TurboTenant fills the unit. Keystead keeps the books.
TurboTenant is a genuinely good free tool for listings, applications, and screening. But once the lease is signed, the work shifts to rent reconciliation, expense categorization, and tax prep — and that's the part Keystead automates.
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Keystead vs TurboTenant, honestly
| Feature | Keystead | TurboTenant |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $29/mo up to 10 units, $79/mo up to 50. 14-day free trial, no card. | Core plan is free for landlords — tenants pay application and screening fees. An optional paid plan adds premium features. |
| AI lease parsing | Drop a PDF — tenants, rent, deposits, dates, and clauses extracted with confidence scores and citations back to the document. | Offers lease templates and document storage; terms of an existing lease are entered 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 — however the tenant pays. | Rent collected through TurboTenant records itself; rent arriving outside the platform (Zelle, checks) is tracked manually. |
| Accounting & bank rules | QuickBooks-style rules engine: auto-categorize by payee and amount, with transfer detection between your accounts. Per-property books. | Accounting is not the core product — many landlords pair TurboTenant with a separate bookkeeping tool. |
| Schedule E export | Included on every plan, aligned line-by-line to the IRS form. Built by a CPA founder. | Not a core feature — tax prep typically happens in a separate accounting tool. |
| Listings & syndication | Keystead can publish a simple public listing page per unit, but marketing syndication isn't the focus. | One of the strongest free vacancy-marketing tools for landlords — listings, lead management, and pre-screening. |
| Applications & tenant screening | Not yet — Keystead focuses on what happens after the lease is signed. | Online applications and screening reports, paid for by the applicant. |
| Maintenance / work orders | Work orders with status, assignees, estimates, and actual costs — included on every plan. | Tenants can submit maintenance requests through the platform. |
| Resident portal | Resident portal with email invites for rent and maintenance requests. | Tenant portal for payments, requests, and renters insurance. |
TurboTenant details from turbotenant.com, checked June 2026: free core plan for landlords with tenant-paid application/screening fees, plus an optional paid plan. Features and pricing change — confirm current details on each vendor's site.
Who should use TurboTenant — and who should use Keystead
TurboTenant makes sense if your biggest recurring problem is vacancy. Its free plan covers listing syndication, lead management, online applications, and tenant screening (paid by the applicant) — a legitimately strong toolkit for zero dollars. If you turn over units often and mostly need to find and vet tenants, start there.
Keystead makes sense when the tenancy itself is the work: deposits arriving by Zelle and check, lease terms buried in scanned PDFs, expenses that need sorting into the right tax categories every month. Keystead is accounting-first — built for self-managing landlords with one to fifty units who want CPA-grade books without doing CPA-grade data entry. Free-for-landlords tools tend to be light here, because deep accounting is expensive to build and hard to monetize through tenant fees.
The post-signature gap
Most landlord tools concentrate on the two weeks around lease signing. The other fifty weeks of the year are bank transactions. Keystead starts where the signature ends: drop the signed lease PDF and Claude extracts every term — tenants, rent, deposit, dates, late fees, key clauses — each field with a confidence score and a citation back to the page it came from.
Then connect your bank through Plaid. Incoming rent — ACH, Zelle, wire — auto-matches to the right tenant by amount, name, and rules you define, no matter how the tenant chose to pay. Outgoing transactions hit a QuickBooks-style rules engine: insurance categorizes itself to Insurance, the water bill to Utilities, and transfers between your own accounts are detected so they never inflate income or expenses. Platform-based rent collection only sees the payments made through the platform; a bank feed sees everything.
Tax time, from a CPA founder
Keystead's founder is a CPA, and it shows most at tax time. Every expense category maps to a specific Schedule E line item — insurance, mortgage interest, repairs, taxes, utilities, each on its own IRS line. When January comes, you export a per-property Schedule E report and hand it to your accountant — no shoebox, no "miscellaneous" bucket to untangle.
With a listings-first tool, tax season usually means exporting whatever payment records exist and rebuilding the year in a spreadsheet or a separate accounting product. In Keystead, the Schedule E export is on every plan, because tax-ready books are the point of the product.
What it actually costs
TurboTenant: the core plan is free for landlords — the business model is tenant-paid application and screening fees, with an optional paid plan for premium features. For vacancy marketing and screening, free is real and the value is real.
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. There's a 14-day free trial with no credit card required — upload one lease and connect one bank account, and see how much of the month-end work disappears.
Common questions
Is Keystead free like TurboTenant?+
No. TurboTenant's core plan is genuinely free for landlords because tenants pay the application and screening fees. Keystead starts at $29/month for up to 10 units. The difference is what each is built for: TurboTenant is strongest at filling a vacancy; Keystead is built for everything after — AI lease parsing, automatic rent matching from your real bank feed, categorized books, and a CPA-ready Schedule E at tax time.
What does Keystead do that TurboTenant doesn't?+
The accounting backbone. Keystead reads your lease PDFs with AI (every term extracted with a confidence score and a citation back to the page), matches incoming rent to the right tenant from your Plaid bank feed regardless of how the tenant paid, and runs QuickBooks-style categorization rules so expenses file themselves into Schedule E categories. TurboTenant is built around listings, applications, and screening — accounting is not its core product.
When is TurboTenant the better choice?+
If your main problem is finding tenants, TurboTenant is hard to argue with: free listings syndicated to rental sites, lead management, applications, and tenant-paid screening. If you have steady long-term tenants and your pain is bookkeeping, rent reconciliation, and tax prep, that's Keystead's territory.
Can I use TurboTenant and Keystead together?+
Yes, and some landlords do exactly that: market the vacancy and screen applicants in TurboTenant, then upload the signed lease to Keystead, where AI extracts the terms and your bank feed takes over rent tracking and expense categorization. There's no integration between the products — but since each owns a different phase of the tenancy, there's also nothing to sync.
Does Keystead charge my tenants fees?+
No. Keystead charges the landlord a flat monthly subscription ($29/mo Starter, $79/mo Pro) and doesn't monetize your tenants. TurboTenant's free-to-landlord model works by charging tenants for applications and screening — a fair trade-off, just a different one.
Keep TurboTenant for the vacancy. Try Keystead for the books.
Upload one lease and connect one bank account. If Keystead doesn't save you an hour in the first week, no hard feelings.
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