Lodgify is built to get a small operator a working direct booking site quickly, and Hostaway is built for the manager adding properties who wants tighter control of the channels. Lodgify's four plans are $14, $26, $42 and $62 a month on a year paid up front, or $18, $33, $53 and $77 month to month, every one of those figures priced for a single property. Hostaway's pricing page asks how many listings you manage and then puts you through to a salesperson, so there is nothing to compare until a quote lands in your inbox. At 8 to 25 units the Lodgify prices you can see are not yours either, because the cheapest plan takes one property and the second takes two.
For most properties this size I would start with Lodgify, and the reason is the website rather than the monthly figure. Lodgify sells the site and the booking engine as the product, its plans list a 0% booking fee, and it gives you an onboarding specialist at no extra cost and says most hosts are moved across within a few days. If Airbnb and Booking.com fill your calendar today and your own site is a page with a phone number on it, what Lodgify sells you is a site and a checkout that take the card themselves. The website builder is what Lodgify leads with.
Hostaway is worth the sales call at the other end of that range, and the operator who should make it is the one already taking money on their own domain who intends to keep building on it. Hostaway's own hosted booking website costs nothing on top of the subscription. It takes 1.8% of the rate and fees on a US booking that comes through that site, and it charges guests on your own Stripe or Braintree account.
If you already run one of the two, expect to spend weeks of your own time on a switch, because at a property this size that work lands on the owner. Before you start, add up what the system you have costs you in a normal month, counting the bookings you lost and the hours you spent working around it, and set that total against several weeks of migration.
What you will actually pay
Lodgify's Basic plan is limited to one property and Starter to two, which rules both out for everyone reading this. That leaves Professional and Ultimate, and their price climbs as you add properties to the box on the page, so the $42 and $62 you can see are one property figures and yours will be higher. Lodgify says as much on the page itself: the price varies with how many properties you manage and which features you take.
Hostaway asks the same question before it will say anything, and then answers by email. Owners comparing the two in public complain that the figures they hear do not agree with each other. On the BiggerPockets forum, an operator weighing Hostaway against Lodgify wrote, "Hostaway seems expensive I have seen different prices online." A quote that only arrives over the phone cannot be checked against anything published, so you are taking the salesperson's word for it.
So write to both, on the same day, with the same four questions: the monthly price at your exact unit count, whether that price changes the month you add a unit, what either of them takes from a booking made on your own site, and how you reach support at 9pm on a Saturday when a card has been declined on a same-day arrival. Ask for it in writing. Time each reply and note how much of the question it actually answers. You are testing the support desk you will be calling once you are a customer.
The fee on your own bookings, which only one of them has
Hostaway's booking website carries a charge the subscription does not cover: 1.8% of the room rate and fees, taxes excluded, on a US listing paid through Stripe, which Hostaway calls the Guest Service Fee. In Canada and everywhere else outside the US the same booking carries 0.5%, under the name Host Processing Fee. Ask which rate applies where your property is, and whose side of the booking it comes off.
Put a real booking through it. A four night stay at $150 a night is $600, and the US fee on it is $10.80. Fifteen of those a month is $162, which is more than the top Lodgify plan costs at one property. Over the border in Canada the same fifteen bookings carry $45. Next to what Booking.com takes on the same stay, both figures are small. They still come off the bookings you worked hardest for, and they grow as your own site starts to work.
Card processing sits on top of either of them. Stripe's standard US rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents on a card payment that goes through, and Hostaway adds Stripe's own fee to each charge from what Stripe hands back, so nothing there is hidden from you.
| Hostaway | Lodgify | |
|---|---|---|
| Published price | None. The pricing page asks your listing count and opens a quote | $14, $26, $42 and $62 a month billed yearly, or $18, $33, $53 and $77 billed monthly, at one property |
| The price at 8 to 25 units | By quote | Not published. Basic caps at one property and Starter at two; the other two plans price on how many you run |
| Fee on a booking taken through its own site | 1.8% of rate and fees on a US listing on Stripe, or 0.5% elsewhere | The plans list a 0% booking fee |
| Website and booking engine | Included, with no subscription cost on the standard plan | The product you are buying |
| Where the card money goes | Your own Stripe or Braintree account | Stripe and PayPal are among its gateways |
| A card that fails as the booking is made | The booking is deleted and your site is handed an error | The booking is already made, so something has to cancel it |
| Getting your listings across | Not published | An onboarding specialist at no extra cost, and most hosts done in a few days, by Lodgify's account |
Checked on September 2026, from Hostaway's pricing page, Hostaway's booking engine fee article, Hostaway's developer reference, Lodgify's pricing page, Lodgify's switching page and Lodgify's documentation.
