Chickadee Bandit

Six HOA software options for self-managed boards, by what each one is for

PayHOA, HOA Express, Condo Control, TownSq, HOALife and ours, compared for a volunteer board by price, by what each does, and by the association each fits.

Compare › Self-managed HOA software

Quick answer

For a self-managed HOA that wants dues collected online and real books: PayHOA. For a free website, email blasts and mailed letters: HOA Express. For a condo building with a front desk: Condo Control. For owners who want a phone app to pay dues: TownSq. For violations and architectural review above all: HOALife. For a small board that needs a shared workspace and records, not payment processing: ours.

"HOA software" is sold to two different buyers. One is a management company running dozens of associations for a fee; the other is a volunteer board running its own. The software for the first is priced per unit with a minimum, is quoted at a demo, and assumes a paid manager at the desk. A board of neighbours with day jobs needs something they can set up on a weekend and hand to the next board.

This list is for the second buyer, ordered from the most complete self-managed product to the most specialised. We make one of the six and it is marked. Every price here is from each product's own pricing page, help center or app store listing, checked in September 2026, and where a price is not published we say so rather than quote a review site.

The list

  1. PayHOA

    Best for: A self-managed HOA that wants dues collected online and its books kept in the same place

    The most complete product here for a volunteer board, and the one most sold to them: its pricing page has a Self-Managed tab of its own. It keeps real accounting — a general ledger with your own chart of accounts, cash or accrual, bank reconciliation through a bank connection, budgets, automatic late fees, autopay, payables and 1099 e-filing — and adds violations, architectural requests, maintenance requests, amenity scheduling, documents, voting and surveys, an owner portal and a website. Unlimited email, texts and phone calls are included, and it mails a USPS letter for $1.05–$1.25. Bookkeeping and tax filing are paid services on top, from $199/mo and $399 respectively. It runs in a web browser; we found no PayHOA app in the App Store or on Google Play.

    Cost: Priced by units, with every feature on every plan: $49/mo billed yearly for up to 25 units ($54 month to month), $59/mo for 26–50, $99/mo for 51–100, $129/mo for 101–150, up to $249/mo for 401–500. 30-day free trial with no card, no free plan, no long-term contract. Owners paying online cost $2.45 per bank payment and 3.5% + $0.50 per card payment, charged to the association unless it passes them on as a convenience fee.

  2. HOA Express

    Best for: A community website with email, texts and mailed letters, cheaply or free

    The cheapest way to give an association a public face: a website on your own domain with email accounts, blast emails and texts, documents, calendars with RSVPs, a forum, classifieds, and resident and pet directories. On Engage, members can pay dues online, and the fee can be passed to them. It is a website and communication tool rather than association software: its pages claim no accounting, no per-owner balance, no violations, architectural review, amenity booking or elections. It is web only.

    Cost: Free for up to 50 households, with a website, documents, a calendar and news. Paid plans are priced by households: Inform from $15/mo billed yearly and Engage from $21/mo billed yearly, both for up to 25 households. Online payments, email and text blasts, surveys and mailed letters are Engage features; mailed letters start at $1.05 plus $0.15 a page. No setup fee, 30-day trial with no card.

  3. Chickadee Bandit

    That's us

    Best for: A small volunteer board that needs a shared workspace and a record the next board inherits

    A workspace for the board rather than a payment system. Dues & Contributions lists every member's status for each billing period and posts each recorded payment to the right reserve fund, and the Reserve Fund dashboard shows every fund's balance, goal and ledger to all members. Violation Tracking issues a notice to a unit that the homeowner can acknowledge, answer or dispute, with a trail per unit. Architectural Review takes a request with its documents to a committee vote and a written decision. Officer Elections runs a secret ballot, majority or ranked-choice, and Board Minutes records every motion and roll-call vote, then freezes the adopted minutes. Amenity reservations, first-come guest parking passes, a vehicle registry, maintenance requests and a versioned library for the CC&Rs complete it. Each board member keeps their own household private beside it. What we do not do: we do not collect dues online, keep a general ledger or reconcile a bank account, mail letters, or produce resale certificates, and a space of 20 people does not hold an association of a hundred homes that all need to log in. It runs on iPhone, Android and the web, with no ads and a full data export on every plan.

    Cost: $6/mo or $60/yr for one household on the Family plan, 30-day free trial with no card. One board member sponsors the association's space and everyone else joins free. A Family plan's space holds up to 8 people and 10 apps; Organization ($30/mo or $300/yr) sponsors three spaces of up to 20 people and 14 apps each. The Community add-on ($30/yr) adds three more spaces to any plan, or three on its own without one, and four more apps in every space; it does not raise how many people a space holds.

  4. Condo Control

    Best for: A condo building with a front desk, packages and visitor parking

    Sold to both self-managed communities and management companies, and the deepest on building operations: package logs, visitor parking, guest passes, incident reports, security patrol, key tracking and a pass-on log for the desk staff, on top of a resident portal, online payments, maintenance and preventive maintenance, architectural change requests and a file library. Read the plan table closely: amenity booking and violation tracking are paid add-ons on the Standard plan, the security features are Premium or a paid add-on, and e-voting and proxy voting are paid add-ons on every plan. It has iPhone and Android apps.

