TownSq vs Buildium for HOAs: only one will quote you a price

The short version

Both vendors are said to publish their prices. That is half right, and the wrong half is the useful one.

TownSq publishes a rate card keyed to what an association actually is — one community, in a unit band — so a board can read its own price off it without talking to anyone. Buildium publishes a rate card too, but priced around rental portfolios, and its own pricing FAQ tells community associations to call a sales line. See the pricing rows in the table above.

TownSq wins that round outright and loses the next one. Its published tiers do not include community accounting at all; that sits in the quote-only top tier. If your association needs a general ledger rather than a group chat, you are getting a quote from both — and the decision moves to the paperwork, where the ranking reverses.

Where they differ

Pricing and contract transparency

Buildium’s Terms of Use, updated 9 September 2025, are the governing subscription terms rather than website boilerplate — twenty-five sections covering licence term, billing, owner data and support. They renew automatically for the same monthly or annual period unless either party gives thirty days’ notice, and a monthly term is offered. The exit clause is the one to read: an annual customer “has committed to purchase the Services for the full annual term, to be paid annually in advance,” and “may cancel the Services prior to expiration of the annual License Term without refund.” You forfeit what you pre-paid; you owe nothing further.

TownSq’s Master Customer Agreement is published only as a downloadable PDF, and runs the other way. Section 20 auto-renews on thirty days’ notice, as Buildium’s does. Section 7.6 is where they part: on early termination “for any reason,” an amount equal to the minimum monthly fees for the whole remaining initial term “shall become due and payable” within fifteen days. That is acceleration, not forfeiture — the difference between losing money you have spent and being invoiced for money you have not.

Section 21 then adds something we have not seen elsewhere in this category: TownSq “may terminate the Agreement, in whole or in part, for any reason at any time upon seven (7) days’ written notice.” The customer has no matching right. A board signing that document accepts a term it must serve and the vendor may leave on a week’s notice.

Both agreements are at least public, which is more than several competitors manage — compare Vantaca and AppFolio, where AppFolio’s pricing page carries a per-unit rate that not every visitor is shown and Vantaca publishes no price list.

Security, permissions and data ownership

Both are thinner here than a board would like, in different places.

Buildium publishes a security policy describing TLS in transit, bcrypt password hashing, enforced two-factor authentication and AWS storage with encryption at rest — but it is dated “Last reviewed August 2024” and names no certification a buyer could demand evidence of. Its contract does better than its marketing: section 11 commits Buildium to maintain a written information security program and to notify the customer of any confirmed breach. Its privacy policy is publicly readable, sets out Buildium’s role as processor to the management company, and describes access, deletion and portability rights.

Two caveats. The Data Processing Statement that section 11.b incorporates by reference sits at a RealPage domain that redirects to a login, so the privacy commitment a buyer is agreeing to cannot be read before signing. And section 6 states that Buildium “has no obligation to retain Owner Data upon suspension or termination” and that data “may be irretrievably deleted if Owner’s account is 15 days or more delinquent.”

TownSq’s agreement is not thinner on data — it is silent on protecting it and expansive on using it. Across fourteen pages we found no security commitment, no breach-notification clause, no subprocessor language and no data-return or export right. Section 14 says any backups TownSq takes “are for Our purposes” and that it has “no obligation or liability” for backup or recovery. Section 8.1 lets TownSq use service data “for any purpose.” Section 9 takes a “sublicensable, assignable, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual” licence over customer content, expressly including “developing new products and services.”

Buildium’s equivalent grant is narrower and, unusually, defined: the perpetual licence in section 10.d reaches only data in “Aggregated Form,” which the contract defines as combined with at least four other properties and irreversibly de-identified. A vendor that writes down the threshold has given you something to hold it to.

Neither publishes a status page, a service-level agreement or a subprocessor list; /security, /trust, /status, /dpa and /sla are absent on both domains. One thing we could not read: TownSq’s terms of use and privacy policy pages, and its privacy subdomain, are bare containers for a third-party consent-platform iframe that did not render for us. Those documents exist; we have not read them, and do not report on what they say.

Support and onboarding

Buildium publishes numbers. Its pricing page states live phone support Monday to Friday, 9am to 8pm Eastern, an 85% first-call resolution rate, a 95% support satisfaction rating, and for priority support an average phone wait under a minute and ticket wait under thirty. Those are vendor assertions we did not measure, but they are falsifiable ones, and there is a real, populated help centre at help.buildium.com behind them. The gating matters: phone support is only on the middle and top plans, and customers on those plans must buy the onboarding service.

TownSq publishes a support page, an email address and a phone number — and no hours, no service commitment, and one soft response target: “We typically respond within the same day.” The page is written for homeowners rather than buyers, and most of its answers route the reader back to their management company. Its contract says nothing about support at all.

Resident experience

This is where TownSq earns its reputation, and where the comparison is closest. Both homeowner apps were updated within the last three weeks and both are well rated on both platforms; the store links are in the table above. Buildium’s carries an order of magnitude more ratings, but that is a scale artefact rather than a quality signal — Resident Center serves Buildium’s whole rental base, and its recent release notes are about autopay, renters insurance and rent reporting. TownSq Community is built for associations and nothing else. Both apps’ Play Store data-safety declarations say data may be shared with third parties, is encrypted in transit, and can be deleted on request.

Where they are the same

Both auto-renew on thirty days’ notice, and both disclaim all warranties and any promise that the service will be available or secure. Both cover the association core — assessments and payments, documents, requests, violations, architectural review, board communication. Both are owned by larger parents; see the ownership rows above. Neither has been scored against our rubric yet.

Which one, for whom

• A self-managed board that wants a price today → TownSq. It is the only one of the two that will sell to a single association at a published rate.
• An association that needs a general ledger → get quotes from both. TownSq’s transparency advantage disappears exactly when accounting enters the room.
• Anyone who may need to leave early → Buildium. Forfeiting a pre-payment is a smaller risk than being invoiced for the balance of the term.
• A board that wants continuity guarantees → Buildium, on section 21 of TownSq’s agreement alone. Ask TownSq to strike the seven-day termination right and see what happens.
• A management company running rentals and associations together → Buildium, which is explicitly built for mixed portfolios.
• Diligence that requires published security paperwork → neither, honestly. Ask both for a current SOC 2 report and treat a refusal as an answer.

What we evaluated, and how

This comparison rests entirely on published documentation. Neither product was used hands-on, no demo was run, and neither has been scored against our rubric, so nothing here is a verified capability claim. Every URL was hash-checked against a known-bad control path on the same host before being treated as real.

Two findings from that check are worth stating plainly. TownSq’s binding customer agreement is a PDF reachable only from a page that otherwise holds one link, so path-probing alone would have missed it. And Buildium’s /terms-of-use/ reads as boilerplate — its own footer calls it “Website Terms” — when it is the subscription agreement.

Sources

• TownSq Master Customer Agreement (PDF) — accessed 2026-08-31
• TownSq Pricing — accessed 2026-08-31
• TownSq Support and Business Accounting — accessed 2026-08-31
• Buildium Terms of Use (updated 2025-09-09) — accessed 2026-08-31
• Buildium Pricing — accessed 2026-08-31
• Buildium Security Policy and Privacy Policy — accessed 2026-08-31
• Buildium association management software — accessed 2026-08-31

Corrections

7 October 2026. This comparison said that neither Vantaca nor AppFolio publishes a price at all. That was wrong for AppFolio: its pricing page carries a price for community associations, “$0.85 per unit/month”, in the structured data served with the page, and when we checked on 2 October 2026 it showed that price on the page to some visitors and not to others (the Vantaca vs AppFolio comparison sets out how we checked). It was too absolute for Vantaca, whose blog gives a rate of $0.54 per door per month, though we found no price list. The sentence now says what each vendor publishes.

6 October 2026. This piece said TownSq’s support page gives “no response target”. It does give one, in its own words: “We typically respond within the same day.” It is a description rather than a commitment, and the rest of the sentence stands, but the words are on the page and the sentence now quotes them.