Avail has been the default recommendation in landlord forums for years, and for good reason — it does a lot for a platform with a free tier. But defaults get recommended out of habit as much as merit, and plenty of landlords who sign up end up looking for something else within a few months. Usually not because Avail is bad, but because it's built for a slightly different landlord than the one using it.
If you're searching for alternatives, you probably have a specific irritation in mind. This guide covers five options, what each one is genuinely good at, and where each falls short. No pretending every tool is great at everything.
Why People Switch From Avail
The complaints cluster into a few predictable buckets.
The free tier stops being enough faster than expected. Avail's free plan covers the basics, but state-specific lease agreements, next-day rent deposits, and custom application questions sit behind the Unlimited Plus tier at $7 per unit per month. That's fine at two units. At twelve units it's $84 a month, which is real money for features that used to feel like table stakes.
Everything requires an account and an internet connection. Avail is a web platform. Your data lives on their servers. If you want to check a unit's rent history while standing in a basement with no signal, you can't. If you want to look at your own records without logging into anything, you can't. For landlords who think of their rent roll as private financial information rather than a SaaS account, that framing chafes.
The tenant-facing features assume tenants will cooperate. Online rent payments, maintenance ticket portals, and tenant screening invitations all depend on tenants signing up and using the system. Landlords with long-term tenants who pay by check and text about the water heater find themselves maintaining a platform their tenants ignore.
It's more platform than record. Avail wants to be the place where the whole rental relationship happens. Some landlords want a place to keep track of things, and the difference matters more than it sounds.
The right tool depends less on unit count than on whether you want a platform that runs your rentals or a record that documents them.
1. KeyLoft (Free)
KeyLoft is a property management app for iPhone and iPad that runs entirely on your device. No account, no login, no cloud sync, no subscription tier waiting to be unlocked. You download it and start entering properties.
It tracks units, tenants, lease terms and dates, rent payments, security deposits, expenses, and maintenance history. Everything is stored locally, which means it works in a basement, on a plane, in a rural property with no bars. There's no server outage that can take your records away, and no company that can change the pricing on data you already entered.
What it's good at: Being the durable record of what happened. Lease start and end dates, what rent was raised to and when, which deposit was returned and how much was withheld, when the furnace was serviced. This is the information you need at tax time, at renewal time, and in the unpleasant event of a deposit dispute — and it's exactly the information that's most annoying to reconstruct from memory and a shoebox of receipts.
What it doesn't do: KeyLoft doesn't collect rent, doesn't run credit checks, doesn't syndicate listings to Zillow, and doesn't give tenants a portal. If online rent collection is the reason you use software at all, KeyLoft alone won't replace Avail. Plenty of landlords pair it with a payment app they already use — Zelle, Venmo, a bank transfer — and let KeyLoft handle the records.
Who it fits: Landlords with one to roughly twenty units who want organized records without a monthly bill or an account. Especially good if your tenants are long-term, pay reliably, and have no interest in learning a new portal.
Try KeyLoft free today. Download KeyLoft for Free — no subscription, no account, works 100% offline.
2. TurboTenant (Free, $9.92/month Premium)
TurboTenant is Avail's closest competitor and the most direct swap if you like the Avail model but not the Avail price. The free tier is genuinely broad: listing syndication, online rental applications, tenant screening (paid by the applicant rather than you), and rent collection.
Pros: The free tier does more than Avail's free tier in most areas. Screening costs land on the applicant, which is a real savings if you show a unit to eight people. Listing syndication to major rental sites works well and is the single hardest thing to replicate manually.
Cons: The free tier is free because it's a funnel. Expect upsell prompts throughout the interface, and expect partner offers for insurance and other services. Premium at $9.92 a month unlocks lease agreements, expense tracking, and faster rent deposits. Accounting features are thin compared to a dedicated bookkeeping tool. Like Avail, it's cloud-only and account-required.
Who it fits: Landlords who are actively filling vacancies and want listing plus application plus screening in one place, and who don't mind a promotional interface.
3. Stessa (Free, $20/month Pro)
Stessa comes at rentals from the accounting side rather than the operations side. It connects to your bank accounts, auto-categorizes transactions into Schedule E categories, and generates the financial reports that make tax filing less painful.
Pros: The best free financial tracking in this list by a clear margin. Automatic transaction import genuinely saves hours if you have a dedicated rental bank account. Reports are structured the way your accountant wants to see them. Property value tracking and portfolio-level dashboards are useful once you own several doors.
