Basic embed starts the booking on your site and then moves the guest to Cloudbeds to finish. Its Premium embed shows the whole thing on your page, once you have told Cloudbeds which web address is yours. Mews offers three routes: sending the guest to a Mews page, dropping a small piece of code into your site that keeps them with you, or a custom build, which only its largest customers get. Little Hotelier will drop a plugin into an existing WordPress, Squarespace or Wix site. Failing that, it hands you a snippet of code, or it hosts the whole website for you. Beds24's booking page shows a Beds24 address until you pay 19 euros a month for yours to show instead.
Run the five minute version of this on any vendor's demo, and on the site you have right now. Click your own Book Now and watch the address bar.
The phone in your guest's hand
Most people who book a room this week will do it on a phone, standing up somewhere. Open the vendor's demo booking on your own phone and check three things:
- whether the date picker can be worked with a thumb;
- how many screens the card form runs to;
- whether Apple Pay or Google Pay comes up before the card fields, so the guest never types a card number.
Stripe's own guidance for hotels lists digital wallets beside cards as a category to evaluate. We take cards and Apple Pay at MINT. Adding the wallet took our own booking step from four clicks to two. No pricing page states which engines offer one, so you have to look.
While you have that demo open, add breakfast to the reservation. Then a late checkout. Then ask whether the engine can sell somebody a gift certificate in December for a stay in June, because half the inns I know sell them and a fair number of engines cannot.
Google's free booking links
A small hotel can appear in the booking module on its own Google listing without paying for the click. Google states there is no cost for clicks on free booking links, and that nobody can buy a better position in them. Position comes from what travelers prefer, how good your landing page is, and whether the prices you sent Google turned out to be accurate.
The catch is plumbing. You need a Google Business Profile and your live rates inside Google Hotel Center. In practice your engine, channel manager or property system has to be a Google connectivity partner and push the rates for you. innRoad names Google Booking Links among the channels it connects. Most of the others say nothing about it on the pricing page. Put the question in the demo, and ask what the connection costs, because a free channel sitting behind a paid module will still appear on your invoice.
Setup, and who picks up the phone in February
Two of the fifteen say in writing that they charge nothing to get you started: WebRezPro, whose $10 a unit covers the property system with no setup fee, and Beds24, which sells pay as you go with no contract, no minimum term and no setup fee. ThinkReservations lists an account manager and on demand training among the things its price includes, though it will not tell you the price. The other twelve leave setup off the pricing page altogether, and a setup charge tends to appear later in the sales conversation.
Two more questions belong in the demo. How many weeks from signature to the first live booking, and who loads your rooms and rates? And when the sync stops on a Saturday in February, who answers, in what hours, and by phone or by ticket? Ask for both answers by email afterwards, so you have them in writing.
While you are asking, find out what the system sends your guests on its own. ThinkReservations sells guest communication tools alongside the property system, ResNexus lists automated emails in what its subscription covers, and eviivo charges its $0.50 a confirmed booking on the messaging service as well as on payments. At ten rooms without a night porter, the check in instructions going out automatically at 4pm is worth more than most of the features on the brochure.
The discount I could not put in the property system
I wanted to reward guests who stay a week or more at MINT @Naschmarkt, the 18 serviced apartments Maxine and I run in Vienna. Our property system has a rate engine with a length of stay setting, and the vendor told us to set the discount inside it. We configured zero discounts there.
Anything the rate engine works out travels straight through the channel manager to Booking.com. Set a long stay rate in the property system and the platforms receive it too, so the reward lands on a listing that charges us 15% for the privilege. The discount went into our own booking engine's pricing math instead, where it is worked out before the guest sees a number and the property system is never told. We call it the House Rate. The House Rate is 25%, sitting on a ladder of 15% at seven nights, 20% at fourteen and 25% at twenty eight, with everything stacked together stopping at 30% of rent.
Do not copy the 30%. We can afford that much only because we pay for a 20% platform loyalty discount on top of the commission, which leaves a platform stay netting us about 68% of the list price. If you fund no platform discount and pay 15% commission, you keep about 85%, and after card fees of roughly 2.9% your margin for a discount is about 12 or 13%.
Then read your Booking.com contract, because Austrian rules are looser than yours. Under European law Booking.com applies no parity to our own website. A US or Canadian property is under wide parity. Booking.com must get the same or a better price than your own site shows. The single exempt discount is a closed rate for signed in members who have booked with you before. A banner offering 15% off to anyone who lands on your home page does not qualify. There is more on what you can and cannot do in the rate parity piece.
