Buildium Alternative for Small Landlords (Under 20 Units)

I tried Buildium. Signed up for the free trial, spent a weekend setting it up, and canceled on day 8.

It's not that Buildium is bad. It's a solid product. But it's built for property managers with 50+ units and a staff. When you have 12 units and it's just you, about 80% of the features are noise.

Why Buildium Doesn't Fit Small Landlords

The starting price is $55/month for up to 20 units. That's $660/year. For 12 units, that's $55/unit/year just for software. That eats into margins fast.

But price isn't the real issue. The real issue is complexity.

Buildium wants you to set up accounting. Categorize every transaction. Run reports. Manage vendors through their system. Set up a tenant portal.

I don't need a tenant portal. My tenants text me. That works fine. I don't need vendor management software. I have 3 vendors and their numbers are in my phone.

For small landlords, Buildium creates more work than it saves.

What Small Landlords Actually Need

I've talked to dozens of landlords with under 20 units. Here's what they actually need:

1. Know when rent is late. Fast. Not 5 days later when they happen to check.

2. Track maintenance requests so nothing falls through the cracks.

3. Keep it simple. They don't want to learn new software. They already have a system. It mostly works.

That's it. Those three things. Everything else is nice to have.

The Alternatives

Google Sheets (free). This is what most small landlords start with. And honestly, it's fine up to about 10 units. The problem starts when you forget to check it. But for pure data tracking, a spreadsheet is hard to beat.

TenantCloud (free tier). TenantCloud has a free plan for up to 75 units. The catch is the free tier is limited and they push you toward paid. But if you want a step up from spreadsheets without paying Buildium prices, it's worth trying. I compare all three options in my TenantCloud vs Buildium vs RentGuard breakdown.

Avail / Apartments.com (free). Good for tenant screening and online rent collection. Less useful for maintenance tracking. The "free" part is subsidized by pushing you toward their marketplace. It works, but feels a bit like a lead gen tool.

Stessa (free). Great for financial tracking. Less useful for day-to-day operations like catching late rent fast. If your main pain is bookkeeping, Stessa is excellent. If your main pain is "I keep missing late payments," Stessa won't fix that.

The Approach I Actually Recommend

Keep your spreadsheet. Seriously.

Most small landlords have a system that works 90% of the time. The 10% that fails is the alerting part. You miss something because you didn't check your sheet that day. I wrote more about this in my guide to PM software for 5-10 units.

Instead of migrating to a platform you'll spend 20 hours learning, just add monitoring to what you already have.

That's why I built RentGuard. It's $15/month. It connects to your existing Google Sheet. It checks every day and texts or emails you when rent is overdue or maintenance is aging.

No tenant portals. No accounting modules. No vendor management. Just alerts when something needs your attention.

If Buildium is a 747 and you need a bicycle, RentGuard is the bicycle. It does one thing well.

It's free at descoshop.com. No credit card to start.