If you own a handful of rentals and you have spent any time searching for a way to keep track of them, you have probably landed on Stessa. It shows up in every landlord forum thread, it has a genuinely useful free tier, and it does one thing extremely well: it turns your rental portfolio into a clean set of financial statements. That is a real value proposition, and it is why Stessa has the user base it has.
KeyLoft comes at the same problem from a different direction. Instead of starting with the balance sheet, it starts with the daily reality of running units — who paid, who did not, what is broken, when the lease ends, what the last inspection found. It stores all of that on your phone, with no account, no bank connection, and no monthly fee.
These are not the same product, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. This comparison lays out what each tool actually does, where Stessa is the better pick, and where KeyLoft fits better. If you are a solo operator with two to twelve doors, the answer is probably not as obvious as the marketing on either side suggests.
Quick Comparison
| Feature | KeyLoft | Stessa |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, no tiers, no upsell | Free tier; Pro around $20/month billed annually |
| Works Offline | Yes — full functionality with no connection | No — cloud-only, requires internet |
| Account Required | No account, no email, no password | Yes — email account required to use anything |
| Best For | Solo landlords and small portfolios managing day-to-day operations | Investors focused on portfolio-level financial reporting and tax prep |
| Platform | iOS (iPhone and iPad) | Web plus iOS and Android companion apps |
| Key Features | Rent tracking, tenant and lease records, maintenance logs, inspections, document notes, reminders | Bank and mortgage syncing, automated transaction categorization, income statements, Schedule E export, property valuation estimates |
| Data Privacy | Data stays on your device; nothing uploaded, no bank credentials involved | Data stored on Stessa servers; bank linking via third-party aggregator |
Pricing
Let us be precise here, because "free" gets thrown around loosely in this category.
Stessa has a real free tier, and it is more generous than most. You can add unlimited properties, link bank accounts, and get automated income and expense tracking without paying anything. The paid tier — Stessa Pro, roughly $20 per month when billed annually, or higher month-to-month — adds things like accelerated bank syncing, unlimited receipt scanning, custom reporting, mortgage account tracking, and access to state-specific lease agreements. Stessa also monetizes through partner products such as banking, insurance, and loan referrals, which is worth knowing simply because it explains how a free tier stays free.
KeyLoft is free with no paid tier at all. There is no Pro version waiting behind a feature you will eventually need, no per-unit charge as your portfolio grows, and no subscription that renews quietly on an annual cycle. The tradeoff is honest and worth stating plainly: KeyLoft does not sync your bank accounts, so it does not automate categorization the way Stessa does. You get simplicity and zero cost; you give up automation.
| Time Period | KeyLoft | Stessa Free | Stessa Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 | $0 | ~$20 |
| 1 Year | $0 | $0 | ~$240 |
| 3 Years | $0 | $0 | ~$720 |
The honest read: if the Stessa free tier covers what you need, cost is not the deciding factor between these two. The dollar comparison only matters if you would end up on Stessa Pro. What actually separates them is how each tool works and what it asks of you.
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Features
What Stessa does well. Stessa's core strength is automated financial tracking. You connect your rental bank account and mortgage, and it pulls transactions in, categorizes most of them into standard real estate expense buckets, and rolls the whole thing into an income statement, a net cash flow view, and a Schedule E–shaped export at tax time. If you have four properties across three banks, that automation genuinely saves hours in April. It also tracks property value estimates, gives you a portfolio-level dashboard, and handles receipt capture so paper does not pile up.
Stessa is, at heart, accounting software wearing a real estate skin. That is a compliment. For an investor who thinks in cap rates and cash-on-cash returns and wants a single dashboard across a growing portfolio, it is a strong tool and the free tier is a real gift.
Where Stessa is thinner. Operations. Stessa knows a $180 payment hit your account and tagged it as repairs. It does not do much to help you remember that Unit 2B reported a leaking faucet eleven days ago, that you told them the plumber was coming Tuesday, that the plumber never showed, and that you need to follow up before this becomes a habitability complaint. Tenant communication history, maintenance workflow, inspection records, lease-date awareness — these are the parts of landlording that eat your evenings, and they are not where Stessa's product focus lives.
What KeyLoft does well. KeyLoft is built around units and tenants rather than transactions. Each property holds its tenants, lease terms and end dates, rent amounts and payment history, maintenance requests with status and notes, inspection records, and free-form notes for the things that do not fit a form. When a tenant texts you at 9pm about a broken dishwasher, you log it in ten seconds, and three weeks later you can see exactly what happened and when.