Cons: Weak on the operational side — lease management, tenant communication, and maintenance tracking are afterthoughts. Bank connections break periodically and need reauthorizing, which is an industry-wide annoyance but still an annoyance. Pro at $20 a month adds unlimited receipt scanning, rent analysis, and faster reporting. Also fully cloud-based.
Who it fits: Landlords whose main pain is tax preparation and cash-flow visibility, especially those with five or more properties in separate accounts. Pairs reasonably with an operations tool rather than replacing one.
4. Spreadsheets (Free)
Worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. A well-built Google Sheet or Excel workbook handles rent rolls, expense logs, and cash-flow projections for a small portfolio, costs nothing, and has no vendor who can change the terms on you.
Pros: Total flexibility. Exports to anything. You already know how to use it. Nobody's free tier gets restricted next quarter.
Cons: Manual entry, and manual entry that happens on a laptop tends to not happen at all. Spreadsheets are terrible on a phone, which is where you actually are when a tenant hands you a check or a repair invoice. No reminders for lease expirations. Formula errors are silent and can go unnoticed for a year.
Who it fits: Landlords with one or two units and strong spreadsheet discipline. Also a solid backup layer alongside an app.
5. Rentec Direct / Buildium (Paid, No Real Free Tier)
Including these honestly because they're where the search often ends. Both are full property management platforms — accounting, tenant portals, owner statements, work orders, the whole apparatus. Neither has a meaningful free tier; Rentec starts around $45 a month, Buildium around $58 with a minimum unit count.
Pros: Everything in one place, built for scale. If you manage other people's properties, own statements and trust accounting stop being optional and these tools handle them properly.
Cons: Overkill and overpriced below roughly twenty-five units. Setup takes real effort. Interfaces prioritize completeness over speed.
Who it fits: Landlords crossing into small property-management-company territory, or anyone managing units on behalf of other owners.
What to Look for in an Alternative
Pick based on your actual bottleneck, not the feature list.
Identify the one thing that's actually broken. Are you losing track of lease dates? Scrambling at tax time? Struggling to fill vacancies? Chasing late rent? Each of those points at a different tool. Buying a platform to solve a records problem means paying for four modules to use one.
Check what the free tier costs you later. Every free tier is a business decision by its vendor. Some monetize with upsells, some with a paid tier you'll eventually need, some by selling adjacent services. None of that is sinister — but know which one you're signing up for, because it predicts what changes in two years.
Ask where the data lives and how you get it out. Before entering three years of history, find the export function. If it doesn't exist or is locked behind a paid tier, that's a switching cost being built quietly. Local-first apps sidestep this because the data is already on your hardware.
Account for how your tenants actually behave. Tenant-facing features are only worth paying for if tenants use them. A portal that three of your eight tenants log into is administrative overhead, not automation.
Match the tool to where the work happens. Rental work happens at properties, in cars, in hardware store parking lots. A tool that only works well at a desk gets used at a desk, which means later, which means never. This is the same reason contractors managing job costs on site gravitate toward mobile-first tools like TrestleBook for construction project tracking and billing, and why self-employed people tracking billable hours use Stintly rather than reconstructing a week from memory on Friday afternoon. Record-keeping that requires a trip back to the office is record-keeping that doesn't happen.
Making the Switch
Migration is less painful than the anticipation of it, but a few things help.
Don't cancel first. Run the new tool alongside Avail for one full rent cycle. You'll find out what you actually relied on — usually one or two things you'd have forgotten to check for.
Export everything before you downgrade. Avail lets you export tenant and payment data. Do it while your account is still active and at its current tier. Save the files somewhere that isn't a vendor's cloud.
Migrate current state, not full history. You don't need every transaction from 2019 in the new system. Enter active leases, current tenants, deposit amounts held, and this year's expenses. Keep the old export as your archive for anything older. This turns a weekend project into an evening.
Handle rent collection separately and deliberately. If you're leaving a platform that collected rent, tell tenants in writing at least thirty days out, with the new method spelled out plainly. This is the one part of a migration tenants notice, and confusion here produces late payments that are your fault, not theirs.
Recreate your reminders immediately. Lease expirations, rent increase notice deadlines, and insurance renewals living in the old system need a new home on day one. This is the single most common thing landlords forget during a switch, and the consequence — a lease auto-renewing at last year's rent — is expensive.
Give it a full quarter. Any new tool feels worse than the old one for a few weeks because the old one's quirks were invisible from habit. Judge after a rent cycle and a maintenance request, not after an afternoon.
Most landlords looking to leave Avail don't need more software — they need less of it, aimed better. If your bottleneck is records rather than operations, a free offline app that keeps clean lease and payment history solves the actual problem without adding a monthly bill or another account to manage.