Strata Committee Software: How to Choose in 2026

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 actually 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 quietly multiply costs as your building grows.
• An honest decision framework, including the buildings UnitBuddy is the wrong fit for.

If you are on a committee evaluating strata software in 2026, you have probably noticed something unusual about the buying experience: most of the marketing copy is not addressed to you. It is addressed to strata managers and their agencies — the people running the trust accounting, levy collection and AGM administration on behalf of dozens of buildings.

That is not an accident. The Australian strata software market is mostly built for the management industry. Independent reviews of the field consistently group the leading platforms as tools for strata-manager firms, not for the committees those firms work for. The "owner portal" or "committee portal" inside a strata-manager platform is a viewer, not a system. It shows you what the manager has decided to share, in the format the manager has chosen, on the schedule the manager controls.

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

The four categories of strata software

The cleanest way to think about the Australian strata software market in 2026 is in four categories. Onsite, one of the workflow-tool vendors, has written a useful taxonomy that captures the first three; the fourth is the one their taxonomy understandably skips because it is the category that does not pay them.

Category 1: Trust accounting platforms. These hold money on behalf of multiple owners corporations under the strata manager's licence. They are regulated. They are legally required if you are running a strata management agency. Examples: StrataMax, MRI Strata Master, PropertyIQ, Urbanise. These are the "system of record" tools the management industry runs on. They are not bought by committees and they are not designed to be used by committees, 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-specific tools (Strack, Loma Strata, OurBodyCorp, Strata Savings, Self Manage Your Strata) target buildings without a manager. Committee-focused operations platforms (UnitBuddy) target buildings that want their own records regardless of whether a manager is involved. The features overlap with Category 2, but the buyer is different — the committee, not the manager — which changes everything about how the product is shaped.

A common source of confusion: a building thinks it needs Category 1 software because that is what its current strata manager uses. It does not. 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 are not realistic options for a committee — 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 actually matter for a committee

Most software comparison sheets list thirty or forty features. Most of them are noise from a committee's perspective. The list below is the twelve that consistently come up in real committee evaluations, drawn from how committees actually describe their problems rather than 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 — current items, replacement schedule, inflation assumption, 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

Symmetry is useful. Here are twelve features that show up prominently on competitor sites and that committees should weight lightly when comparing tools.

1. Per-user permissions matrices. Most committees have five members. They all need to see most things. Granular role-based permissions are 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 are not leads. They are members of the corporation. Marketing-style relationship management is an inappropriate frame.

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, polls, community events. Lower priority than financial visibility and compliance.

10. Heatmaps and engagement analytics. Owners reading dashboards is not the goal. Levies funded properly is the goal.

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. A sign that the product needs a consultant to set up is a sign that the product is too complex for the buyer it is being sold to.

Comparison table

A short comparison of the platforms a committee is most likely to encounter when researching options. This is not exhaustive — it covers the platforms a committee-side searcher will land on. Trust accounting incumbents (StrataMax, Strata Master, PropertyIQ, Urbanise) are deliberately excluded because they are not realistic options for a committee buying their own software.

A few notes on this table. The "best fit" column is opinion, derived from each vendor's own positioning and from what the platform appears to be optimised for. "Pricing model" reflects the structure as advertised; specific numbers change and should be confirmed at quote time. "Trust accounting" is the most important column for a committee considering self-management — platforms that say "limited" generally support some bookkeeping but do not replace the regulated trust account function.

UnitBuddy is the only platform on the list that explicitly does not do trust accounting and does not pretend to. That is intentional and is covered below.

Pricing models that matter

Pricing model often matters more than headline price. Three patterns to look out for.

Per-lot pricing. Common in the strata-manager incumbents (Category 1) at roughly $3–$12 per lot per month, depending on tier and platform. Per-lot looks fair until you realise that a committee buying for itself is paying the same per-lot rate that a strata-manager pays despite getting a fraction of the functionality and an unrelated value proposition. Per-lot also penalises the buildings that need software most: large schemes with complex finances and many compliance items.

Per-user pricing. Less common in strata, more common in adjacent SaaS. The trap: committees rotate. Adding a new committee member should not cost $20 a month. Avoid platforms that gate users.

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: every committee needs the compliance tracker and the audit log and the AGM module. Tiered feature gating means you are 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 is on the vendor, not the buyer; pricing complexity that does not exist for the buyer is a feature.

A worked example. A 75-lot mid-rise scheme:

• Per-lot at $5/lot/month: $4,500/year
• Per-lot at $8/lot/month: $7,200/year
• UnitBuddy Mid-Rise tier: $999/year

The differences compound year on year, and the per-lot models tend to introduce add-on charges (notices, AGM packs, document storage) that the flat-fee models include. A committee comparing platforms should always model three years of total cost, not the first month's quote.

Red flags

Six things to watch for during evaluation. Each one is a sign that the platform is structurally misaligned with 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 has misaligned its incentives. 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.

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 (Strack, Loma Strata, OurBodyCorp, Strata Savings) or a hybrid stack of UnitBuddy plus Xero plus a bookkeeper. 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.

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 actually 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 navigate the tool with your scheme's actual 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/year for townhouse complexes up to $1,999/year for high-rises with no lot cap. If your committee wants to see what taking back control of records looks like, book a demo and we will set up your building so the comparison is concrete rather than theoretical.