Strata Committee Software: How to Choose in 2026

What this guide covers

• Most strata software is built for strata managers, not committees. The two are different products solving different problems.
• The four categories of platform: trust accounting, workflow and communication, all-in-one, and committee/owner-led. Most committees need a tool from the last category, and possibly access to one from the first.
• Twelve features that matter for a committee, twelve that often appear on the box and usually do not.
• Pricing-model traps that multiply costs as your building grows.
• What UnitBuddy covers today against that list, and where it stops.
• A decision framework, including the buildings UnitBuddy is the wrong fit for.

If you're on a committee looking at strata software in 2026, you've probably noticed that most of the marketing copy isn't written for you. It's written for strata managers and their agencies, the people running trust accounting, levy collection and AGM administration for dozens of buildings.

The Australian strata software market is mostly built for the management industry. The "owner portal" or "committee portal" inside a strata-manager platform only lets you look. It shows what the manager has decided to share, in the manager's format, on the manager's schedule.

This guide is for committees that want their own tool, with their own records, decisions and calendar. The buyer's questions are largely the same whether your building is fully self-managed, hybrid, or has kept its strata manager and just wants better records.

The four categories of strata software

The Australian strata software market in 2026 splits into four categories. Onsite, one of the workflow-tool vendors, has written a useful taxonomy of the first three. It skips the fourth, understandably, because that's the category that doesn't pay them.

Category 1: Trust accounting platforms. These hold money for multiple owners corporations under the strata manager's licence. They're regulated, and legally required if you run a strata management agency. Examples: StrataMax, MRI Strata Master, PropertyIQ, Urbanise. The management industry runs on these "system of record" tools. Committees don't buy them, and they aren't designed for committees to use, even when they offer a viewer-style portal.

Category 2: Workflow and communication tools. These layer over a strata-manager's trust accounting to handle facilities, maintenance requests, owner communication, building management. Examples: MYBOS, Onsite, SMATA, Resvu. These are usually bought by the strata manager (or sometimes by larger buildings with on-site building managers), and the committee gets a portal-level view. Useful, but the data and the decisions still sit with the manager.

Category 3: All-in-one platforms. These attempt to combine trust accounting, workflow and communication into a single product. Examples: Stratasphere, Intellistrata. Almost always paid for by the strata manager. The pitch is fewer integrations, fewer logins, one vendor relationship.

Category 4: Committee and owner-led platforms. This is the newer category and the one with the most variation. Self-managed strata tools (Strack, StrataView, StrataBody, Loma Strata, OurBodyCorp, and Self Strata in Queensland) target buildings without a manager. Some, like StrataView and Self Strata, also offer a mode for committees that keep their manager. Strata Savings sits nearby but is mainly an online management service for small buildings. UnitBuddy is built for the committee whether or not a manager is involved. Self-managed buildings use it to issue levy notices, track arrears and keep compliance dates, with the bookkeeping in Xero or with a bookkeeper. The features overlap with Category 2, but the committee is the buyer instead of the manager, and the product is shaped around that.

Buildings often think they need Category 1 software because their current strata manager uses it. They don't. If the manager is staying, the manager continues to operate Category 1. If the manager is leaving, what the committee needs is some combination of Category 4 plus appropriate accounting (often Xero or MYOB plus a strata add-on, or a dedicated strata trust account service). The Category 1 incumbents aren't realistic options for a committee, because their pricing, complexity and onboarding are all built around the agency model.

The rest of this guide is about Category 4: how to choose committee-led software.

The twelve features that matter for a committee

Most software comparison sheets list thirty or forty features, and most of those are noise for a committee. These twelve keep coming up in real committee evaluations. They come from how committees describe their problems, not how vendors describe their products.

1. Financial visibility. Admin fund balance, capital works fund balance, contribution history, spending by category, year-on-year comparison. The committee should be able to answer "where did our levies go" without asking the manager.

2. Compliance tracker with state-specific rules. Annual fire safety statements, lift inspections, common-area electrical safety, pool barriers, insurance renewals. Each one with a date, an evidence file, and an alert before it lapses. Generic "compliance" features that ignore state variation are almost worse than nothing: they create a false sense of coverage.

3. Document vault that survives manager changes. Insurance certificates, AGM minutes, by-law amendments, levy notices, financial statements. Searchable, exportable, owned by the building. The test: if your strata manager were replaced tomorrow, would the new manager have everything they needed without going back to the old one?

4. AGM and committee decision log. Motions, votes, resolutions, recorded as data not as PDFs of minutes. Two committees from now, someone needs to know what your scheme decided about pets in 2024 without trawling through eighteen monthly meeting packs.

5. Ten-year capital works planning. A live model with current items, replacement schedule, inflation assumption, and the contribution required to fund it, not a static PDF that goes stale within twelve months. Bonus if it can model multiple scenarios (best, mid, worst case).

6. Levy notice generation and collection tracking. Whether you generate notices in this tool or in your accounting software, the collection status (paid, pending, overdue) needs to live somewhere the committee can see in real time, ideally with arrears trends.

7. By-law registry. Active by-laws, amendments with dates, status (current, under review, replaced). The boring version of this is a folder of PDFs. The useful version is a structured record where each by-law is its own item, with version history.

8. Owner-facing portal. Each owner sees their lot: ownership share, levy contributions for the year, arrears status, notices that apply to them. Generates the certificate-style report a buyer's lawyer will ask for at sale.

9. Audit trail and event log. Tribunal matters, by-law breaches, incidents, insurance claims, inspections, correspondence. Each one with severity, status, parties involved. Institutional memory that survives committee turnover.

10. Mobile and offline access. Treasurers do not sit at desks. Reading the AGM pack on the train, approving an invoice from the kitchen, looking up a contractor's last quote at the building site: all need to work without a desktop.

11. Data export and portability. Full export, every record, every document, in non-proprietary formats. CSV for tabular data, PDF for documents, native files where possible. If the platform makes export hard, the platform owns your records, not you.

12. Integration or honest non-integration with trust accounting. If the platform claims to do trust accounting, ask how. (Trust accounting is a regulated category in every Australian state: handling client money requires a licence in some, specific account structures in all.) If the platform does not do trust accounting, ask how it integrates with the tools that do. Either answer is fine. "We do everything" answers, when probed, are usually wrong.

Twelve features that look impressive and rarely matter for a committee

These twelve show up prominently on competitor sites, and committees should give them little weight when comparing tools.

1. Per-user permissions matrices. Most committees have five members. They all need to see most things. A read-only role is useful for a new member. A granular permissions matrix is an enterprise feature and a price-tier upsell trap.

2. Maintenance ticketing for every contractor request. Useful for buildings with on-site building managers and high-volume requests. Overkill for the average residential scheme, where contractor work is monthly or quarterly. A simple log is usually sufficient.

3. Booking systems for facilities like BBQs and tennis courts. Genuinely useful for buildings with high-frequency shared amenity use. Most buildings just need a Google Calendar.

4. Two-way SMS messaging. Looks modern. In practice committees use email and a Whatsapp group. SMS is a feature managers wanted, not committees.

5. White-label customisation for branding. A tool the committee uses internally does not need its own visual identity. This is a strata-manager feature where each manager white-labels the same product to their portfolio.

6. CRM-style owner relationship tracking. Owners aren't leads. They're members of the corporation, and marketing-style relationship management doesn't fit.

7. AI chatbots that answer owner questions. Different from an AI assistant that reads your live data. Chatbot-style FAQ tools are a manager-side cost-reduction feature; for a committee, a clear notice board is more useful.

8. Bulk emailing and mailmerge. Most committees have ten to two hundred owners. A regular email handles it.

9. Marketing modules / "engagement" tools. Surveys and community events. Lower priority than financial visibility and compliance. A short non-binding poll can test opinion before a motion, but it's no reason to choose a platform.

10. Heatmaps and engagement analytics. The goal is properly funded levies, and that has nothing to do with how many owners read a dashboard.