    Cost: From $67.50/mo for under 50 units on its Self-Managed tab; larger communities are not priced on the page. Its three plans (Standard, Modern and Premium Living) carry no published price. Its current payments FAQ charges the resident 2.9% + $0.30 per card payment plus a $2.00 service fee. No free trial or free plan is published.

  5. TownSq

    Best for: Owners who want a phone app to pay dues and book the clubhouse

    The most-installed homeowner app on this list, with more than 500,000 downloads on Google Play and an iPhone app too: owners pay assessments, see their balance, book amenities, file requests and read announcements, documents and a community forum on their phone. Its pages are written mostly for management companies, and its homeowner FAQ assumes one — owners are told their management company will send the invitation. TownSq is owned by HOAM Ventures, whose 2022 acquisition announcement was issued under Associa's name, and Associa calls it its partner platform for managed communities. Full association accounting is an Enterprise feature; the smaller plans process owner payments without keeping the books.

    Cost: Priced by units: Pro is $90/mo for up to 300 units, $180/mo for 301–900, $270/mo above that; save 10% paying yearly. Violations and architectural review are $20/mo each on Pro, and a binding vote is $250 per voting event plus a $25 one-time setup fee. Owners pay a $2.95 convenience fee per online payment, plus 3.5% on a card; a mailed check or direct debit costs nothing.

  6. HOALife

    Best for: A larger association whose hard problem is violations and architectural review

    Built around enforcement: drive-by inspections from a phone with GPS, automated notice letters sent by First-Class or Certified mail, and a collaborative architectural review with an optional submission fee, plus dues payments with autopay, work orders, documents, online voting and an owner portal and website. It keeps no ledger of its own; the books live in QuickBooks Online, which it syncs with both ways. Its iPhone and Android app is HOALife Inspector, for the board or the inspector; owners use the web portal. Its own pages disagree on two points: who pays processing fees (the payments page says homeowners, the homepage offers association-pays too) and the smallest community it serves (100 homes on the pricing page, 50 in its FAQ).

    Cost: From $199/mo; the final price is quoted after a 30-minute demo, based on community size. No free trial or free plan, month-to-month agreements, and fees paid are not refunded. Its pricing page describes communities of 100 to 5,000+ homes. Card and bank processing fees are billed to homeowners; the amounts are not published.

Prices and features are from each product's own site as of September 2026; where a product has a head-to-head page here, its entry restates that page. Products change — always check the other product's site for current details.

Choosing between them

  1. If the board wants owners to pay online and the treasurer wants real books with bank reconciliation, PayHOA. It is priced for self-managed associations and has everything else too.
  2. If the first need is a website, email blasts and mailed notices, HOA Express, free under 50 households.
  3. If you are a condo building with packages, guests and a front desk, Condo Control.
  4. If owners expect a phone app and you are comfortable with software written mostly for managed communities, TownSq.
  5. If violations and architectural review are the job and the association is large, HOALife.
  6. If the board is small and needs a workspace — the reserve funds, the violations, the ARC decisions, the elections and the minutes, in a record the next board inherits — and the dues already arrive by check or bank transfer, that is what we built.

Price per unit, or per board

Most association software is priced by the number of units, so the same product costs a 40-home HOA a fraction of what it costs a 400-home one, and each owner who pays online pays a processing fee on top (or the association does). Ours is priced by the board member's plan and the size of the space, not by units, and it collects no payments, so it has no processing fee. The trade-off is the size limit above: we fit a board and a small building, not a large community where every owner logs in.

Nabr Network, AppFolio and Buildium

Nabr Network no longer exists under that name. Great Hill Partners bought it in 2022 and merged it with TOPS Software as Enumerate; its old address now opens Enumerate Engage, which Enumerate sells only with its accounting product, from $500 a month with an annual contract and a one-time implementation fee.

AppFolio is sold to property management businesses, quoted, with a 50-unit minimum. Buildium is mostly sold to management companies too, but its Essential plan, from $62/mo, names self-managed associations of 150 units and under; its pricing page asks community associations to call for a price.

What none of them does

None of these replaces the association's bank account, its insurance, or a professional reserve study. None imports another's history, so export the owner ledger, the documents and the violation records before you switch. And software does not make an election valid or a violation enforceable: your governing documents and your state's HOA statute set the notice, quorum and hearing rules, and the software only helps you follow them.

The feature list is not fixed

Every other product on this page is a fixed set of features: it does what it does, and a need it did not anticipate gets a no. Chickadee Bandit is built from small apps, and a household can add one of its own. An admin describes the app in a paragraph on the Apps page and the hub builds and installs it, using the AI credits that come with every plan; someone who writes code can start from any of the open-source apps and install their own version from a URL. A custom app gets the same checks as the ones we ship: it declares what it reads and writes, keeps its data in your household's own database, and the hub refuses anything it did not ask for.

How to build a custom app for your household

Where this list comes from

We make one of the products on it, and it is marked. Every claim about another product was checked against that product's own pricing and feature pages on the date above — not against another review site — and where we could not find a published price we say so rather than quote one. The order is by what each product is for, not a ranking of merit.

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