Sync and support, the two things owners argue about
Two complaints follow Lodgify around the host forums. One host comparing it with Hostaway writes, "DO NOT USE LODGIFY !!! TOTAL waste of time and your money. The sync systems do not work," and goes on to say that support happens by email and nothing else. Hostaway, for its part, publishes a page saying it beats Lodgify on Capterra, Trustpilot and G2, which is Hostaway writing about Hostaway. Neither of those settles anything about your property.
You can test both complaints yourself. Sync means the calendar: block a date in the system, then go and look at your own Airbnb and Booking.com listings and time how long it takes to disappear. Support means the out of hours reply: send the question at 9pm on a Saturday and see what comes back and when. Ask each of them for a demo account you can do both of those in. Give it two weeks and write down what you saw, because your own note of how long the calendar took and how long support took is worth more to you than the threads are.
While you have the demo open, write down everything else you already pay for, the smart locks, the dynamic pricing tool, the cleaning schedule, the accounting package, and look each one up by name on both vendors' app pages. A logo on a marketplace page is not a promise that your particular lock or your version of the accounting package connects, so make support confirm the model you own before you sign.
When your own website is doing the work
Once you sell on your own domain, the two part company over what happens when a guest's card is declined. Hostaway can create the booking and charge the card in the same step, and a failed charge deletes the reservation and hands your site an error. Nothing is left on the calendar for you to find on Monday. Lodgify makes the booking first and collects the money afterwards through a payment link, so an abandoned card form leaves a booking sitting on your dates until something removes it.
Hostaway also tells you when the link to your own systems breaks. It sends a message every time a booking is made or changed, and if your side does not answer, it tries three times, then stops and emails you the failed message, and it switches off a connection that has been failing for five days straight. Lodgify keeps knocking instead, up to ten times, until your side answers, and then its attempts stop without telling anyone. If your site goes deaf to Lodgify overnight, nothing arrives in your inbox to say so and you hear it first from a guest. What a build on Hostaway involves goes through the rest of it.
Neither of these runs our own building. MINT @Naschmarkt, the serviced apartments I co-own in Vienna, is on Hostfully today, and in August we decided to move to Guesty. Everything in the rows above comes off these two vendors' own pages. What our own migration taught me that applies to this pair is about whose account holds the card money. When we first wired our booking page up, the charge was going through the property system's own payment account, and moving it onto our own Stripe account instead took 1% off the top of every direct payment we took. Hostaway hands you that account by default; ask Lodgify's salesperson whose account your guests' money lands in before the first booking arrives. Changing that after the money has started moving is slow and easy to get wrong. Guesty against Hostaway covers the third name that turns up in every one of these threads.
So which one
Lodgify is the answer for an operator running 8 to 15 units whose bookings nearly all arrive through the platforms and who has nobody technical to call. You get a working site and checkout inside a week for a price you knew in advance, and outgrowing it later is a good problem.
If you run 15 to 25 units and already take some money on your own domain, get the Hostaway quote. You are paying for the payment account staying yours and for being told when something breaks, so the quote itself decides this one. Put the number beside what Lodgify's own page quotes once you type your unit count into it, and make whoever is more expensive say what the difference buys.
Neither of them is built around a B&B or an inn with a front desk and a breakfast service. Both grew up around whole houses rented to a family for a week, and a property with room types and a daily arrivals list will spend its first month translating itself into their vocabulary. Look at the website builders and booking engines aimed at your kind of property before you settle.
If you have a quote from either of them sitting in your inbox, send it over and I will read it with you.
