The short version
Alto and Proplio look adjacent but solve different problems. Alto by Houseful is a full cloud-based sales-and-lettings CRM and operations platform — applicants, vendors, sales progression, lettings progression, client accounting, diary, portal feeds to Rightmove and Zoopla — with compliance surfaced as one workflow among many. Proplio is a compliance platform that does not do sales, lettings progression, accounting, or CRM.
If the operational pain point is running a sales-and-lettings business — managing applicants, progressing tenancies and sales, reconciling client account, feeding the portals, keeping one CRM across the team — Alto wins outright. Proplio does not compete in that lane. If the pain point is compliance oversight — the EICR you are not sure has been done, the HMO renewal you might have missed, the council inspector turning up next week — Proplio is the deeper tool and is dramatically cheaper.
A lot of agencies run both. The combined monthly cost is typically less than moving up an Alto tier or adding seats to deepen the compliance side, and you get a stronger compliance tool either way. This is the honest 1:1 comparison. We make Proplio, so we are biased — we have tried to be fair about where Alto wins.
What each product is actually for
Alto by Houseful (formerly Vebra Alto, now part of the Houseful group alongside Zoopla) was built as a cloud CRM and operations backbone for estate and letting agencies, with a strong following among small and mid-sized independents who wanted a browser-based system rather than installed desktop software. The applicant and vendor sit at the centre; matching, sales progression, lettings progression, client accounting, diary, and portal integrations all flow through the same record. The property management module records certificates and surfaces expiries, but it rides alongside the rest of the platform. It is competent. It is not the part of Alto the product is shaped around.
Proplio was built around the compliance lifecycle and nothing else. A property has a list of compliance items. Each item has an expiry date. As that date approaches, reminders fire at 90, 60, 30, 14, and 7 days. When an inspector or landlord asks for evidence, you generate a one-click PDF compliance pack. The portfolio dashboard tells you which properties are red, amber, or green. There is no CRM, no applicant matching, no sales progression, no client accounting, no tenancy ledger, no portal feeds.
Choose based on which spine fits your operational reality. If your team spends more time on the operational backbone of running a sales-and-lettings business than on compliance follow-up, Alto. If it is the other way around, Proplio. If both are real, run both — that is the most common ending for agencies once the portfolio grows.
Compliance, head to head
Both tools surface gas safety, EICR, and EPC status with expiry alerts. The differences show up at the edges, which is where compliance actually bites you. See the full compliance checklist for the obligations any tracker has to cover.
Compliance type coverage. Proplio ships with twelve UK compliance types as defaults — Gas Safety, EICR, EPC, Legionella, Smoke and CO, Right to Rent, HMO Licence, Selective Licence, PAT Testing, