Guesty vs Hostaway: which is better for a small lodging business

Guesty and Hostaway do the same job. Each holds your calendar, pushes your rooms out to Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com, and comes with a booking website of its own. Owners who have run both describe Guesty as the older and more expensive system, built for managers who are adding properties. They describe Hostaway as the cheaper one, with a better support line and rougher edges. Guesty publishes a starting price of $9 a month plus 1 percent of every reservation, for 1 to 3 listings, and quotes everything above that. Hostaway quotes every account it sells, so a property of 8 to 25 units cannot compare the two without two sales calls. Guesty is the better fit if you sell several identical units as one room type, and neither system was designed around a B&B or a small hotel with a front desk.

If you run one to three units and want a figure before you talk to a salesperson, Guesty Lite is the only one of the two that gives you one. On that plan it connects Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com, which is most of what an owner that size sells on anyway. Add a fourth unit and Guesty moves you to Pro, where the price goes back behind a quote, so from four listings upward both companies quote. Send each of them one email asking for the monthly figure at your listing count, the onboarding fee and the contract length.

If you run a B&B, an inn or a small hotel, look at the systems built for that kind of property first. Both Guesty and Hostaway grew up around whole houses, so a front desk, a breakfast service and a set of room types all have to be forced into a shape drawn for something else. What a ten room B&B actually needs covers the systems built for that job instead. If you sell several near identical units under one name, Guesty is the one I would pick, for the reason at the bottom of this page. And if you already run one of them, stay where you are unless your calendar is refusing bookings for rooms that are standing empty.

What the two actually cost

Guesty's pricing page carries three plans: Lite for 1 to 3 listings from $9 a month plus 1 percent per reservation, Pro for 4 to 199 listings on a quote, and Enterprise above that. A 10 room property cannot buy Lite. Hostaway's pricing page opens a three step wizard and asks how many listings you manage before it shows you anything at all, so there is no published figure to compare against.

Onboarding and contract length rarely appear in a monthly price comparison, and for a small business both land on the same year's budget as the subscription does. Hostaway's own comparison page puts its onboarding at $500 with all modules included, and Guesty's at $1,500 with extra cost for some modules, and it says Guesty sells a 13 month contract while Hostaway sells month to month or annual. Hostaway wrote that page to win the argument, so treat those figures as questions to put to a Guesty salesperson in writing. Guesty's own pricing page publishes neither an onboarding fee nor a contract length.

Support, and what it covers on each plan

Hostaway's comparison page claims 24/7 phone support and a dedicated rep for itself, and describes Guesty's support as chat and email based with slow response times. Guesty's own pricing page tells a slightly different story: 24/7 live chat and the help center on both Lite and Pro, with phone support and a dedicated customer success manager reserved for Enterprise. Chat is there on every Guesty plan, and a phone number arrives only when your portfolio is large enough for Enterprise. Decide what a phone line is worth to your business before you compare monthly prices, because a card declined on a same day arrival is the moment you will want one.

Owners comparing the two on Reddit, in the short term rental Facebook groups and on BiggerPockets tend to reach the same conclusion. Guesty is treated as the more mature system at a higher price. Hostaway is treated as the cheaper option with more bugs in it, and as the quicker of the two to learn. Hospitable comes up in the same threads as the one people like for guest messaging and find thinner on the management side. Read a few of those threads before your sales calls and take the specific complaints in with you.

What each one does with a guest's card

Hostaway connects your own Stripe or Braintree account, so payouts arrive in an account you already reconcile. Guesty will also charge on your own processor, and its payment gateway fee page sets out when its own fee applies, declined attempts included, without ever stating the rate. Ask for that rate in writing before you sign anything. Card processing sits on top of whatever the software charges, and Stripe's standard US rate is 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on a successful card payment, so ask each vendor what it adds to that figure.

Hostaway's hosted Booking Website costs nothing on top of the subscription and takes 1.8 percent of a booking in the United States, or 0.5 percent in Canada. Guesty has a booking engine of its own too. Feeding Guesty's rates and calendar into a website you already own is a separate job, and Guesty's help center says that one needs a web developer with the right experience.

The two also part company when a guest's card is declined. Hostaway's own documentation describes a setup where the booking is created and the card charged in the same step. If that charge fails, Hostaway deletes the reservation, so nothing is left on your calendar to tidy up afterwards. Guesty's documentation says the prices in a quote are guaranteed for that booking for 24 hours, and it says nothing about the dates being held along with them. When the guest comes back to pay, Guesty looks at the calendar again and refuses the booking if those nights have gone. In practice you can lose a Hostaway booking without ever seeing that it existed. On Guesty your quoted price stays open for a day while those same nights are still selling to everybody else.

Checked on September 2026, from Guesty's pricing page, Guesty's channel manager page, Hostaway's pricing page, Hostaway's comparison page and Hostaway's API reference. Rows sourced to Hostaway's comparison page are one vendor's claims about its rival, and are marked as such.

Why we picked Guesty, and the one thing it does that the other does not

I co-own MINT @Naschmarkt, 18 serviced apartments in five apartment types in Vienna, so we sell several interchangeable units under one name. Last June our own calendar was quietly lying to guests. Our system treated an apartment type as unavailable whenever any single unit in it was booked, so for one month it offered 5 of 30 nights when 26 were actually free. We asked the vendor to publish a count of free units per day and were told it does not do that by design.

Guesty can publish how many units of a type are free on each date as a plain number, which is what your own checkout has to see before it can accept a booking. We are still on our old system today, and in August 2026 we decided to move to Guesty, with both running side by side until the calendar proves itself. The money will stay on our own Stripe account through the switch.

Hostaway handles it by moving bookings instead. Its Smart Reservation Assignment documentation, dated March 2026 and checked on September 2026, describes moving the bookings it already holds between the units in a listing, so a new booking is not turned away when the free nights are split across several of them. It only moves arrivals inside a two week window, and you can lock a booking so it stays where it is. So Hostaway rearranges the bookings you already have, while Guesty tells your own website how many units are free on a date. Both approaches fill the calendar, and the Guesty one is easier to build your own checkout against, which we went through in what a direct booking page on Guesty costs to build.

Should you switch at all

For most properties of this size the answer is no. A move uses up the only technical help a property this size has, and ours was scoped at four to six weeks of setup work plus another two to four weeks with both systems running side by side, against an earlier estimate of three to four months in total. Both systems will carry a property of 8 to 25 units, so a calendar that hides free rooms is the only reason I would move.

If your rooms are all different, and you are not selling several of the same unit under one name, then neither system has something the other is missing that will change your week. Ask each sales rep for the monthly price at your listing count and for the length of the contract, and decide on those. Hostaway says it sells month to month and that Guesty asks for 13 months. If that still holds when you ask them directly, contract length is a fair way to decide.

There is also a bigger reason to slow down. Reporting on Hostaway's own 2026 short term rental report found that 70 percent of operators already have a direct booking website while 62 percent get under a quarter of their bookings direct, and 18 percent get none at all. For most of those operators the property system is not what is holding the direct number down, so changing it will not raise it. If you want to see the rest of the field before you commit, the channel manager and PMS comparison has the prices side by side.

If you have a quote from either of them and want somebody to read it with you before you sign, book a call and I will go through it with you.