The three property systems you will see named most often for a hotel your size are Cloudbeds, Mews and RoomRaccoon, and none of the three gives you a price until you have sat through a sales call. Five of the twelve systems below do publish theirs. Little Hotelier starts at $39 a month plus a 1% booking fee, eviivo at $50, WebRezPro at $100 for ten rooms, Beds24 at 15.50 euros, and freetobook charges nothing at all for the diary and the booking page. Before you shop, look at what you are already paying for: a system that keeps every platform showing the same free nights and takes a card on your own domain is doing the job, and replacing it will cost you more than it returns.
What each one costs at your size
| System | Built for | What it publishes | What that price leaves out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Little Hotelier | Rooms, 1 to 30 of them | Basics from $39 a month plus a 1% booking fee, Pro from $179 | Nothing structural. Basics already carries the channel manager and the booking engine. The 1% rides on what you book |
| eviivo | Rooms | From $50 for one property, from $125 across several | Payments, guest messaging, promotions, reporting and owner statements are $1 to $3 a room each, plus $0.50 a confirmed booking in the US and $0.75 in Canada |
| WebRezPro | Inns, guest houses, small hotels | $10 a unit a month with a $100 floor, so $100 at ten rooms, no setup fee | At 1 to 14 units the only connection inside the price is the payment gateway. One free integration begins at 15 units, two at 25 |
| innRoad | Rooms with a front desk | Its own estimate: "our core PMS software typically falls around $150 per month for most properties" | Channel management sits on its own list of optional features |
| Sirvoy | Rooms | A free plan at 0 euros, Starter at 12 euros, Pro at 44 euros a month, 0% commission on all three | Only Pro connects to Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, Agoda and Hostelworld. The free plan covers one room |
| Beds24 | Rooms or whole units | From 15.50 euros a month, worked out from your real unit count, no contract and no setup fee | Each channel link is 0.55 euros a month, an extra user login 2 euros, and putting your own web address on the booking page 19 euros |
| freetobook | Small hotels, B&Bs, guest houses | Booking engine, diary and property system free forever, no commission | The channel manager is 1.50 pounds a booking, floor of 9 pounds and ceiling of 99 pounds a month, with a one off 49 pound fee per channel connected. Card payments and messaging are billed yearly |
| Cloudbeds | Growing independents | No figure on Flex, One, Experience or Enterprise | It does state that it adds no commission to its own booking engine or channel manager, and charges metasearch commission only after the guest has checked out |
| Mews | Independents that want the front desk automated | No figure on Essentials, Advanced or Enterprise | A form, then a 30 minute call with a Mews expert, then a number |
| ThinkReservations | Inns and B&Bs | No figure anywhere. One button, Request Pricing | You have to call. Put this one first in the week, because the rest of your comparison waits on it |
| ResNexus | Inns, B&Bs and lodges | No figure. "Flexible, custom pricing based on your units and seasonality" | It does publish two things worth having in writing: no setup fees, and an offer to match what your current software costs |
| RoomRaccoon | Independent hotels and hostels | Four plans, Entry to Pro, with a room count box where the rate should be. No figure appeared on the page. Annual billing is advertised as 20% cheaper | Card and terminal fees sit outside the subscription, with no rate shown for either |
Every row above checked on September 2026 against each vendor's own pricing page.
If what you rent is whole apartments or cabins, five more belong on your list, and they charge per unit.
- Lodgify: $14 to $62 a month at one property billed yearly, against $18 to $77 billed monthly, and no booking fee on any plan.
- Hostfully: from $15 a property a month on Growth, which adds a 1% payment gateway fee and 0.85% on your direct bookings, and from $25 on Pro, which drops both.
- OwnerRez: $40 covers the first property and each one after costs less as the count climbs. No commission, no guest fee.
- Guesty: $9 a listing plus 1% a reservation on Lite, and Lite stops at three listings, so at your size you land on Pro and Pro is quoted.
- Hostaway: nothing published. Its pricing page asks how many listings you manage and calls that step one of three.