Rent tracking in KeyLoft is manual entry, which sounds like a downside until you consider that most small landlords already know within a minute whether rent came in. Marking it paid is faster than reconciling an auto-categorized transaction that got labeled wrong. For a portfolio under roughly a dozen units, manual is not a burden — it is clarity.
KeyLoft also does not try to be your whole business. If you run other work alongside your rentals, purpose-built tools beat one bloated platform. Landlords who freelance or run a side business on top of rental income often pair KeyLoft with Stintly for time tracking, invoicing, and self-employment finances. And if you are doing serious rehab work — a full unit turnover, a roof, a basement conversion — job-level cost tracking belongs in something like TrestleBook, which handles construction project management, contractor billing, and job costing properly rather than flattening a $40,000 renovation into a single "capital improvement" line.
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Offline & Privacy
This is the clearest difference between the two, and it is not a minor one.
Stessa is cloud-only. No internet, no access. That is fine most of the time and genuinely annoying some of the time — standing in a concrete-walled basement checking a water heater, walking a unit in a rural area with no signal, on a plane trying to prep for a tax appointment. KeyLoft works entirely offline. Every record is on the device. Airplane mode changes nothing about what you can see or do.
The privacy difference runs deeper. Stessa requires an account, and to get its main benefit you link bank and mortgage accounts through a third-party data aggregator. Millions of people do this and it is a normal, mainstream arrangement. But it means your rental income, your mortgage balances, your transaction history, and your tenants' payment patterns live on servers you do not control, at a company that also monetizes through financial partner referrals. If that company changes its pricing, gets acquired, or shifts its data practices, you are along for the ride.
KeyLoft asks for nothing. No email, no password, no bank credentials, no cloud account. Your tenants' names, their payment history, and your notes about disputes or late rent never leave your phone. For anyone handling tenant personal information — which is every landlord — keeping that data local is a real reduction in exposure, not a marketing line.
The practical test: if the company behind your software shut down tomorrow, would you still have your records? With a local-first app, yes. With a cloud platform, you are dependent on an export you probably have not run.
The honest tradeoff: local-only means no automatic multi-device sync and no web dashboard, and your backup story is your device backup. If you want your records on a laptop and a phone simultaneously, Stessa wins that.
Who Should Use Stessa
Stessa is the better choice if you fit any of these:
- You are optimizing for tax and reporting. If your main pain is assembling Schedule E and reconciling a year of transactions, automated bank sync and categorization will save you real time.
- You have a growing portfolio across multiple accounts. Six-plus properties spread across several banks and mortgages is exactly the situation automation was built for.
- You think like an investor first. Portfolio-level dashboards, valuation estimates, and equity tracking matter to you more than maintenance logs.
- You work primarily on a desktop. Stessa's web app is its strongest surface; KeyLoft has no web version.
- You need multi-device or multi-person access. A partner, spouse, or bookkeeper who needs the same view is a genuine reason to be in the cloud.
- You are comfortable linking financial accounts. If that does not bother you, you get the automation for free.
Who Should Use KeyLoft
KeyLoft fits best if you recognize yourself here:
- You have one to twelve units and run them yourself. Manual entry takes minutes a month at this scale, and you avoid a whole category of syncing problems.
- Your pain is operations, not accounting. Missed maintenance follow-ups, forgotten lease renewal windows, and losing track of who said what are the problems that actually cost you.
- You will not link bank accounts. Some landlords simply will not, whether for privacy, mixed personal-and-rental accounts, or plain preference. That is a legitimate position, and it makes Stessa's core feature unusable for you.
- You want zero subscriptions. On a small portfolio, $240 a year against thin margins is a real line item, and free means free permanently.
- You work in the field. Basements, garages, rural properties, dead zones. Offline is not a niche requirement when you are the one walking the units.
- You want to start today. No signup, no verification email, no onboarding flow. Download and enter your first property in under a minute.
The Bottom Line
Stessa and KeyLoft solve adjacent problems, and the honest recommendation depends on which problem is yours.
If your rentals are primarily an investment you need to report on cleanly, and you are willing to link accounts and stay online, Stessa is a good tool with a legitimately generous free tier. Use it. The paid tier only makes sense once portfolio size makes the automation worth $240 a year.
If your rentals are a business you actively run — if you are the one answering the maintenance call, walking the unit, and chasing late rent — the daily friction is operational, and that is the gap KeyLoft fills. Free, offline, no account, no data leaving your phone.
There is also a reasonable third answer: use both. Nothing stops you from keeping your books in Stessa's free tier while running day-to-day operations in KeyLoft. Since KeyLoft costs nothing and needs no account, trying it carries no risk and no cleanup if it turns out not to fit.
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