Which property management software do AI answer engines actually recommend?

When an SMB buyer asks an AI assistant which property management software to buy, a shortlist comes back. We asked 44 different phrasings of that question across 2 engines, 88 answers in total, and counted every product named. This is the result. Nobody paid to be on it, and no vendor list was written in advance — the 48 vendors below are simply everyone the engines named.

Run 3 August 2026 Questions 44 Answers 88 Vendors named 48 Top-10 repeatability 8/10

Free to read, raw data included.

Is one of these property management tools yours?

The board is re-measured every month. For $9.99 a month you get one email when your own row moves — your rank and answer count, who took the mentions you were absent from, and which of the 44 questions started or stopped naming you. Leave your address and I reply by hand with what your row reads today. What is in it, and the $29.99 one-off report →

Nothing is charged and nothing starts — I reply by email. Your address is used to answer you and to set up billing; it does not go on a list.

Two conditions on every number below

These 44 questions are one family of phrasings — property management software — and every number below is conditional on them. A differently worded family about the same products — a different size of buyer, a different budget, a different constraint — is a different measurement and can come back naming a different set of products. All 44 questions are printed in full below, so you can see exactly what was asked before you read what came back. We have measured how big that can get, on two of our own boards: SuiteCRM is named in 83 of the 132 answers on /c/crmctx/ and in none of the 132 on /c/crm/ — same products, same day, same extraction, asked differently.
The engine columns below are not one instrument. Perplexity (sonar) searches the web while it answers and returned the sources used beside every one of those 44 answers — that column is what gets retrieved. Gemini (gemini-flash-latest) was called through its API with no tools and the near-empty system prompt quoted in the method below, so it answers out of the model’s own weights — not one of those 44 answers came back with a source. That column is what the model already remembers. Both are worth counting and they are not the same measurement: a product can be named often by what the models remember and rarely by what they retrieve, or the reverse, and the totals in the Answers column add the two together.

The leaderboard

“Answers” is how many of the 88 answers named that product. Share is the same number as a percentage. The two right-hand columns split it by engine. Every row has its own link — the # beside a vendor name gives you something like connexion.me/c/propertymanagement/#buildium. Click a vendor's name to see which of the 44 questions named them, and click one of those to read the answer it was counted from, word for word.

#VendorAnswers ShareGeminiPerplexity
1Buildium#6068.2%2634
2AppFolio#5967.0%3227
3DoorLoop#4348.9%1924
4Avail#2831.8%1711
5Innago#2326.1%914
6TenantCloud#2022.7%416
7TurboTenant#1921.6%127
8Yardi Voyager#1921.6%118
9Yardi Breeze#1517.0%78
10RealPage#1415.9%68
11MRI Software#1314.8%58
12RentRedi#1314.8%103
13Rent Manager#1213.6%66
14Entrata#1112.5%47
15Landlord Studio#910.2%09
16Baselane#66.8%24
17Rentec Direct#66.8%42
18Stessa#66.8%51
19Yardi#66.8%33
20Re-Leased#55.7%14
21Yardi Breeze Premier#55.7%41
22Propertyware#44.5%13
23RentPost#44.5%04
24Guesty#33.4%21
25Hemlane#33.4%03
26Hostaway#33.4%21
27Zillow Rental Manager#33.4%21
28Hospitable#22.3%11
29Lodgify#22.3%11
30OwnerRez#22.3%11
31Breeze#11.1%10
32Breeze Premier#11.1%10
33Hostfully#11.1%01
34Leasecake#11.1%01
35MagicDoor#11.1%01
36ManageCasa#11.1%01
37Mews#11.1%01
38Property Matrix#11.1%01
39Property Meld#11.1%10
40REI Hub#11.1%01
41Renew#11.1%01
42Rentvine#11.1%10
43ResMan#11.1%01
44Shuk Rentals#11.1%01
45STRATAFOLIO#11.1%10
46Vendoroo#11.1%01
47Voyager#11.1%10
48VTS#11.1%10

What is free, and what is for sale

Everything above is free and stays free — the leaderboard, the method, all 88 raw answers and the machine-readable ranking, published in full at the bottom of this page. No vendor paid to be listed, no vendor can pay to move, and nothing here goes behind a login later.

What is for sale is one vendor's row, watched: $9.99 a month to be told when your rank moves, who took your mentions, and which phrasings started or stopped naming you — the board is re-run monthly and you get what changed. A one-off $29.99 deep report on a single row is the other option. What is in each →

Method

Every claim on this page is reproducible from the files linked at the bottom.

