Little Hotelier vs Lodgify: which one fits your small hotel, inn or serviced apartments
Christian, Co-founder, Fullstreak; co-owner, MINT @Naschmarkt, Vienna
Published
Lodgify is the better answer if your first problem is having no booking page of your own, and Little Hotelier if your first problem is keeping the platforms in step. Lodgify starts at $18 a month for one property and takes no cut of a booking. Little Hotelier starts at $39 a month and adds 1% of what you sell, both figures off their own pricing pages in October 2026.
Fullstreak is a done-for-you direct booking service for independent hotels and rentals. It puts your property into the answers Google and ChatGPT give, tracks every guest back to where they found you, and takes the booking on your own website, working over the property system you already run so you keep the commission the platforms take today.
At a glance
Who this is for
Operators selling the same unit on more than one channel, who have been caught out once already.
What you get
Lodgify if your first problem is having no booking page of your own, Little Hotelier if your first problem is keeping the platforms in step. Prices, the pooled inventory question, and a verdict by property size.
Both are starting prices, so your quote lands above the page, and Little Hotelier's payments page never says whether you may bring your own processor the way Lodgify's Stripe route lets you. Ask that on the sales call.
Whether your own page can take the booking
On Lodgify, yes. A connection your web developer can set up lets your own site reach your real booking calendar directly, so it can check true availability and create an actual reservation straight into that live calendar. On Little Hotelier, nobody outside the company can promise you that today. SiteMinder's own developer guide states that availability and rates data is not yet available for SiteMinder Platform and Little Hotelier properties, so an outside page cannot read what is free, let alone sell it, and its booking channel guide will not connect a second property to any outside booking system until the first one has been running successfully with real guests. What you can build is a button that hands the guest to the checkout Little Hotelier hosts. If Lodgify is where you land, how to build a direct booking site on Lodgify covers what its connection gives your checkout.
When one unit books, do the others still show free?
Pooled inventory is what you have whenever four identical queens go on sale under one name and the system owes you a number: how many are still free tonight. Lodgify's availability reference names exactly that field, the number of available units for the period, so your own site can read it and check. SiteMinder publishes no availability data for Little Hotelier properties, so from outside there is nothing to check against. Lodgify hands you a number you can test for yourself, something Little Hotelier never provides.
MINT @Naschmarkt in Vienna belongs to Maxine and me, five apartment types across 18 serviced apartments, and for a stretch of last year the booking page was saying no on nights we had free. 5 of 30 nights looked bookable before the fix; 26 of 30 after. Pooled multi-unit availability had been reporting a whole apartment type unavailable if any one physical unit was booked. We had developers rebuild how occupancy got counted, working it out straight from the reservations instead of trusting that flag. The pooled-inventory fix our team ran at MINT is written up with its caveats.
This kind of failure can run for months before anyone catches it. A double booking usually surfaces within a day, because a guest calls or shows up. A guest wrongly turned away just books elsewhere without complaining, so you never find out you lost the sale. Test it by taking one unit of a type you sell two or more of off sale for a midweek night a month out, then asking your own page for that type as a guest would. The same ground against a different rival is in our Hostaway vs Lodgify comparison.
Which one to buy at your unit count
Here is what I would pick at each size, before the subscription price talks you out of it.
Your property
What I would do
8 to 15 units, almost everything booked through the platforms, nobody technical on the payroll
Little Hotelier. More than 450 channels and a price printed on a page beat a connection you have no plan to build
15 to 25 units, with a little money already arriving on your own domain
Lodgify. Your own page can create the booking, and you can read a real count of free units per type
Already running one of the two
Stay, unless the capability you are missing is published on the other one and on no plan of yours
Give Little Hotelier its due before you move: its own booking engine page reports customers seeing 50% increases in direct bookings and 40% profit growth. What it will not do at your size is let anybody build a checkout of your own on top of it. Either way, the switch itself is what costs you, well beyond the gap between the two subscriptions. When we modelled putting our own apartments onto a different property system, the work came out at 4 to 6 weeks of a developer working on little else, plus 2 to 4 weeks running the old and new systems side by side as a safety net, where an earlier estimate had put the whole migration at 3 to 4 months end to end.
If you are still not sure
What most operators want settled is whether the system they choose now will block the booking page they want later. Lodgify will not, and Little Hotelier does today unless SiteMinder publishes something new. We do the direct booking side ourselves, over whichever system you keep, and the first booking usually lands on the property's own domain about three weeks in. Under about $350,000 of bookings a year the commission saved does not cover what the work costs, which is better said here than on a quote.
Bring the one you are leaning toward to the call, and we will tell you where it stops and what that costs you. Twenty minutes, prepared for your property. Book a call, or run the commission math with the calculator first.
Questions operators ask
Is Lodgify worth it?
On the review data, yes for most of the people buying it: Software Advice shows 4.5 out of 5 across 1,311 reviews, ahead of Little Hotelier on every sub metric it tracks, checked on October 2026. Unless you plan to build your own checkout, you will be paying for a strength most buyers at your size never use.
How much does Lodgify cost per month?
Four plans, priced at one property: Basic $18, Starter $33, Professional $58 and Ultimate $85 a month, or $14, $26, $47 and $68 paid annually, with no booking fee, read off Lodgify's own page in October 2026. The price scales with how many properties you manage, and which plan lets you connect your own booking page is marked only with an icon the page text does not spell out, so get that confirmed in writing before you buy to build on.
How much does Little Hotelier cost per month?
Basics is published from $39 a month, with a 1% booking fee calculated on total bookings after cancellations are taken out, and Pro from $179 a month, checked on October 2026. Both are "from" prices: the figure for your property comes out of the room count calculator or a sales call.
Which of Little Hotelier and Lodgify can my own booking site build on?
Lodgify. You generate the key yourself in your account settings, and it lets your site both check availability and create new bookings. Lodgify also keeps your site updated automatically the moment a booking changes. On Little Hotelier, SiteMinder's own developer guide says outside websites cannot see availability and rates at all, and before it will accept a booking from an outside system, that system has to already be running successfully on one property with real guests.
Is it worth switching from Little Hotelier to Lodgify?
Only if what you are missing is what Lodgify publishes and Little Hotelier does not: a booking created by your own page, and a count of free units per type your site can read. Switch for that, or for a quote materially better at your unit count, and plan for weeks of your attention with little else moving while the migration runs.
What do Little Hotelier and Lodgify reviews say?
Software Advice puts Lodgify at 4.5 from 1,311 reviews and Little Hotelier at 4.1 from 237, with Lodgify rated higher on every sub metric it tracks, checked on October 2026. The gap in review counts matters as much as the gap in scores, since one pool is several times the size of the other.
Co-founder, Fullstreak; co-owner, MINT @Naschmarkt, Vienna
I own MINT @Naschmarkt in Vienna with Maxine, and I run Ekamoira, the agency Fullstreak came out of. Almost every booking we took arrived through the platforms, so we built the site that takes the booking, the plumbing that keeps one calendar, and the pages Google and the AI assistants quote. MINT ran it first. Fullstreak is that work, made repeatable for operators like you.
Every vendor claim traces to the vendor's own page, checked on the month shown under each table. MINT numbers come from our own books.
See where your own bookings leak.
Twenty minutes on a call. You get a read on where your bookings start today, what the platforms take, and what a direct channel would take to build. It is yours whether or not you hire us.
