Which PMS Should You Choose in 2026? Hostaway, Guesty, Smily, Smoobu, Lodgify Compared

Three things first.

One. We have a referral link to Hostaway, and we say so — it's disclosed at the top of this page. Our conclusion favours Hostaway. You're entitled to weigh that.

Two. Precisely because we're interested, everything below is sourced from the vendors' own official pages, checked on 17 July 2026 — not from third-party comparisons. Almost all of those are affiliate-driven, and we'll show you two places where they are wrong by a factor of five.

Three. We have run only Hostaway and Guesty in production. The other three we studied; we didn't operate them. We flag that each time rather than pretend otherwise.

If a comparison still discusses BookingSync, close it: nobody has reread it in four years. bookingsync.com 301-redirects to smily.com. The rebrand was May 2022.

Same test with Kigo (acquired by Guesty in September 2022, brand gone) and Syncbnb (now Hosthub, 2023). Three excellent staleness detectors.

The factor-of-five error. You'll read everywhere that Smily starts at "€1,472/month". It doesn't. The official simulator is a slider whose default position is 100 properties — and €1,472 is the 100-property price. Drag it to 1 and you get €297/month, a flat floor from 1 to 15 properties. The comparisons quoting €1,472 screenshotted a page without touching the slider.

And the one place Hostaway is the worst of the five: its own price. It isn't public. The pricing page is a form. The ranges circulating on blogs contradict each other. We're customers — we won't publish our contracted rate, but we won't pretend the opacity isn't there. Ask for a quote; it's the only number that binds anyone.

The most useful section here, and it has nothing to do with us.

Gap 1 — "0% booking fees". That's what all four plans display. But the terms of service define "Booking Fees", "where applicable to the Customer's chosen subscription plan". And the pricing page's own markup carries a hidden plan with the slug starter-fee, alongside the visible starter-no-fee. We're not concluding you will be charged — we're saying the contract provides for a case the page doesn't mention.

Gap 2 — "no commitment". The ToS (art. 7.c–7.f) set out 12- or 24-month prepaid initial terms, automatic renewal with no duty to warn you, and no pro-rata refund. The 14-day withdrawal right is reserved for "Consumers" — so it does not apply to a management company. Sign as a business and you have no cooling-off period.

Also: Lodgify displays "4.8/5 — 5,000+ reviews" beside a G2 logo. The actual G2 profile reads 4.2/5 on 71 reviews. The in-house aggregate is unattributed and not reproducible.

And the vendor isn't Spanish, as often repeated, but Codebay Solutions Ltd, registered in England — so an English-law contract.

Get into the habit of reading the pricing page in both languages.

• Guesty shows €18 for Lite on its French page while its English FAQ says $9. That's not FX. "From $9" is sourceable but misleading to a French reader.
• Smoobu shows three different entry prices across three official pages (€28, €29, €35). Worse: for the extra unit, the English page says "from €9.60" — the French page dropped the "from" and states €9.60 flat, while the help centre says €12. At ten properties you get €121 or €143 depending which language you read.
• Lodgify: the euro prices differ between the FR and EN pages, and the page loads an A/B testing tool — so the price can vary by visitor. Re-check on the day you sign.

Everyone displays them. Three points.

They're dated. Hostaway's claimed statuses are 2025; Guesty's are 2024 — on pages read in July 2026. The honest phrasing is "2025 status claimed", not "is a Preferred Partner".

They're checkable. Airbnb publishes its software partner list. Reading it: Smily is Preferred, not Preferred+, contrary to what circulates. Lodgify claims Preferred+; we could not find it on Airbnb's official page. Not an accusation — an invitation to check.

The only badge we could confirm on the OTA's own side is Smily's: Booking.com Premier Plus 2026, verified with Booking on 17 April 2026. Credit where it's due.

Two warnings. Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice are all Gartner and share one review pool: for Smily that's 56 reviews shown three times, not three confirmations. And its profile is still filed under "BookingSync", with reviews going back to 2015 — they aren't about today's product.

We publish no G2 scores: the platform returned errors on four of five profiles, and the cached snippets contradict each other. A number you couldn't read yourself doesn't belong in a comparison.

Here's the counter-intuitive finding, and it applies wherever you operate. None of the five automates French tourist tax — not even Smily, the only legally French vendor, which states plainly that the host calculates, collects and remits it themselves except on Airbnb; and the automatic calculation it cites is Airbnb's, not its own.

The general lesson: vendors build compliance for the market that pays. Hostaway built a Spanish module (VeriFactu); Smoobu documents German e-invoicing. Blog posts about your country's rules — all five have them — prove nothing about the product. Whatever your market, ask for a screen-share demo of the compliance feature before you sign, from all of them.

If you sell into France, four real things:

• French-only channels no American PMS carries: PAP Vacances, Maeva / Pierre & Vacances — with access to roughly 6,000 works councils — Cdiscount Voyages, Veepee, Abritel.
• A French phone line. Mundane, until a channel breaks on a Friday.
• A French legal ecosystem: a disbursement-mandate app built by a lawyer, references to the carte G and the loi Hoguet.
• A permit_number field exposed at API level — the only nod to registration numbers we found across the five.

We run close to 70 apartments. Our public site, admin tool, review bot and invoicing bot all run on the Hostaway API. Our verdict hasn't moved.

Why Hostaway — only reasons we've lived:

• Owner statements. If you manage for third parties, this decides it. Formulas nestable 7 levels deep, versioned by date — change a commission rate without rewriting history. We run 30 automatic, 8 on schedule. Guesty's accounting is a paid premium module at a non-public price. Smoobu doesn't document it. Lodgify reserves it for the top plan. Smily calls it "reporting only — does not move money", their words.
• The API. We built four services on it. Public, documented, with webhooks.
• Customer rating: 4.8/5 on 1,577 Capterra reviews — the best of the five, on the largest volume.

What we hold against it, and it's not nothing: its price isn't public — the most opaque of the five on that point. We also keep our own list of product limits, which we send to their team rather than stay quiet about; several are detailed in our piece on what a PMS really does. None has changed our mind.

👉 Request a Hostaway demo (via our partner link) — ask for a costed quote on the first call, and a screen-share of any compliance feature that matters to you.

And if you're targeting the French works-council market, look at Smily first. We have no interest in telling you that, which is exactly why we're telling you.