Preno vs Cloudbeds: Pricing, Plans and Which One Fits Your Property

If you searched Preno vs Cloudbeds, you're probably trying to work out which one actually costs less before you book a demo with either. The honest answer is that both companies make that harder than it should be — neither publishes a flat number you can compare side by side. What you can compare is how each prices its tiers, what's bundled at each level, and which size of property each one is actually built for. We make PA PMS, a free PMS alternative, so we've kept the Preno and Cloudbeds facts below to what's published on their own sites.

How Preno prices its plans

Per Preno's own help center article on plans and pricing, Preno runs four tiers. Flexi is the entry option: a low fixed monthly base plus a 1% fee on the revenue of bookings it processes — so your bill moves with how busy you are. Essentials bundles the core PMS with a channel manager (connecting up to three OTAs), a website booking engine, automatic payments and deposits, and Xero/MYOB accounting integration. Growth Pilot adds dynamic pricing tools and a fuller channel manager. Enterprise/Groups is custom-priced for multi-property operators. Everything except Flexi scales by the number of rooms/units on your account, worked out through a calculator on Preno's pricing page rather than a flat published figure, and annual billing (paid 12 months up front) gets a 20% discount over paying month to month.

Preno itself (per its own marketing pages) is a New Zealand company pitching its platform at small and medium independent properties — hotels, motels, bed and breakfasts — with Booking.com, Expedia and Airbnb connections built in, and a 7-day free trial rather than a permanent free tier.

How Cloudbeds prices its plans

Cloudbeds' pricing page lists four plans — Flex, One, Experience and Enterprise — and every one of them leads to "Request a quote" with no published figures, offering a demo rather than a free trial. Per the same page, Flex covers the core PMS, payments and its partner marketplace without distribution tools. One adds the channel manager, booking engine and Google Free Booking Links on top of Flex. Experience builds on One by adding guest messaging, digital check-in and reputation management. Enterprise is a custom package aimed at multi-property groups, brands and management companies. Add-on modules — revenue management, a guest marketing CRM, digital marketing, websites and premium phone support — are sold separately, also without published prices.

Where Cloudbeds is the stronger choice

Cloudbeds is the bigger platform of the two by a clear margin. Payments are part of every plan, and its Experience and Enterprise tiers add guest messaging, digital check-in, reputation management and enterprise-level reporting aimed at groups and management companies running several properties. If you want one vendor that can eventually cover marketing, a website and multi-property oversight as you grow, it has more ceiling than Preno.

Where Preno is the stronger choice

Preno is pitched more specifically at the small independent property — a motel, a B&B, a boutique hotel — and its mid-tier plans bundle a channel manager, a booking engine and payments together without needing Cloudbeds' larger, quote-only sales process. The Xero/MYOB accounting integration is a real differentiator if your bookkeeping already runs through either tool. If you want channel sync and a booking engine from one small-property vendor and you're comfortable with usage-based pricing (the 1% revenue fee on Flexi, per-room pricing above it), Preno is built closer to that brief than Cloudbeds.

Where PA PMS fits

Both Preno and Cloudbeds price around growth: more rooms, more bookings or more features means a bigger bill, and in both cases you only find out the exact number after a quote or a calculator. PA PMS takes a different shape. The free plan covers the day-to-day front desk — reservations and group bookings, check-in/check-out, guest folios and charges, housekeeping status, night audit, and reporting (occupancy, ADR, RevPAR) — with no per-room fee and no setup fee, syncing with Booking.com and Expedia through their XLS/CSV exports. When manual imports stop being enough, a paid plan adds live two-way channel sync with Booking.com and Expedia; it's set up manually, not self-serve, after a hotel requests it, and has no published fixed price. Sign-up itself is instant — new accounts are activated automatically, with only suspicious signups held for manual review. It's in daily production use at Hidden Lagoon Resort in the Philippines, where it was built, and it's built for hotels and resorts of any size that don't want to pay per-room fees, setup costs or monthly minimums for the core PMS.

How to decide

• Choose Cloudbeds if you want one commercial platform that can grow into payments, revenue tools, marketing and multi-property management, and you're comfortable going through a sales quote to find out the price.
• Choose Preno if you're a small independent property that wants a channel manager, booking engine and Xero/MYOB accounting bundled together, and you're fine with usage-based pricing rather than one flat monthly number.
• Choose PA PMS if you want the core front-desk PMS for free with no per-room fee, and you'd rather add live channel sync later, on your own terms, than commit to either vendor's pricing model now.
• Also compared: PA PMS vs Cloudbeds, PA PMS vs Little Hotelier and PA PMS vs eZee Absolute. For the pricing models used across the industry generally, see How Much Does a Hotel PMS Cost?