AppFolio Property Manager vs Entrata: Which is a better fit?

Melanie: Hi, my name's Melanie. I'm a controller at Blue Marble Development, and I give AppFolio property management, a rating of five out of five. Prior to using AppFolio, we used QuickBooks Desktop Premier, and it just wasn't working for our company because it didn't have enough property management availabilities and tasks that needed to be done with property management. We couldn't record it very well in QuickBooks, so we started looking for a new program, and AppFolio was the one that we decided to go with. We decided to go with AppFolio because it is a great property management program. It has every task that you need to do. It's very user-friendly, and it just was a very easy transition from QuickBooks into AppFolio. We love it. Getting started with AppFolio was very simple. The customer service team was great in assisting us in getting it implemented, and it was just a really easy transition for our company. I highly recommend AppFolio. And any advice that I would give for anybody going into this program is really just to have a close contact with customer service. They work great with you, and they're available to answer any of your questions. It's a really great program, and I highly recommend it.

Tonya I.: Hello, my name is Tonya. I'm an Operations Manager for a mid-size property management firm located in Miami. We have been using Entrata for 16 years and have been very happy. I give this product definitely five out of five. Prior to switching to Entrata, we used one site, used a couple different products there, as well as ERD. Those were great, but definitely have benefited from switching. We were looking for all inclusive solution that also would be cost effective. The greatest benefit that we saw in Entrata is that it had all the different modules that were addressing our needs in terms of prospect portal, resident portal, accounting suite, as well as document management and generating [inaudible 00:00:50] lead management, really all in one and, throughout the years, we have used all those products. One other feature that I think really separates Entrata from others is that it caters to student properties and has a large number of operators and owners in student housing using this product. We really loved the roommate matching feature that exists in Entrata, so that was very helpful to us. The onboarding and migration process was very straightforward. We had a dedicated team that was assigned to us initially. We started way ahead and worked through the high level items in terms of setting up us as a company, general ledger, all GL codes, all the important stuff as well as everything on the leasing side. And then, we were migrating at first one property at a time and then a couple at a time, and it was pretty straightforward. The downtime was about maybe a week, and that was long time ago. Now, they have a self migration tool that allows to do it almost instantly, so long you're prepared and can roll with it. Currently, I think you have two options and we actually utilized both options recently with the recent migrations. You can have them help to migrate or you can do self migration, so both options were available. But, again, that was very organized, methodical, straightforward and, before you go live, you have a chance to review everything and sign off on everything to make sure you really confirmed and completed everything as you wanted. Just if someone had already made up their mind to switch, just really, prior to migration, make sure that you have everything cleaned up in your old system, so whatever data you're bringing in is clean and there are no errors remaining. Check your deposit reports, your resident aged payables, vendor aging, all of those reports, making sure you're 100% ready to migrate. Other than that, that will be smooth sailing.