Stessa vs Baselane vs REI Hub: 2026 Bookkeeping Verdict

Stessa, Baselane, and REI Hub all claim to be the bookkeeping system small landlords should use. Two are free. One charges per door. All three produce Schedule E reports. The right pick depends almost entirely on portfolio size.

Pick wrong and tax season turns into a scramble. Landlords on r/realestateinvesting describe Stessa’s auto-sync as “notoriously broken” past a handful of accounts, and Baselane’s free tier quietly assumes operating banking gets routed through them. REI Hub avoids both problems and almost nobody talks about it.

The short answer: Baselane is the strongest pick for 1-4 unit landlords who want banking and rent collection in the same tool. REI Hub is the underrated winner for 5-20 unit operators who care about reconciliation and Schedule E reports. Stessa works for casual tracking but stops scaling around 10-15 doors.

The case for each — and the portfolio sizes where each one breaks — follows.

Stessa vs Baselane vs REI Hub at a Glance

REI Hub is the only one charging per door. That is the tradeoff for the strongest reconciliation in the category.

Stessa: Strong UI, Hits a Ceiling Past 10-15 Doors

Stessa is owned by Roofstock and built specifically for residential real estate investors. The free Essentials tier covers most under-10-door landlords without ever requiring an upgrade. Pro adds unlimited portfolios, forecasting, e-filing, and advanced reporting at $28/month billed annually or $35/month billed monthly.

The mobile app is genuinely the best of the three. Stessa is the only one of these tools that runs cleanly on a phone, which matters more than vendors admit for landlords managing properties on the move.

The ceiling is real, though, and it shows up around 10-15 doors. A landlord on r/realestateinvesting at 5 properties / 10 long-term doors / 2 STR was blunt about why: “Currently using Stessa and I’m just not happy. It looks great, but not having the ability to reconcile, set up separate bank/cc accounts manually and an auto-sync that is notoriously broken, I’m done.” The same operator added that the platform looks great but “too amateur for what we’re doing” and questioned whether it would hold up in an audit.

Scaling pain is the more common complaint. A landlord with 30 units across two portfolios described the workflow this way: “I’ve been using Stessa to manually transcribe property expenses from these PDF statements but to be honest, it’s getting tedious and not scalable.” A reply from another operator captured the consensus: “At 30 units, manual entry is definitely going to burn you out fast. A VA can work, but you’ll still need to review their input for accuracy. Software that automates imports will scale better long-term.”

That said, for landlords with one or two units, Stessa remains the default recommendation in community threads. A small-business owner on r/smallbusiness who runs a freelance dev shop and a single rental put it simply: “I track the rental through Stessa since it’s built specifically for real estate.” The free tier handles Schedule E categorization, the mobile app keeps it easy, and the learning curve is shallow.

Stessa is the right pick for portfolios under 5 units where the priority is a clean mobile dashboard. It is the wrong pick once reconciliation matters or door count moves past 15.

Baselane: Best for 1-4 Units That Want Everything in One Place

Baselane is the only tool of the three that bundles banking, rent collection, and bookkeeping into a single product. Core banking is free. Rent collection via ACH is free for landlords. The platform is FDIC-insured up to $250,000 per account through Thread Bank, so the “free” banking is a real bank account, not a virtual wallet.

The standout bookkeeping feature is automatic Schedule E categorization. As a reviewer on r/PropertyManagement put it: “Baselane automatically tags every transaction to the specific property and Schedule E category. This means that by the time you’re done collecting rent, your bookkeeping is essentially done for you.” For a 1-4 unit landlord, this collapses three workflows (banking, rent, books) into one screen.

The tradeoffs become visible past the marketing page. The “free” tier rests on the landlord routing operating accounts through Baselane — which is fine for new landlords starting fresh, less fine for established operators with existing bank relationships. Add-ons add up: e-signature runs $5 each, lease creation is $10 per lease, and tenant screening is $24.99 per applicant. Tenant ACH costs $2 and card payments are 3.49% — the landlord can absorb the ACH fee or pass it through, but the card fee is harder to swallow.

The other gap is the missing mobile app. Everything runs in the web app. For landlords who want to approve a maintenance expense from a parking lot, this matters. A landlord on r/PropertyManagement was direct about it: “I tried baselane when I first started out and hateddd it.” The same thread had multiple users defending Baselane for its all-in-one workflow and free ACH, so the verdict is genuinely split — but the web-only complaint shows up repeatedly.

For comparison shoppers also weighing the rent-collection side of the equation, the broader TurboTenant vs Avail vs Innago breakdown and the best rent collection software for landlords cover that angle in more depth.

Baselane is the strongest pick for new landlords with 1-4 units. The fine print: the free tier is paid for in banking flow, not dollars.

REI Hub: The Underrated Pick for 5-20 Door Operators

REI Hub is the tool that rarely shows up in “best landlord software” listicles and consistently shows up in Reddit threads after Stessa breaks. It charges per door: Essentials at $15/month for up to 3 units, Growth at $25/month for up to 10, Investor at $45/month for up to 20, and Professional at $80/month for unlimited units.

The architecture is the differentiator. REI Hub is built on true double-entry accounting with proper reconciliation, separate bank and credit-card accounts per property, and Schedule E plus per-property P&L reports out of the box. It is the only tool of the three an experienced bookkeeper or CPA would describe as “real” accounting software.

The catch: no rent collection of its own. REI Hub is the accounting backend bundled with RentRedi, but it can be used standalone. The mobile experience is web-only and clearly designed for the desktop. There is no built-in tenant communication.

That is the reason REI Hub does not market itself like Baselane does. It is a back-office tool for operators who already have rent collection figured out and need the books to be auditable. The recurring thread on r/realestateinvesting where operators outgrow Stessa and ask “what next?” — REI Hub is the most-named alternative that is not QuickBooks.

For landlords managing a few mid-sized portfolios who are weighing accounting and property management together, the Buildium vs AppFolio comparison covers the property-management side of the same bundle.

REI Hub is the right pick at 5-20 doors. The per-door pricing is a feature, not a bug — it caps complexity instead of charging by user seat.

What Real Landlords Say

The Reddit consensus across r/realestateinvesting, r/PropertyManagement, and r/smallbusiness lines up tightly with the portfolio-size verdict.

On Stessa, the love-hate pattern is consistent. The UI gets praised, the scaling ceiling gets named explicitly, and the workarounds at scale involve LLM-assisted PDF parsing rather than switching tools. One operator described their workflow: “I bet you can get one of the LLMs to pull your data out of property manager statements and transform it to a format Stessa can import.” That is a tell. When users build tooling around the tool instead of switching, the tool is good enough at the small scale but fundamentally limited.

On Baselane, the split is along workflow lines. Users who like a single platform praise the Schedule E auto-tagging and the free ACH. Users who already have banking elsewhere or want a mobile app push back. There is no Reddit thread where everyone agrees Baselane is the answer — but there is no thread where everyone agrees it is not, either.

On REI Hub, the silence is louder than the praise. It is the tool serious operators name when asked specifically and rarely the tool anyone discovers through marketing. That asymmetry is the buying signal.

The other consistent finding: a meaningful fraction of small landlords use spreadsheets instead of any of these. A landlord with 2 properties / 8 units on r/realestateinvesting described a 5-year-honed Google Sheets workflow that costs $5 total and takes about 2-4 hours per year. For portfolios under 5 doors with low transaction volume, that is genuinely competitive with Stessa.

Pick by Portfolio Size

1-4 doors: Baselane. Free banking and rent collection in one platform, automatic Schedule E categorization, and the lowest setup friction. The banking-routing dependency is acceptable because new landlords often do not have an established operating-account relationship to disrupt. The missing mobile app is a real cost but a survivable one at this scale.

5-20 doors: REI Hub. Per-door pricing is honest at this scale (Essentials $15 covers 3, Growth $25 covers 10, Investor $45 covers 20), and reconciliation becomes non-negotiable. The trade is no rent collection — which is fine because at this scale most operators already use a separate rent-collection tool.