11. Workflow automation builders. Looks impressive in demos. Committees do not have repeatable workflows in the way agencies do. Standard out-of-the-box flows are usually fine.

12. White-glove onboarding consultancy. If a product needs a consultant to set up, it's too complex for the buyer it's being sold to.

Comparison table

A short comparison of the platforms a committee is most likely to encounter when researching options. It isn't exhaustive. Trust accounting incumbents (StrataMax, Strata Master, PropertyIQ, Urbanise) are left out because they aren't realistic options for a committee buying its own software.

Every row except UnitBuddy's says only what the vendor publishes on its own website. We checked each site on 19 October 2026.

Platform	Who it says it's for	Pricing model	Accounting	Coverage
UnitBuddy	Committees and owners corporations, with or without a manager	Flat fee per building per year ($199 to $1,999 + GST)	No trust accounting, by design. Issues levy notices for self-managed buildings and tracks budgets, transactions and utility bills	National
StrataView	Owners, committees, strata managers and caretakers, with separate committee and self-managed plans	Per scheme, tiered by lot count, monthly; free plan; custom pricing over 50 lots	Self-managed plan includes levies, bank reconciliation and financial reporting	Australia
Strack	Self-managed owners corporations, strata agencies and service providers	Per lot per month, tiered, plus a setup fee	Yes, including trust accounting and bank reconciliation	Not stated
StrataBody	Owners corporations that manage their own scheme	Per scheme per month, 14 lots included, then per extra lot; yearly is 10 months' price	Levy schedules, payments and arrears; no bank reconciliation listed	National
Self Strata	Committees who self-manage, and managers who support them	Per lot, three plans, for 2 to 50 lots	Levies, arrears, fund tracking and financial reports	Queensland only
Loma Strata	Owners managing their own scheme; suits schemes under 15 lots	Per lot per month, free trial	Levies and finances	Australia
OurBodyCorp	Self-managing schemes, with admin-support and fully managed options	Per unit per month, tiered; setup fee on upper tiers	Levies, income and expenses	National
Strata Savings	Small buildings; mainly an online management service	Per-lot service fees, quote on request	Bank account and invoice handling as part of the service	NSW and Queensland
Onsite	Building managers, owners committees and strata managers	Per lot per month + GST, billed annually	No; works alongside the manager's trust accounting	Australia and New Zealand
MYBOS	Building managers, facilities teams, strata managers and owners corporations	Quote on request	No	Australia, New Zealand and UAE
Manager-supplied portal	Strata manager	Bundled in the management fee	Manager-provided	Varies

Vendors change their plans and prices often, so confirm the details when you ask for a quote. "Accounting" is the most important column for a committee thinking about self-management. A product that tracks levies isn't the same as one that runs a trust account.

UnitBuddy doesn't do trust accounting and doesn't pretend to. That's deliberate, and it's covered below.

What UnitBuddy covers as of November 2026

This table scores UnitBuddy against the twelve features, including where it stops. We checked it against our product changelog on 1 November 2026.

A few newer features sit outside the twelve:

• Where you could save. Building Health shows the categories where you spend far more per lot than similar buildings, once at least 10 of them have figures. Start a tender opens a work request for that service.
• Retenders and quotes. Retender on a contract creates a work request from its scope and opens the quote request. Each quote keeps its amount, and selecting one doesn't approve the spend.
• Polls. Non-binding polls test owner opinion before anyone drafts a motion. They aren't a vote under strata law, and a closed poll can become a motion at an upcoming meeting.
• Read-only committee members. Someone can sit on the committee and see what's going on without being able to change anything.

Pricing models that matter

Pricing model often matters more than headline price. Look out for four patterns.

Per-lot pricing. The most common model, including for most of the self-managed tools in the table above. Per-lot pricing is simple to understand, but the bill grows with every lot, so it costs most for the large schemes with the most complex finances and compliance.

