Landlord Studio and Tenarize
Landlord Studio is free for three properties. Why would I pay for Tenarize?
This is the closest comparison of the four, and the one where the honest answer helps you least. Landlord Studio has a real free tier, a tenant portal on every plan including that one, e-signatures, maintenance tracking and MTD filing — and below four units it costs less than Tenarize.
So the question is not which does more. It is whether the specific things Tenarize adds are ones you need: the evidence you would produce at a deposit dispute, and the statutory duties underneath the reminders.
Everything below was read off Landlord Studio's own website on 15 September 2026. Prices change — check theirs before deciding. England only — Scotland and Wales are different regimes.
What Landlord Studio does that Tenarize does not
None of this is a setup for a counter-argument. If these are the things that matter most to you, the rest of this page will not change your mind, and it should not.
A free tier that is actually usable
Their Go plan is £0 for up to three units, with income and expense tracking, tenancy and application management, mileage, ten stored documents, and MTD submissions at £5 each. Tenarize has no free tier at all. If the budget is genuinely zero, this is the honest recommendation and Tenarize is not.
It is cheaper below four units
Pro is £12 plus VAT covering three units, then £1.20 plus VAT per extra. At one to three properties that is £14.40 including VAT against Tenarize's £15, and the free tier is £0. Tenarize only becomes cheaper at around four properties.
It files your MTD return
Included on Pro and above, pay-as-you-go on the free tier. Tenarize does not file with HMRC at all — it pushes figures into FreeAgent, which does.
Mobile-first, and a tenant portal on every plan
Their app is the product rather than an accessory to it, and the tenant portal is not gated behind a tier the way it is at some competitors. Tenarize is a responsive web app; it works on a phone but it was not designed phone-first.
Tenarize and Landlord Studio, as published
What each company says on its own website. Not a verdict, and not a feature count — a record of two price lists and two sets of claims on one date.
| Tenarize | Landlord Studio | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | None — one month free, full refund inside 3 months | Yes — 3 units, 10 documents, MTD £5/submission |
| Price, 1–3 properties | £15/month, no VAT added | £0, or £12 + VAT (£14.40) on Pro |
| Price, 5 properties | £15/month | £14.40 + VAT (£17.28) |
| Price, 10 properties | £35/month | £20.40 + VAT (£24.48) |
| Tenant portal | Yes | Yes, all tiers |
| E-signed tenancy agreements | Yes | Yes |
| Maintenance request tracking | Yes | Yes — maintenance task board |
| MTD for Income Tax | Via FreeAgent, which files. Tenarize does not file | Files — included on Pro, £5/submission on free |
| Compliance reminders | Yes, with the renewal bookable from the reminder | Yes — recurring reminders |
| Inventory and inspection reports | Room by room, photos, signed both sides | Not advertised |
| Supplier list | Real local tradespeople, filtered and mapped | Not advertised |
| Audit trail | Export per tenancy, for a dispute or tribunal | Not advertised |
| Coverage | England only, and says so | UK |
On Tenarize not having a free tier
There is no free tier, and that is deliberate. All three plans are the same product — the same compliance tracking, the same tenant portal, the same inventories, the same e-signed agreements, the same audit trail, the same support. The only thing the price changes is how many properties it covers.
A free tier is a smaller version of a product, and a landlord with one property would be on the smaller version permanently. Tenarize is built for one to twenty properties, so one property is the size it was designed around rather than the size it tolerates. What replaces a free tier here is a month free and a full refund inside three months if no tenancy is active.
What Tenarize adds
Read off landlordstudio.com/uk on 15 September 2026. Where it says not advertised, that is what their public pages did or did not claim — and on a product this broad, that caveat is doing real work.
Nothing to produce at a deposit dispute
An adjudicator decides on the condition of a room at two points in time. Neither an inventory with photographs signed by both sides, nor an exportable audit trail, appears on Landlord Studio's public pages — and a maintenance log is not the same evidence.
Room-by-room inventories with photographs, signed at move-in and move-out by both sides, and an audit trail per tenancy you can export for a dispute or tribunal.
A reminder, but not the duty it belongs to
Recurring reminders will tell you a certificate is due. What is not described is the statutory layer: that a deposit carries two separate duties on one deadline counted from the day of receipt, that an outstanding one blocks a possession order on every ground but two, or that a section 8 notice must satisfy the longest ground cited.
Tenarize tracks both deposit limbs against the same deadline and reports one done late as the breach it is, warns when an outstanding duty would bar possession, and works the earliest valid expiry from sixteen section 8 grounds — the same logic the free calculators run.
The reminder does not become a booking
Knowing the gas certificate lapses in six weeks is the easy half. Finding a Gas Safe engineer who will come is the half that makes people late.
From sixty days out, Tenarize offers to book the renewal from the reminder: it picks the right trade from your own supplier list, gives you the number, drafts the email, and tracks the visit as a job you can put the invoice on.
England, specifically
Landlord Studio covers the UK. That is a feature for most people and a limitation for none — but a product covering several regimes cannot encode the fine detail of one.
Tenarize does England and nothing else, which is why it can be exact about the things that differ: the post-Renters'-Rights-Act periodic structure, the Information Sheet, section 8 grounds and periods, and the deposit deadline counted the way section 213 counts it.
When Landlord Studio is the better choice
There is a version of this page that leaves this section out. It would be a worse page, and you would find all of it out later anyway.
You want free, and three properties is enough
Then take the free tier. It is a real product, not a trial that expires, and nothing here is worth paying £15 a month to avoid if your budget is zero and your portfolio fits.
One to three properties and price decides it
£14.40 including VAT against £15, or £0 on the free tier. Tenarize does not become the cheaper option until about four properties, and at ten it is meaningfully more expensive.
You want MTD filed inside the product
They file. Tenarize does not, and the FreeAgent route means a second subscription unless you already have one.
You manage from your phone, mostly
Theirs is a mobile-first app and ours is not. If you do the job standing in a hallway rather than at a desk, that difference will matter more than a feature list suggests.
Answers, in plain terms
Is Tenarize cheaper than Landlord Studio?
Not below four properties. Landlord Studio is free for up to three units, or £12 plus VAT on Pro; Tenarize is £15 with no VAT added for one to five. At around four to five properties Tenarize is slightly cheaper, and at ten it is more expensive — £35 against roughly £24.48 including VAT. Price is not the argument for Tenarize, and a page claiming otherwise would be easy to disprove.
What does Tenarize do that Landlord Studio does not advertise?
Three things, all of them about evidence and statutory duty rather than day-to-day admin: room-by-room inventories with photographs signed by both sides, an audit trail exportable per tenancy for a dispute or tribunal, and a searchable list of real local tradespeople with the certificate renewal bookable straight from the expiry reminder.
They both do compliance reminders. What is the difference?
The reminder is similar; what sits underneath it is not. Tenarize models the duty rather than the document — both deposit limbs against one deadline, the possession bar while either is outstanding, and section 8 notice periods by ground with a warning when your expiry date falls short. You can test that yourself on the free calculators without an account.
Does either one file my tax return?
Landlord Studio does, on Pro and above, with pay-as-you-go submissions on the free tier. Tenarize does not file anything. It pushes rent and costs into FreeAgent nightly, split by property, and FreeAgent is HMRC-recognised and files. FreeAgent is the only provider supported.
A month free, and your existing tenancies come with you
"Import existing tenancy" skips the vetting you already did years ago and keeps the certificates, which are the part worth carrying across. £15 a month for one to five properties, no commission on rent, and a full refund inside three months if no tenancy is active.