If you own a handful of rentals and you're tired of a spreadsheet that lives in three places at once, you eventually land on the same two options: a full online landlord platform like Avail, or a simple app that just tracks what you own and what you're owed. Avail is a real product with real users and the backing of Realtor.com. KeyLoft is a free iPhone app that works without an account or an internet connection. They solve overlapping problems in genuinely different ways, and the right answer depends far more on your portfolio than on any feature checklist.
This comparison is written by the people who build KeyLoft, so read it with that in mind. What follows is an honest accounting: where Avail is clearly the better tool, where KeyLoft wins, and where the two aren't really competing at all.
Quick Comparison
| Feature | KeyLoft | Avail |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, no tiers, no upsell | Free plan; Unlimited Plus around $7/unit/month |
| Works Offline | Yes — fully functional with zero connectivity | No — cloud platform, requires internet |
| Account Required | No sign-up, no email, no password | Yes — account for you, accounts for tenants |
| Best For | Solo landlords, 1–20 units, self-managed | Landlords who want online rent collection and tenant portals |
| Platform | iPhone and iPad | Web browser, plus mobile apps |
| Key Features | Property records, tenant info, rent tracking, expense logging, lease dates, maintenance notes | Online rent payments, state-specific leases, tenant screening, listing syndication, maintenance ticketing, e-signature |
| Data Privacy | Data stays on your device; nothing transmitted | Data stored on company servers under corporate ownership |
Pricing
Avail's pricing is honest and fairly generous by industry standards. The free tier covers the basics: listing your unit, collecting applications, standard lease templates, and online rent collection with slower ACH transfers. The paid tier — Unlimited Plus, roughly $7 per unit per month — adds state-specific lease agreements, next-day rent payments, custom application questions, waived fees on FastPay, and cloner tools for duplicating listings and leases across units.
Per-unit pricing is reasonable at small scale and quietly expensive as you grow. Two units is pocket change. Twelve units is $84 a month, which is $1,008 a year — real money for a portfolio that might net a few hundred dollars per door monthly. That isn't a criticism of Avail's business model; per-unit pricing is standard across the category and it aligns cost with the value larger landlords extract. It's just arithmetic worth doing before you commit.
KeyLoft has no pricing page because there is no price. No free trial that expires, no unit caps, no premium tier holding the useful features hostage. The app is free because it doesn't run servers, doesn't process payments, and doesn't store your data — there's no ongoing cost to pass along.
| Time Period | KeyLoft | Avail Free | Avail Unlimited Plus (6 units) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 | $0 | $42 |
| 1 Year | $0 | $0 | $504 |
| 3 Years | $0 | $0 | $1,512 |
Worth stating plainly: Avail's free tier is genuinely usable, and a landlord with two units who mainly wants online rent collection can run on it indefinitely. The paid tier is where the per-unit math starts to matter.
Save money. Try KeyLoft free today. Download KeyLoft for Free — no account needed, works 100% offline.
Features
Avail is a transaction platform. Its center of gravity is money and paperwork moving between you and your tenants. Tenants get their own login where they pay rent, submit maintenance requests, and sign documents. You get listing syndication that pushes vacancies to Realtor.com and partner sites, tenant screening with credit and background reports, state-specific lease agreements that account for local disclosure requirements, and e-signature. Rent auto-charges and payment reminders go out without you touching anything. For a landlord who wants the entire leasing lifecycle handled in one browser tab, that's a coherent and well-built package.
The state-specific leases deserve particular credit. Lease compliance varies enormously by jurisdiction — required disclosures, deposit limits, notice periods — and having a template that's already accounted for your state is worth real money compared to a generic form or a lawyer's hourly rate.
KeyLoft is a record-keeping tool. It holds the information you actually need at hand: what properties you own, who's in each unit, what rent is due and whether it arrived, when leases start and end, what you spent and on what, and what maintenance has been done. You open it, you log something, you close it. There are no tenant accounts because tenants don't use KeyLoft — you do.
That's a deliberate narrowing, and it comes with real tradeoffs. KeyLoft does not collect rent. It does not screen tenants. It does not run credit checks or syndicate listings or handle e-signatures. If those are the jobs you need done, KeyLoft is simply the wrong tool and you should use Avail or something like it.
What KeyLoft gives you in exchange is speed and independence. No page loads. No login. No password reset when you haven't opened it in a month. Logging a $180 plumbing invoice takes about fifteen seconds. This matters more than feature lists suggest, because the tracking system you actually use beats the comprehensive one you abandon in March.
