Smoobu vs Lodgify: which one actually costs less on direct bookings

The short answer

Which is cheaper, Smoobu or Lodgify?

Lodgify is cheaper on the sticker and often more expensive in practice. Lodgify Starter is about $16 per month billed annually, against €29 per month per unit for Smoobu Flex. But Lodgify adds a 1.9% fee to every direct reservation on Starter and Professional, while Smoobu Flex adds 0.9% and Smoobu Prepaid adds nothing.

The crossover depends entirely on how much direct business you actually do. On published list prices, the gap between Lodgify Starter and Lodgify Ultimate, which removes the booking fee, is roughly $87 per month. A 1.9% fee reaches that at about $55,000 a year in direct bookings, so below that the fee is cheaper than upgrading and above it the upgrade pays for itself.

Run the same arithmetic on your own numbers before choosing. Neither vendor puts the booking fee next to the headline price, and for a host doing real direct volume it is the larger of the two costs.

Does Smoobu or Lodgify charge commission on direct bookings?

Both do, on their cheaper plans. Smoobu takes 0.9% on Professional Flex and 0% on Professional Prepaid and Teams Pro+. Lodgify takes 1.9% on Starter and Professional and 0% on Ultimate. These are separate from the card-processing fee your payment provider charges, which you pay in every case.

This surprises hosts who moved to direct booking specifically to stop paying commission. It is much smaller than an OTA cut, which typically runs 3% to 15% or more, but it is not zero, and it scales with your success rather than staying flat.

Do you need either of them if you already have a website?

Often not. Smoobu and Lodgify are both platforms built around the assumption that they will host your booking website, and most of what you pay for is channel management and site building. A host who already has a Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, or Webflow site and just wants guests to see live availability and send a booking request is buying a lot of platform to solve a small problem.

The lighter route is an embedded widget: a calendar that pulls your blocked dates in over iCal from Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com, and a booking form beneath it. RentalBeam does exactly that, refreshing imported availability at most every 15 minutes, and takes no commission and no booking fee on direct bookings. The only booking cost is the standard card-processing fee, paid to Stripe rather than to us.

It is genuinely not the right answer for everyone. If you need a channel manager pushing rates and availability out to the OTAs over API, or you want a new booking website built for you, buy one of the two platforms above. RentalBeam is neither of those things.

Work out your own number

Percentage fees only matter in proportion to what you book directly, so the honest comparison is the one run on your own figures rather than anyone's example. Calculate what commissions cost you per year.

Sources

• Smoobu pricing page
• Lodgify pricing page

Smoobu and Lodgify are trademarks of their respective owners and are not affiliated with RentalBeam. RentalBeam makes a competing product, which is why it appears in the table above and is labelled as ours. Plan details were checked on 21 August 2026and vendors change pricing without notice, so confirm current terms on their own sites before deciding. Where published sources disagree about a vendor's terms, the table marks the row as varying rather than guessing.