Stessa vs Baselane in 2026: Which Free Landlord Platform Should You Actually Run Your Rentals On?
Stessa and Baselane get compared constantly because both are free and both promise to handle a landlord's money, but they solve different halves of the problem. Stessa, owned by Roofstock, is an accounting and reporting layer that sits on top of the bank accounts you already have, pulling transactions in through bank feeds and turning them into Schedule E style reports. Baselane is the opposite shape: it wants to be the bank account, with per property checking, interest bearing balances, free ACH rent collection, and bookkeeping that happens because the money moved through it.
Scored head to head
| Criteria | Stessa | Baselane | Rent Ledger Template |
|---|---|---|---|
| Court / record quality | 7.0 | 6.5 | 9.5 |
| Ease & speed | 6.5 | 6.5 | 10.0 |
| No signup required | 2.0 | 2.0 | 10.0 |
| Price | 10.0 | 10.0 | 10.0 |
| Features & automation | 9.5 | 9.5 | 5.0 |
| Flexibility | 6.0 | 6.0 | 9.0 |
| Overall | 7.0 | 6.9 | 9.1 |
Scores from our full 2026 comparison, out of 10. Between the two, Stessa scores higher overall.
Pick Stessa if
Pick Stessa if you already have banking you like and what you actually want is clean books and tax ready reporting across a portfolio. Its free Essentials tier covers unlimited properties, automatic bank feeds, basic reports, screening and rent collection, and the paid tiers (around $12 a month billed annually for Manage, closer to $28 a month for Pro) add Schedule E, legal forms, advanced reports and budgeting.
Price: Free · ~$12/mo Pro (as of 2026)
Pick Baselane if
Pick Baselane if you are willing to move your rental banking and want the bookkeeping to fall out of it automatically. The core plan is free, rent collected by ACH costs nothing, balances earn interest in the high 2s to low 3s percent depending on the account and whether you collect rent through it, and per property accounts make the year end sorting mostly disappear. Its paid Smart tier, roughly $20 a month billed annually, mainly buys automation like rule based tagging, receipt matching and faster rent deposits.
Price: Free (as of 2026)
The bottom line
The honest split is that Stessa is a reporting product and Baselane is a money movement product, and the deciding question is whether you want to change banks. Stessa is the safer pick if you have an accountant, multiple entities, or existing accounts you will not move, though its most consistent complaint is bank feed connections breaking and needing to be relinked. Baselane is the better pick if you are a small to mid sized landlord (most reviewers put the sweet spot under about ten units) who would rather have one place where rent lands, categorizes itself and earns interest, with the caveat that it is a fintech on a partner bank rather than a bank itself. Neither is worth onboarding to if all you needed was a single tenant's payment history on paper, which is the narrow case our free rent ledger generator covers: enter the charges and payments and get a dated ledger with a running balance you can print, with no account and no bank connection.
- ✓Court-ready ledger in ~60 seconds, no onboarding
- ✓Free with no signup to start; PDF/CSV out of the box
- ✓Running balance, partial payments, and late-fee notes built in
- ✓Nothing to migrate — generate, print, done
Free, no signup. Or see the full ranking of all 6 tools.