The same logic drives our other tools. If you also freelance or run a small business alongside the rentals, Stintly handles time tracking and self-employment finances the same way — offline, free, no account. If you do renovation work on your units or run a contracting side of the business, TrestleBook covers job costing and contractor billing. Same philosophy, different domain.
Want to try KeyLoft for free? Download KeyLoft for Free — no subscription required.
Offline & Privacy
Avail is a cloud platform, which is the correct architecture for what it does. Moving money between bank accounts and giving tenants a portal requires servers. There's no offline version of ACH transfers.
But that architecture has consequences you feel in the field. Basements have no signal. Rural properties have no signal. Parking garages, older buildings with thick walls, the back unit behind the main house — these are exactly the places where you're doing an inspection and want to log a cracked outlet cover or a water stain. With a cloud platform, you note it on your phone's notepad and hope you transfer it later. You usually don't.
KeyLoft works with airplane mode on. Every feature, every time. Your data lives in the app on your device, not on a server. That means no outage takes your records away, no service shutdown strands you, and no pricing change forces a migration. It also means the backup responsibility is yours — if you lose the phone without a backup, you lose the data. That's a real tradeoff and we won't pretend otherwise. Device backups handle it, but you have to actually have them turned on.
On privacy: KeyLoft doesn't transmit your data because it doesn't have anywhere to transmit it to. Your tenants' names, their payment history, your unit addresses, and your expense records never leave your phone. Avail stores this on servers owned by a company that is itself owned by Realtor.com, which is owned by Move, Inc., which is majority-owned by News Corp. Avail's privacy practices appear reasonable and they're a legitimate operator. But corporate ownership chains change, terms of service get revised, and data collected for one purpose has a way of finding new ones. If you're uncomfortable with your tenant roster living inside a real-estate media conglomerate's infrastructure, that discomfort is not irrational.
The practical question isn't whether a company will misuse your data today. It's whether you need them to have it at all.
Who Should Use Avail
Avail is the better choice if any of these describe you:
- You want tenants paying online. Chasing checks is a genuine time cost, and automated rent collection with reminders solves it well. KeyLoft tracks whether rent arrived; it doesn't move the money.
- You're actively filling vacancies. Listing syndication, online applications, and integrated screening compress a multi-week process into a manageable one. That's Avail's strongest suit.
- You need compliant leases without a lawyer. State-specific templates with proper disclosures are worth the subscription on their own if you're signing several leases a year.
- You want tenants self-serving. A portal where tenants submit maintenance requests and pull their own payment history cuts down on texts at 9pm.
- You manage with a partner or co-owner. Cloud sync means both of you see the same data. KeyLoft's device-local storage doesn't share across people.
- You have 20+ units. At that scale, per-unit pricing buys back hours of labor and the automation genuinely pays for itself.
Who Should Use KeyLoft
KeyLoft fits if this sounds more like your situation:
- You have 1–20 units and manage them yourself. Small portfolios rarely need workflow automation. They need accurate records and a way to remember which lease expires in April.
- Your tenants pay by Zelle, Venmo, ACH, or check and it works fine. If rent collection isn't broken, paying per unit to fix it is a strange trade. Track payments in KeyLoft, collect them however you already do.
- You're long-term-hold with low turnover. Listing and screening tools are dead weight if you sign a lease every two years. Day-to-day, you need expense logs and maintenance history, not a leasing funnel.
- You want your tax records in order. Logging expenses by property as they happen turns Schedule E from a February ordeal into a twenty-minute export.
- You work in places with bad signal. Inspections, basements, rural properties, new construction. Offline is a feature, not a fallback.
- You don't want another account. No password, no email verification, no data-sharing agreement, no marketing emails.
- You're testing whether you even like being a landlord. One unit, first year, still figuring it out — a free app costs you nothing to try and nothing to leave.
The Bottom Line
These apps aren't really the same category, which is why "which is better" has no clean answer. Avail is leasing and payment infrastructure. KeyLoft is a ledger for what you own.
If your bottleneck is collecting rent, filling vacancies, or generating compliant leases, Avail does those things well and the paid tier is fairly priced for what it delivers. Landlords with active turnover and a dozen or more units usually come out ahead on it.
If your bottleneck is remembering what you spent, when leases end, and whether unit 3 paid this month — and you're currently solving that with a spreadsheet, a notes app, and optimism — KeyLoft covers it for free, and you'll never hit a paywall or an upsell.
A reasonable middle path: run KeyLoft as your daily ledger and use Avail's free tier when you have a vacancy to fill. The free plan handles listings and applications at no cost, and you skip the per-unit subscription entirely during the long quiet stretches when nothing is turning over. Plenty of small landlords run exactly this way.
Ready to switch? Download KeyLoft for Free — it takes 30 seconds and costs nothing.