The engines

Gemini (gemini-flash-latest), Perplexity (sonar). Each was called through its public API with a near-empty system prompt — “answer the user's question directly and concisely” — and nothing else. The engines were not asked to produce a list, rank anything, or name vendors. Steering them toward a list would have manufactured the thing being measured.

The questions

44 distinct phrasings of one purchase decision, written before any measurement was run. No vendor name appears in any of them.

These 44 questions are one phrasing family, not every way this market gets asked about. The family is property management software — that is the wording they were written from, and it is counted back against them here: 39 of them contain “property”; 37 of them contain “management”; 33 of them contain “software”, and all 44 of them contain at least one. A different family about the same products — a different size of buyer, a different budget, a different constraint, different words — is a different measurement, and it can come back naming a different set of vendors. This board is this family, measured. It is not the whole market.
  1. What is the best property management software for a small landlord?
  2. Best rental property management software for 20 doors
  3. We manage 50 residential rental units and need software for tenant billing and maintenance. What should we buy?
  4. Recommend property management software for a growing property management company.
  5. affordable property management software for small real estate investors
  6. What property management software do independent landlords actually use?
  7. Best software for managing residential apartments and rent collection
  8. What property management tool should I use for 10 single family rental homes?
  9. Top rated property management systems for commercial properties
  10. We're a 100-unit apartment building owner looking to automate lease renewals and online rent payments. Which software is best?
  11. Best property management software for mixed-use real estate portfolios
  12. What is the easiest property management software to learn for a sole property manager?
  13. property management software with tenant portal and maintenance request tracking
  14. What software should I buy to manage vacation rentals and short-term properties?
  15. Best all-in-one property management software for residential rentals
  16. We are managing 250 units across multiple locations. What property management platform should we implement?
  17. best property management software for multi-family residential buildings
  18. What is the best software for tracking tenant leases and collecting rent online?
  19. Property management software recommendations for first-time landlords
  20. Which rental property management software has the best accounting features?
  21. What software do professional property managers use to run their business?
  22. Best property management system for small commercial portfolio
  23. We are moving away from spreadsheets to manage 15 rental properties. What property management software should we get?
  24. affordable property management platform for self-managed HOA and rental units
  25. What is the best property management app for mobile tenant requests and maintenance dispatch?
  26. Recommend a property management platform with built-in tenant screening and rent payments.
  27. Best software for managing student housing property rentals
  28. We manage 500 rental doors and need enterprise property management software. What should we consider?
  29. What property management software is best for single-family home rentals?
  30. property management software comparison for 30 unit residential landlord
  31. What software should a property management startup buy?
  32. Best cloud-based property management software for multi-unit property owners
  33. Which property management software is best for managing work orders and vendor payments?
  34. What software do residential property management agencies rely on?
  35. best property management tool for mid-sized apartment complexes
  36. We need property management software with automated rent collection and lease tracking for 40 units.
  37. What is the top property management system for commercial office space leasing?
  38. Recommend a property management tool for a landlord with a mix of residential and retail spaces.
  39. best user-friendly property management software for DIY landlords
  40. What property management software offers the best financial reporting for real estate investors?
  41. What is the best property management platform for managing maintenance work orders?
  42. Which property management software is best for portfolio managers handling over 1000 units?
  43. property management software for landlords with under 50 units
  44. What property management software should I choose to streamline online tenant portals and payments?

How the vendor list was built

Each of the 88 answers was read back and every named product extracted. The vendor list is discovered: a product appears here if and only if an engine named it. Counted are property management software platforms, rental management systems, and broader real estate software suites whose property management module was named. Excluded, even when named: rental listing marketplaces and portals, standalone tenant screening services, generic accounting and bookkeeping packages, real estate sales CRMs and brokerage tools, mortgage and loan origination tools, home inspection apps, smart lock and access control tools, HOA-only community platforms, and companies named only as an example landlord or property owner.

Spelling variants of one product are folded together, and a trailing “by company” is dropped. This run collapsed 13 spellings onto 6 of the rows below: “Avail”, “Avail (by Realtor.com)” and “Avail by Realtor.com” are one row — the one the table prints as Avail. An edition name is folded into its product when it is that product’s name followed by a further word, and the plain name is at least three times as common. This run folded 8 such names, among them “AppFolio Property Manager” counts as AppFolio and “Yardi Voyager / Yardi Commercial” counts as Yardi Voyager. A name that merely begins with the same letters is a different product and keeps its own row. No pair was merged by hand in this category: every fold above is the rule applied mechanically, with no human judgement about who is who.

Beyond those folds a product is counted as the engines spelled it, and two rows in the table are never merged into one. When a product has been renamed or acquired and the engines still answer with both names, both names keep their own row: this page carries no hand-maintained list of who is now who, because that list would be a human claim about a mechanical count and nothing here could check it. What it has instead is the answers. Where an answer itself writes two of the rows below as one product renamed — the construction “X (formerly Y)” — the line beside those rows quotes that sentence and gives the overlap and the total, so the union is on the page. Nothing else produces that line. Two rows being named in the same answers does not, however often: the engines answer in shortlists, so the leaders of a category are named together whatever they are called. No answer in this run wrote two rows below that way, so no row below carries that line.

A product is counted once per answer, however many times that answer mentions it.

Is this stable, or is it noise?

The entire run was repeated a second time, same 44 questions, same engines, independent calls. The top ten came back 8/10 identical. What moved: Yardi Breeze (9 in run A), RealPage (10 in run A) dropped out of run B's ten and AppFolio Property Manager (7 in run B), RentRedi (10 in run B) took those places. by position, TurboTenant was 7 in run A and 8 in run B; Yardi Voyager was 8 in run A and 9 in run B. Run B named 44 vendors over 88 answers against run A's 48. The tail moves; the head is stable to within one place.

A leaderboard whose top ten reshuffles between runs would not be worth publishing, so this check was run before the page was, and the page ships only because it passed.

What this is not

This measures what two answer engines said on 3 August 2026, in response to these questions, through their APIs. It is not a quality ranking, not a review, and not advice on which property management software to buy. A product can be excellent and rank low here — that gap is the point.

The raw data

All 88 answers, verbatim, one JSON object per line: run A · run B. The per-answer extracted product names: run A · run B. Machine-readable ranking: ranking.json.

What Perplexity was reading. It is the only one of these engines that returns a source list, and the markers in its answers above — [1], [2] — point into it. Every URL it cited, with the title, date and the excerpt it actually retrieved, one JSON object per answer: run A · run B. Join on index to the answers file, and read [n] as citations[n-1]. Perplexity returned a source list on 44 of its 44 answers. Gemini returned no sources at all — no citation, grounding or search-result field of any kind appears anywhere in its API response, on any of the 44 answers it gave. That is a fact about the engine, not a gap in this page.

The sources behind the answers

Run A's 44 Perplexity answers cited 860 URLs across 146 distinct domains. Below are the 56 that were cited in three or more separate answers. Citations counts every URL from that domain, so a domain cited three times in one answer counts three times; Answers is how many of the 44 answers cited it at all.

DomainCitationsAnswers
reddit.com8742
youtube.com6741
appfolio.com4038
doorloop.com4030
buildium.com2921
amerisave.com2828
gartner.com2828
tenantcloud.com2723
landlordstudio.com2421
avail.com2322
capterra.com2320
wifitalents.com2116
softwareadvice.com1816
baselane.com1717
learn.g2.com1616
re-leased.com1615
getapp.com1413
g2.com1412
gitnux.org1110
innago.com1110
facebook.com119
investopedia.com1010
rentpost.com99
worldmetrics.org99
mrisoftware.com98
yardibreeze.com98
guideflow.com88
rocketmortgage.com88
lula.life77
shukrentals.com76
hemlane.com65
gatewise.com55
hoteltechreport.com55
realpage.com55
sourceforge.net55
techradar.com55
touchstay.com55
rentredi.com54
magicdoor.com44
rentable.com44
secondnature.com44
softwareconnect.com44
stayfi.com44
ustechautomations.com44
v7labs.com44
wint.ai44
yardi.com44
zipdo.co44
clearleaddigital.com33
f6s.com33
linkedin.com33
managecasa.com33
ndconsultingllc.com33
nextautomation.us33
revela.co33
turbotenant.com33

A domain missing from this table was cited in fewer than three answers, or was never cited at all — the run A file linked above is the complete list either way, and it is the only way to tell those two apart. Cited is not endorsed: a page the engine retrieved is not a page that recommended anyone, and this counts what was read, not what it said.

The answer a vendor panel shows you is read straight out of the run A file linked above — the page fetches the one line it needs and displays it unaltered, so what you read there and what you get by downloading the file are the same bytes.

What one line of each file holds, and the terms you may re-use them under — the raw answers may be re-used in any medium, commercially and inside open-source software, with attribution.