The three names on every list, and what they are for
Cloudbeds is sold to independents that expect to grow. Its pricing page names no rate, and the one firm thing it does say is that Cloudbeds adds no commission to bookings made through its own booking engine or channel manager, and charges its cut on bookings that come through Google's hotel results or Tripadvisor only once the guest has checked out. Mews is built around automating the front desk, and its own route to a price is a form, a 30 minute call and then a recommendation. RoomRaccoon aims at independent hotels and hostels and prices from your room count, with card and terminal fees outside the subscription.
All three are real systems and any of them will run a 15 room hotel. All three also want an hour of your time before they will name a figure you can set beside Little Hotelier's $39. Start from the systems that print a price even if one of the three is where you end up, because those figures give you something to hold the quote against.
What a property system is, and the two jobs people confuse it with
Vendors sell three different pieces of software as one product, and they price each one differently.
Start with the property system, which is the master record. Every booking from every source lands in it, and you go to it to see who arrives on Friday, which rooms are dirty, what a guest owes and what the month made.
Between that record and Booking.com, Expedia and Airbnb sits the channel manager, whose one job is to stop a night that sold on one of them from still being offered on the others. Nineteen of the systems we priced elsewhere already include it, so open your current subscription and check before you shop for one. The full comparison runs to 31 of them.
Then there is the booking engine, the checkout on your own website where a guest picks dates, sees a total and pays you. Most of these systems include one. What fifteen of them cost, and what their engines actually do, if that is the part you are shopping for.
Almost everyone selling to you sells all three together. What "all in one" covers changes from vendor to vendor, and inside a single vendor it changes by plan tier, so the brochure will not settle it.
What the monthly figure hides at your size
Add on fees raise the base price, often well past double it. There are five places they come from.
The plan tier that switches the channel manager on. Sirvoy's free and Starter plans connect to no major booking site at all, and the connection arrives on Pro. Little Hotelier goes the other way and puts the channel manager in its cheapest plan. There is no rule across the market, so ask each vendor which plan the channel manager starts on.
The fee per booking, on top of the subscription. Little Hotelier takes 1% of what you book. eviivo takes $0.50 a confirmed booking in the US and $0.75 in Canada. Hostfully's Growth plan takes 0.85% of a direct booking and Pro takes none. At 1,500 bookings a year those lines are worth more than the subscription you compared.
The connection you assumed was included. WebRezPro states this plainly enough to check: under 15 units your $100 covers the payment gateway and nothing else, and free integrations begin in the 15 to 24 band. Beds24 charges 0.55 euros a month per channel link, which is cheap and still a number.
The card fees, which nobody quotes at all. RoomRaccoon says outright that payment and terminal fees are billed separately, without a rate. Ask for that rate in writing. On your own Stripe account the published US price is 2.9% plus 30 cents on a domestic card, and anything above that is the software company's margin.
Google's free booking links. A guest looking at your Google listing can be sent straight to your own booking page for nothing, because Google charges no fee for those links and paid hotel ads do not affect where they rank. What it needs is a Business Profile and your live rates arriving in Google Hotel Center, which in practice means your system has to be a Google connectivity partner and has to send them. Ask your salesperson whether they send rates to Google Hotel Center and whether they are a Google connectivity partner. Those two answers matter more than most of the feature list, and you do not have to take the answer on faith. Search your own property name on Google, open the panel with the dates and prices in it, and look for your own site listed beside Booking.com with a rate next to it. If your own name is missing from that panel, the rates are not arriving, whatever you were told on the call.
Hardware, and where these systems run
All twelve run in a browser, so there is nothing to install on a machine at the desk, and eviivo and Little Hotelier both include a phone app in the plan. The hardware question that does come up at this size is the card terminal in reception. RoomRaccoon sells one and bills its fees outside the subscription. Everyone else expects you to bring your own arrangement, which usually means whatever your card processor supplies.
Can you get your own bookings out of it?