Per-user pricing. Less common in strata, more common in adjacent SaaS. The trap is that committees rotate, and adding a new committee member shouldn't cost extra. Avoid platforms that charge by the user.

Per-feature pricing tiers. "Starter" plan without compliance tracker; "Pro" plan without AI assistant; "Enterprise" plan unlocks the audit log. This pattern works fine in horizontal SaaS but is hostile in strata, because every committee needs the compliance tracker and the audit log and the AGM module. You end up paying enterprise pricing to get a complete product.

Flat per-building pricing. Less common but cleaner. UnitBuddy uses this: one annual fee, scaled by lot bracket, every feature included. The pricing risk in this model sits with the vendor, and the buyer has no pricing complexity to work through.

Ask each vendor for a written quote for your lot count, covering three years. Include setup fees, add-ons and any price review terms. Then compare the totals, not the first month. For reference, UnitBuddy for a 75-lot scheme is $999 a year plus GST, with every feature included.

Red flags

Watch for six things during evaluation. Each one suggests the platform wasn't built for what a committee needs.

Data ownership not in writing. Ask explicitly: who owns the records? On termination, what do you get back, in what format, by when? If the answer is vague, the platform owns your records. This is a problem when you change platforms (or when the platform changes its pricing).

Exit clauses with notice periods longer than 30 days. A platform that makes leaving slow is protecting itself at your expense. Three months' notice for a SaaS subscription is unreasonable.

"Free if your manager pays" trap. If the strata manager is paying for the platform, the platform is built for the manager. The committee gets a portal, not a system. When the manager leaves, the platform leaves with them.

Lock-in to the vendor's own trust account or banking partner. Some platforms bundle trust accounting and require you to use their specific banking partner. This is convenient until you need to leave, at which point your historical financial data is hostage.

Aggressive auto-renewal terms. Annual subscription that auto-renews unless cancelled 60+ days in advance is a manager-industry pricing pattern. SaaS in 2026 should have transparent month-to-month or honest annual terms.

Marketing copy that talks about "the agency" or "the manager" more than "the committee" or "the building." Read the homepage, the pricing page and the support docs. If the implied buyer throughout is a strata manager, the product was built for one, regardless of what the sales page says about committees.

A decision framework

Three buyer profiles that cover most committees. Each one points to a different category of tool.

1. 01
   Identify scheme size and setup
2. 02
   Manager staying or leaving?
3. 03
   Pick committee-led platform
4. 04
   Add accounting if self-managing
5. 05
   Trial two or three options
6. 06
   Confirm export terms in writing

Profile 1: small self-managed scheme. Under twenty lots. No active manager, or manager being removed. Needs end-to-end coverage including levy generation and basic accounting. Right answer: a Category 4 self-managed strata platform (for example Strack, StrataView, Loma Strata, OurBodyCorp, or Self Strata in Queensland) or a hybrid stack where UnitBuddy issues the levy notices and keeps the records, with Xero and a bookkeeper handling the books. Either works; the choice depends on whether the building wants accounting bundled in (cheaper but more lock-in) or separated (more flexible but more setup).

Profile 2: medium scheme keeping a strata manager. Twenty to seventy-five lots. Manager is staying, but the committee wants its own records, its own compliance tracker, its own AGM history. Right answer: UnitBuddy, or another committee-focused platform, running in parallel with the manager's system. The manager continues with their trust accounting; the committee gets independent records that survive any change of manager.

Profile 3: large scheme with a building manager. Seventy-five-plus lots. Active building management, frequent contractor work, common amenity bookings. Right answer: probably both. A workflow tool (Onsite or MYBOS, often manager-paid) for building operations, plus a committee-side tool (UnitBuddy) for finances, decisions and compliance. The two address different audiences and different problems.

The buildings UnitBuddy is genuinely the wrong choice for: large schemes that need bundled trust accounting in the same tool as workflow (Strack is a better fit), buildings whose committee specifically wants a single combined platform run by their manager (an all-in-one in Category 3), and buildings under five lots where the time saved over a spreadsheet is marginal.