What the card processor takes, on top of everything above
No booking engine pricing page includes card processing. The charge rises with your revenue, so it costs a good deal more at $30,000 of bookings a month than at $5,000. Stripe's standard US rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents on a successful domestic card payment. You will also see Stripe Connect quoted at 0.25% plus 25 cents per payout, and that one is billed to the software company running the payments rather than to you, although a vendor is free to pass it along. Ask what your vendor adds to Stripe's number, because several of them add a percentage of their own. Hostfully publishes the shape of it: its Growth plan carries a 1% payment gateway fee and a 0.85% direct booking fee, both of which disappear on the Pro plan at $25 a property. eviivo's $0.50 a confirmed booking applies only if you take its payment service. RoomRaccoon includes payments in the subscription and then bills card and terminal fees separately without publishing a rate, and Cloudbeds Payments names two pricing structures, blended and cost plus, with no percentage attached to either. At MINT the cards go through our own Stripe account, which keeps a 1% platform fee off every direct booking.
The price your guest is allowed to see
Since May 12, 2025 the FTC's rule on unfair or deceptive fees has covered short term lodging, your own website included. Any price you display has to be the total with every mandatory fee inside it, a cleaning or resort fee included, and that total has to be more prominent than any other number on the page. Tax can sit outside it, as long as the guest sees it before paying.
Plenty of engines were built before the FTC rule came in. Put a two night stay through the demo with a cleaning fee switched on and read the first screen. If the fee shows up for the first time at checkout, the engine does not meet the rule, and fixing it becomes a request you have to put to the vendor before you sign.
Six things to make a demo prove
Book twenty minutes with each vendor on your shortlist and get through this list. Take the notes yourself.
- Set a discount that only your website gets. Configure one in the demo account, then open your Booking.com and Expedia listings the next morning and see whether the cheaper price went out with it. If it leaks, you have paid commission on a cheaper Booking.com listing that you funded yourself.
- Book a room on your own phone. Watch the address bar, count the taps, and see whether a wallet is offered before the card form.
- Show me the total. Two nights, a cleaning fee, tax, and the discount you just set, each on its own line, with the total more prominent than anything else.
- Export the guest list. Ask them to download the actual file during the call, instead of showing you the screen it lives on. The file should hold every guest's name, email address and the dates they stayed. If it downloads, your guests stay yours when the contract ends.
- Move next summer's reservations. Ask who does the work of getting your confirmed future bookings into the new system, and in what form they want them handed over. Ask the same about years of guest history and your private notes on particular guests, because some of it stays in the old login until the subscription lapses. Stored cards are the one thing that usually will not travel. Our own upcoming refundable bookings stayed on the old system until the last of them had checked out.
- Keep your own card processor, if you have one. Ask whether you can connect your existing Stripe or Square account, or whether payments have to run through the vendor's own version at the vendor's own rate.
Add subscription plus booking fee plus card processing, then run that against last year's real volume rather than against the headline price. A 1% booking fee costs $10 a month on $1,000 of bookings and $250 a month on $25,000. Once you are taking $25,000 a month, that 1% is six times the $39 subscription it came attached to. A cheap plan with a percentage on it often turns out to be the expensive one.
Where I would start, by property
8 to 15 rooms, nobody on staff who enjoys software. Little Hotelier at $39 plus 1%, or eviivo at $50. Both bundle the channel manager, both publish their numbers, and neither needs a project.
15 to 25 rooms, several room types, someone at a front desk. WebRezPro at $100 for ten units, innRoad around $150, or SiteMinder at $179 with the engine in. Ask all three what the number becomes at your unit count, because every one of them scales differently.
Running a B&B or an inn. ThinkReservations and ResNexus are built for you and quote on a call, and the specialist field is worth its own look in what a 10 room B&B actually needs.
Letting apartments, cabins or whole units. OwnerRez at $40 for the first property, or Lodgify from $14 billed yearly.
Already running something that works. Keep it. A migration in July costs you lost nights and two weeks of your own time, worth far more than the twenty dollars a month a different subscription might save you.
If you are sitting with two quotes and cannot tell which one leaves you in control of your own pricing, bring both to a call and we will go through them line by line.