Every one of these will show you a report. Fewer will pass your bookings straight to another piece of software you picked yourself, and at 8 to 25 rooms that difference decides how much of your own setup you can ever build.
eviivo is the most open about it. It publishes its developer tools on its own site and describes them as free, covering distribution, invoicing, guest check in with door codes, accounting and its till. ThinkReservations, which publishes no price at all, publishes a full developer reference anybody can read. Hostfully offers the same kind of connection on all three plans, sold as an extra with no price printed beside it, so a build on Hostfully starts by asking what that extra costs.
All that means is the system can talk to other software without anybody retyping a booking, and how it does that is your developer's problem. Ask one thing on the call: is it included on the plan you are being quoted, and what does it cost if it has to be added. With it, a checkout of your own design is roughly a month of work. Without it, your only option is the page the vendor gives you.
If that is where you are heading, we wrote the answer up system by system: Guesty, Hostaway, Cloudbeds and Mews. Each one covers what its interface really allows, what breaks after launch and what the build costs.
The field nobody opens in a demo
I co-own MINT @Naschmarkt, 18 serviced apartments in five apartment types in Vienna, and our worst software surprise came from a tax field inside the property system. The field carried the label a net figure carries, but instead of dividing the way a net figure is worked out it took off a fixed fraction, close enough to right that a batch of live invoices went out overstated by the same small amount before anyone measured it directly. No guest complained, because the totals all looked reasonable.
A demo shows a booking arriving and a bill going out with round figures on it, so it will never surface a fault like that one. Bring your own awkward stay to the call instead: two adults and a child, one late checkout, a city tax, a deposit taken in advance and a refund. Ask them to run it in front of you and to show you the finished invoice, then check the arithmetic yourself while they are still on the line.
I am not naming the vendor, because I cannot point you at a line in their documentation that says the field works that way. Without that, naming them would be my word against theirs, and you would have no way to check it.
Six questions for the demo, and what a straight answer sounds like
- What does this cost at my exact unit count, in one annual figure, with everything switched on that I need? Ask them to put a final number in a written quote.
- Which plan turns the channel manager on, and which channels does it reach? A useful answer names the plan and the platforms. Sirvoy will tell you Pro. Press anyone who answers "all of them" on which tier they mean, then ask which connections go both ways and how long an update takes to land on Booking.com. Have them make a booking on a platform during the call and watch it arrive.
- What comes off each booking, on top of the subscription? Say the words percentage and per booking. You are looking for the 1%, the 0.85%, the $0.50.
- What are the card fees, and can I keep my own processor? Get the rate in writing. If you must use theirs, get that rate too and compare it against 2.9% plus 30 cents.
- Do you send my rates to Google Hotel Center, and are you a Google connectivity partner? Yes or no. If the answer is yes and nobody at your property has switched it on, you have been leaving free traffic on the table.
- Can I export everything, and can my developer read my bookings through your interface on this plan? Ask what format the export comes in, whether the interface is included or sold as an extra, and whether anything feeds your bookkeeping software. eviivo publishes one for accounting; most vendors will tell you to export a file and hand it over.
Take notes in their own words, and ask them to email the quote before the call ends.
Who should stay exactly where they are
Keep a system that shows the same free nights everywhere and clears a card on your own site. A migration takes about a month of your attention, and for part of it two systems will disagree about who is arriving. At the end you have the same bookings in a different screen. Three things do justify a move. Your system cannot reach a platform you need to sell on. Your bill has climbed for two renewals while the software stayed the same. Or you are still doing a job by hand that the alternative does on its own, and for most small properties that job is the Monday morning one: logging into Booking.com, then Expedia, then Airbnb to type next month's rates in three times, then typing the same numbers into whatever prints your invoices.
Two complaints in particular get blamed on the wrong software. A calendar that disagrees across platforms is a channel manager job, and the fix is often a setting you already own. Getting too few bookings on your own site usually traces back to the booking page itself and the price showing on it. If you sell rooms and work a front desk, the shorter list is what a ten room property really needs. Systems designed for whole apartments charge per unit and will quote you badly at ten rooms.
Bring us the two quotes you are weighing and the number of units you run, and we will tell you what each one leaves out and which of the six questions above they dodged. Book a call.