What the Act requires the software to hold

Software marketing talks about "engagement". The statute talks about records.

A NSW owners corporation under the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 must be able to produce the documents behind a section 184 certificate: levies, by-laws, insurance, meetings, certain orders, embedded networks. The capital works plan, from 1 April 2026, has a prescribed form when it is new or replaced. Section 106 repair history is what a leak file becomes in NCAT. Section 160 needs a current certificate of currency, not a screenshot in someone's camera roll.

Victoria's Owners Corporations Act 2006 and Queensland's Body Corporate and Community Management Act 1997 have the same demand in different labels: financial statements, meeting minutes, contracts, insurance, the long-term plan. A platform that cannot export those as ordinary files is a hostage situation with a login screen.

Five contract questions that beat a feature matrix

1. Whose data is it? The scheme's. If the vendor's terms say they own "aggregated insights" built from your minutes, get that clause cut or walk.
2. What leaves on termination? Minutes, levy history, contractor files, insurance PDFs, CCTV access logs if you store them. Name the formats (CSV, PDF, original uploads). "We will discuss a migration" is not an answer.
3. Who can see footage and personal information? If the tool stores CCTV clips or resident phone numbers, treat the Privacy Act 1988 as the working standard even when the owners corporation sits under the turnover threshold. Name the admin accounts. Review them when a committee member resigns.
4. Does the manager's copy replace yours? A Category 3 all-in-one that only the agency can open is the outgoing manager's USB stick with branding. Keep a committee-side copy of decisions and compliance dates.
5. Will it still make sense after the next reform date? NSW Strata Hub reporting, Victorian manager education by 30 June 2027, Queensland smoke-alarm coordination toward 1 January 2027: the tool should store dates and evidence, not a blog post about "2026 reforms".

What not to buy because it looks modern

A resident chat feed does not issue a levy notice. A pretty dashboard that cannot separate admin fund from capital works fund will fail the first AGM pack. An AI "ask your by-laws" bot that cannot cite the registered instrument is a liability. If you want automation, start with reminders for insurance valuation, fire-statement due dates and capital-works review, the dates the Act already cares about.

Trial the tool with last year's AGM pack, one open leak, and a sample section 184 request. If the committee cannot reconstruct those three files in an hour, the software is a brochure.

Where to start

The honest order of operations for a committee evaluating tools.

1. Read your management agreement (if you have a manager) and identify what you are paying for. Most committees discover the answer is less than they thought.
2. Decide whether you are keeping the manager or leaving. The software question follows from this decision; reversing the order produces bad outcomes.
3. If keeping the manager: focus on Category 4 software for committee records and decision-making.
4. If leaving the manager: focus on Category 4 plus an accounting solution. Many committees pair a committee operations tool with Xero plus a bookkeeper for the cleanest separation.
5. Trial two or three platforms, ideally with real data from your scheme. Vendor demos with sample data are misleading; what matters is whether your committee can use the tool with your scheme's particular quirks.
6. Confirm export and termination terms in writing before committing.
7. Onboard incrementally. Start with finances and compliance; add by-laws, contractor records and AGM history over the first six months.

For specific evaluation help, the self-managed strata guide covers what changes when you remove the manager. The audit-your-strata-manager guide covers the financial side of deciding whether to remove them. And the how-to-change-strata-manager guide covers the mechanics if you have already decided.

UnitBuddy's pricing is on the pricing page: flat per building per year, every feature on every plan, no per-user fees. From $199 a year plus GST for townhouse complexes up to $1,999 a year plus GST for high-rises, with no lot cap. If your committee wants to see it working, book a demo and we'll set up your building so you're comparing on your own scheme instead of sample data.

Further reading

• NAT: Strata managers who work smarter will outlast the ones who work harder, via LookUpStrata
• QLD: Can a strata manager restrict access to financials if owners pay for the software?, via LookUpStrata

What changed in strata this month? Read the strata news for your state, with every figure sourced.

Keep the scheme file in one place the committee and the manager can both open. Features, pricing, or book a tour.