Buildium vs AppFolio: pricing, minimums and how to pick

It's Tuesday at a property management office with about seventy doors. Rent was due on the first and nine tenants still haven't paid. A maintenance request came in by voicemail overnight, and another came by text to your own phone. An owner wants her statement. The spreadsheet that held all of this at thirty doors is three tabs behind, so you've narrowed the software search to two names and typed "Buildium vs AppFolio" into Google.

I opened both pricing pages on November 10, 2026: Buildium's and AppFolio's. Every price below comes from one of those two pages. Where a page is silent, I say so instead of borrowing a number from a review site. Both pages change, so check them again before you sign.

Buildium vs AppFolio at a glance

Neither page gives a contract length or cancellation terms. Buildium's page also doesn't say how its "starting at" prices move as your unit count grows, so treat those three numbers as the least you'd pay.

What each one costs at 50, 100 and 200 units

Here is the arithmetic from the published numbers. For Buildium I've added the incoming bank transfer fee, assuming every tenant pays rent that way once a month. For AppFolio it's the per-unit price times the door count, because the page shows nothing else to add.

Don't read that table as "AppFolio is cheaper" yet, for two reasons.

First, the columns don't count the same things. The Buildium numbers include rent payment fees because Buildium publishes them. The AppFolio numbers leave them out because AppFolio doesn't. AppFolio also has a minimum spend with no amount attached, so the real floor at 50 units could sit above $74.50. You'll only learn it on a sales call.

Second, the Buildium figures are a floor too. The plan price may be higher at your unit count, and each owner distribution goes out as an outgoing transfer at $0.99.

On Buildium, the per-payment fee matters more than the plan price as you grow. At 50 units Essential is the cheaper Buildium plan. Somewhere past 137 bank-transfer payments a month, Growth's lower fee makes up its higher price, and by 200 units Growth costs less than Essential.

I broke each product down on its own in Buildium pricing and AppFolio pricing, including add-ons this post skips.

Where the two differ day to day

You can tell from the pricing pages what size of office each company expects.

Buildium is easy for a small shop to pick up. You can start a trial this afternoon with sample data, and there's no stated minimum portfolio. The pricing page lists resident and owner portals, two-way email and text threads, bank reconciliation and inspections. What you give up on the cheapest plan is mostly support and fees: Essential gets ticket support only, pays the highest transfer fee, and pays $5 for every lease that needs a signature.

AppFolio expects a portfolio that's already a certain size. Core starts at 50 units and you can't get in without talking to sales. The entry plan is fuller, though. It already lists accounting and reports, marketing and leasing, work orders, inspections and unit turns, purchase orders, a built-in assistant and messaging. Custom fields, the workflow tool, a read-only API and maintenance scheduling with automated billing wait on Plus. A leasing CRM and a read and write API wait on Max.

The API line matters if you ever want other tools to talk to your software. On Buildium, the open API is a Premium feature. On AppFolio it's read-only on Plus and read and write on Max. At either company, the cheapest plan is the hardest to connect to anything else.

How to pick

Pick by door count first, because it settles more than the feature lists do.

• If you manage fewer than 50 units, go with Buildium. AppFolio's own footnote puts you below Core's minimum. If you still want AppFolio, ask whether you'd be billed for 50 doors anyway.
• Between 50 and about 150 mostly residential units, either can work. Run Buildium's free trial with a real month of your data, then sit through AppFolio's demo and ask for a written quote at your door count. Compare the two totals with payment fees included.
• If you run affordable or student housing, look at AppFolio first. It lists both as Plus features, and Buildium's pricing page doesn't mention either.
• If you want to try the software before talking to anyone, that's Buildium. AppFolio has no trial on its page.
• If most tenants pay by bank transfer and the budget is tight, do the fee math above for your own count before choosing a Buildium plan. Ask sales whether the fee can be passed to the resident, because the page doesn't say.

Four questions for the AppFolio call, since its page leaves them open: what the minimum monthly spend is at your door count, what a resident pays per eCheck and per card payment, what screening costs and who pays, and what onboarding costs. Two for Buildium: what the plan price is at your unit count, and what the required onboarding costs on Growth and Premium.

What neither one does for you

Both products give you a portal and a ledger. Tenants ignore the portal all the time, and neither product decides what happens then. The office work that stays manual looks the same on either one:

1. The maintenance request that arrives as a text or a voicemail, which someone has to type into a work order. I compared the two channels in tenant maintenance requests: portal vs text.
2. The leasing inquiry that lands after hours and waits until morning, by which time the prospect has called two other buildings.
3. The tenant who's five days late and needs a nudge that sounds like it came from a person, on a schedule someone agreed to in advance.
4. The owner who wants to approve a repair over a certain dollar amount and takes three days to answer an email.
5. The Friday question from the owner of the business: how many units are vacant, how much rent is outstanding, and which work orders are older than a week.

These are the pieces I build around whichever product you choose. A missed call gets a text back within a minute asking what's wrong and at which unit. A request that comes by text is turned into one clean summary for whoever dispatches. Late-rent reminders go out on your schedule and stop the moment the payment posts. The weekly numbers arrive on one page. On the cheaper plans, where there's no API, a person still makes the final entry in the software, but that's one entry per real request, with the details already gathered.

I built payment collection and lead tracking like this for a Chicago-area pool service company, which runs a lot like a property office. The same customers get charged on a schedule, and service requests arrive however the customer feels like sending them. Builds start at $500 one-time, then a flat monthly from $99 after an included run-in period, cancellable. There's more on the property management automation page.

What stays with a person

Some calls shouldn't be automated on either platform. When a tenant's description of a leak is vague, somebody in your office decides whether it's an emergency. Approving or denying an application is a person's job too, and fair housing rules apply to how it's done no matter which screening tool produced the report. The tenant who's lost a job and is asking for a payment plan should get a conversation, and so should the owner who's surprised by a statement. What I'd hand to software is gathering the facts and getting them to the right desk quickly, so your staff has time for those conversations.

Before you sign with either

If you're stuck between Buildium and AppFolio, or you're already on one and requests still slip, book a free 20 minute process audit. We'll look at where rent, repairs and owner questions stall in your week, and whether the fix is a different plan or a small build around the one you have. Book it here.