20+ doors with property-manager statements: hire a bookkeeper or move to QuickBooks Online with class-based property tracking. All three of these tools start hitting their ceilings here. REI Hub Professional at $80/month for unlimited units is the closest, but at 20+ doors the bookkeeper cost is justified and the accounting requirements (depreciation schedules, cost segregation, multi-LLC consolidation) outgrow purpose-built landlord software. Operators at this size are often better served by the Buildium vs AppFolio tier of platforms.

House-hacker or single rental: Stessa free or a spreadsheet. The Stessa free tier is genuinely free and covers everything a single-rental landlord needs. The spreadsheet route is also valid — multiple landlords with 2-8 units swear by Google Sheets + Scanner Pro + a quarterly entry session.

The channel POV on the per-unit pricing question: REI Hub’s model is the most transparent of the three because it caps cost by door count, which is what landlords actually scale on. Baselane’s free tier is honest about being free but the cost is the banking dependency. Per-user-seat pricing — which neither of these uses but which AppFolio and Buildium do — is the worst model for sub-50-door operators because the user-count math punishes anyone who needs a co-signer or a property-manager handoff.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Stessa actually free, or do you eventually need Pro?

The free Essentials tier is genuinely free for tracking and reporting. Pro at $28/month annual unlocks unlimited portfolios, forecasting, e-filing, and advanced reporting. Most landlords under 10 doors never need it.

Does Baselane charge any fees landlords should know about?

Core banking and rent collection are free for landlords. The fee schedule landlords should know: $5 per e-signature, $10 per lease creation, and $24.99 per tenant screening. Tenants pay $2 for ACH or 3.49% for card unless the landlord absorbs it.

Is REI Hub worth $15/month for under 3 units versus free Stessa?

Probably not — unless reconciliation matters or there is a CPA who wants proper double-entry books. For a single-unit landlord whose accountant is fine with Schedule E categorization from Stessa, the $180/year is not justified.

Can any of these replace QuickBooks for a 30-door portfolio?

REI Hub Professional at $80/month for unlimited units is the closest substitute. Accountants who know QuickBooks Online often prefer QBO with class tracking past 30 doors, but the REI Hub reporting holds up for landlords who want to keep the books in a real-estate-specific tool.

Which one handles short-term rentals (Airbnb) best?

Baselane has a known issue with Airbnb payouts — they hit as net amounts after host fees, so tracking gross income requires a manual journal entry. Stessa handles STR categorization out of the box. REI Hub handles it via per-property accounts. For a pure-STR operator with 3+ listings, REI Hub is the cleanest pick.

The Bottom Line

Baselane for 1-4 doors, REI Hub for 5-20, Stessa for casual tracking. No tool wins all three buckets, and the vendor pages that claim otherwise are written by the vendors.

The practical move: open accounts on the free tiers of Stessa and Baselane first, run one full month of transactions through both, and only consider REI Hub once reconciliation breaks or the portfolio crosses 5 doors. The cheapest bookkeeping software is the one that does not fall over at tax time.

References

1. Stessa pricing page — https://www.stessa.com/pricing/
2. REI Hub pricing page — https://www.reihub.net/pricing/
3. Baselane homepage and pricing — https://www.baselane.com/
4. Baselane fee schedule — https://support.baselane.com/hc/en-us/articles/30917462973979-Does-Baselane-charge-any-fees
5. r/realestateinvesting — “Landlord accounting software (again)” thread — https://reddit.com/r/realestateinvesting/comments/14w9zxr/landlord_accounting_software_again/
6. r/realestateinvesting — “Scaling Rental Property Bookkeeping: Stessa Manual Entry” thread — https://reddit.com/r/realestateinvesting/comments/1nogisz/scaling_rental_property_bookkeeping_stessa_manual/
7. r/PropertyManagement — “Innago vs. Baselane” thread — https://reddit.com/r/PropertyManagement/comments/1ottkp1/innago_vs_baselane/
8. r/smallbusiness — “How do small business owners manage bookkeeping for rental property income when filing Schedule E?” — https://reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/1rsimsh/how_do_small_business_owners_manage_bookkeeping/