DoorLoop manages portfolios. Keystead manages yours.
DoorLoop is capable, professional-grade PM software — and most of that capability exists for people managing other owners' properties. If you own what you manage and have under fifty units, Keystead gives you the part you actually need: books that close themselves and a Schedule E your CPA can file from.
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Keystead vs DoorLoop, honestly
| Feature | Keystead | DoorLoop |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $29/mo up to 10 units, $79/mo up to 50. 14-day free trial, no card. | Entry plan starts around $69/mo (billed annually); pricing scales with units and plan tier. |
| Built for | Self-managing landlords with 1–50 units who own what they manage. | Professional property managers and larger portfolios — built to scale to hundreds of units. |
| AI lease parsing | Drop a PDF — tenants, rent, deposits, dates, and clauses extracted with confidence scores and citations back to the document. | Lease records and documents are managed in the system; terms are set up by hand. |
| Rent-to-tenant matching | Plaid bank feed auto-matches every ACH, Zelle, and wire to the right tenant by amount, name, and your rules. | Rent collected through DoorLoop posts to the ledger automatically; payments arriving outside the platform take manual handling. |
| Accounting depth | Purpose-built landlord books: bank rules, transfer detection, per-property P&L, Schedule E categories. No double-entry overhead to learn. | Full double-entry accounting with bank reconciliation — genuinely strong, designed for professional management workflows. |
| Schedule E export | Included on every plan, aligned line-by-line to the IRS form. Built by a CPA founder. | General-purpose accounting reports; the product is organized around management workflows and owner statements rather than your personal Schedule E. |
| Owner portals & trust accounting | Deliberately absent — Keystead assumes you own what you manage, so there's no owner-vs-manager layer to maintain. | Owner portals, owner statements, and tooling for managing other people's properties. |
| Setup & learning curve | Self-serve, about 10 minutes: add properties (auto-filled from public records), upload leases, connect your bank. | A full PM suite with more surface area — expect onboarding and a learning curve, because it does more. |
| Maintenance / work orders | Work orders with status, assignees, estimates, and actual costs — included on every plan. | Maintenance management with tenant requests and vendor workflows. |
DoorLoop details from doorloop.com, checked June 2026: entry plan starts around $69/mo billed annually, with pricing scaling by units and tier. Features and pricing change — confirm current details on each vendor's site.
Who should use DoorLoop — and who should use Keystead
DoorLoop makes sense if property management is your business rather than a side of owning. Trust accounting, owner portals and statements, team roles, vendor workflows, and double-entry books with reconciliation are real requirements when you manage for third-party owners or run hundreds of doors — and DoorLoop covers them well.
Keystead makes sense if you own what you manage. There's no owner-vs-manager layer, no trust ledger, no onboarding project — because a self-managing landlord with one to fifty units doesn't need any of it. What you get instead is automation aimed at your actual workload: AI that reads lease PDFs, a bank feed that matches rent to tenants, rules that categorize expenses, and a tax-ready export in January.
Right-sized beats full-featured
Professional PM suites earn their price through breadth — every workflow a management company might need. The cost is paid in setup time, learning curve, and features you scroll past daily. Keystead optimizes for the opposite: the shortest path from "signed lease and a bank account" to "books that keep themselves."
Drop a scanned lease PDF and Claude extracts every term with a confidence score and a citation back to the page. Connect your bank through Plaid and incoming rent auto-matches to the right tenant by amount, name, and your rules, while expenses run through a QuickBooks-style rules engine with transfer detection. Setup is self-serve and takes about ten minutes — no sales call, no implementation phase.
Tax time, from a CPA founder
A management company's accounting answers to its owners; a self-managing landlord's accounting answers to the IRS. Keystead's founder is a CPA, and the product is organized around the form you actually file: every expense category maps to a specific Schedule E line item — insurance, mortgage interest, repairs, taxes, utilities, each on its own line.
In January, you export a per-property Schedule E report and hand it to your accountant. The export is on every plan, including the free trial, because tax-ready books are the point of the product — not a report buried three menus deep.
What it actually costs
DoorLoop: the entry plan starts around $69/month billed annually, with higher tiers adding features and pricing scaling with unit count. For a professional operation, that pricing is reasonable for what's included.
Keystead: $29/month for up to 10 units, $79/month for up to 50, custom above that. Every plan includes the AI lease parser, Plaid bank feeds with automatic rent matching, the bank-rules engine, Schedule E export, work orders, and unlimited reports. 14-day free trial, no credit card — if you're under fifty units, try the tool that was sized for you.
Common questions
Is Keystead cheaper than DoorLoop?+
For small portfolios, yes. Keystead is $29/month for up to 10 units and $79/month for up to 50, with a 14-day free trial and no card required. DoorLoop's entry plan starts around $69/month billed annually and scales up with units and plan tier. The bigger difference isn't the sticker price — it's that DoorLoop is priced and built for professional management operations, while Keystead is right-sized for owners managing their own units.
What does Keystead do that DoorLoop doesn't?+
Two things stand out. First, AI lease parsing: drop a scanned PDF and every term — tenants, rent, deposit, dates, late fees, key clauses — is extracted with a confidence score and a citation back to the document, instead of being typed in. Second, bank-feed-first rent matching: incoming payments from your real bank account auto-match to tenants however they paid, including Zelle and wires that never touched a payments platform.
When is DoorLoop the better choice?+
If you manage properties for other owners, need trust accounting and owner statements, have a team with role-based workflows, or run a portfolio well beyond fifty units, DoorLoop is built for that and Keystead isn't. DoorLoop's double-entry accounting and vendor management are genuinely capable — they're just more machine than a self-managing landlord with a dozen units needs.
Is Keystead's accounting as deep as DoorLoop's?+
It's deep in a different direction. DoorLoop offers full double-entry accounting with reconciliation, built for professional managers who answer to owners. Keystead skips the bookkeeping ceremony and automates the outcome: bank transactions auto-categorize via rules, transfers between your accounts are detected, every category maps to a Schedule E line, and the export is CPA-ready. If you'd rather review books than keep them, that's the design.
Can I switch from DoorLoop to Keystead?+
Yes. Setup takes about 10 minutes: add your properties (details auto-filled from public records), upload your lease PDFs (AI extracts the terms), and connect your bank through Plaid. Historical data lives in your bank feed, so your books rebuild themselves from real transactions rather than imports. The 14-day trial means you can verify the fit before moving anything.
Skip the implementation phase.
Upload one lease and connect one bank account — you'll have running books in ten minutes, not ten days. If it's not a fit, walk away before the trial ends.
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