PayHOA vs HOA Express: Which is a better fit?

James: I'm James. I'm the treasurer of a homeowners' association. We use the PayHOA accounting app to keep our financial records and I would overall rate that at about a three. Prior to using PayHOA, one of our homeowners who had been a math professor created a lot of Excel spreadsheets. They worked fine, but they only worked for him. As we started to think about someone else becoming treasurer, we looked outside to find some cloud-based app that could help us and PayHOA stood out. We chose PayHOA because it was inexpensive. It had some wonderful customer support, fantastic people to speak to who could have held our hand in getting on board and stayed in touch with us, or were available for many, many months afterwards. It's done its job very nicely. It's a good app, simple record keeping. We've been happy with it. It was very easy to onboard and integrate our homeowners records with PayHOA made all the easier by the fact that intelligent, very courteous staff people took much of that work on for themselves. Something seems to have happened to PayHOA. I don't know what it would be like to come aboard today. I'm going to assume the coming aboard may be excellent. We've now been clients of theirs for about a year and three quarters, and in the last year, pretty much they have been completely unavailable to service us. Calls are not returned, emails are not responded to, and that courtesy and that exquisite interpersonal manner that they shared with us simply is absent. I hope it comes back. The service is still wonderful and valuable, easy to use, but in having a problem which we've had, we just can't find answers to them whatsoever.

Peter S.: Hi, I'm Peter. I'm president and treasurer of the Keswick B Condo Association in Florida. I am working with HOA Express on their website development, on the website development for our development, and I would rate them as a five. I've been very happy with their support and performance. We are a 20-unit condo development building, and I use HOA Express to develop the website for our unit in order to communicate important information to our owners. I'm new to website development, so I was very concerned about whether or not I would have the capability to develop the website and how much time and effort it would take me. So I looked first online at various website developers, and I looked at Wix and GoDaddy because I had heard a lot about them. Then I also looked at HOA Express because one of the owners in another building had used them to develop their website for their building. When I looked at all three of those developers, I came to choose HOA Express because they were geared specifically to condominium developments. The HOA is Homeowner Association, and we are a condo association, which is very similar to an HOA. I found that all of the items that were in their template were very specific for condominium developments such as ours, whereas I didn't need to customize a platform to make it fit. Their platform and templates fit exactly to what I needed for our website. So I chose HOA over the other two. Even though HOA was $2 or $3 more per month, I felt that was minuscule compared to the benefits of using HOA Express. I found, in developing the website, first of all, it took me much less time than I expected, but there were also some features that were not self-explanatory. For instance, when I went to the members page and entered the information for our owners, I find that there were certain idiosyncrasies. For instance, one had to click on the name in order to get additional information, and it wasn't obvious that I needed to do that. So I wound up having to talk to HOA Express to Meredith there on the chat, and she was able to explain it to me. So I found that all of the features that I wanted were there, but not all of them were obvious when I navigated through the website. So I added language onto various pages in order to get our owners to understand how better to use those pages. Another feature that I had some difficulty with was getting the members' information onto the website, and I got help from HOA Express from Meredith there through the chat, and she formatted the information in the way it needed to be. But I would've been willing to do that had I had enough instruction to do that. So I felt that a user manual would've been helpful when I was going through all of that. But having said that, those issues were more annoyances than problems, and they were easily resolved once I contacted HOA Express. They had solutions that were very readily implementable, and I got over those hurdles very quickly.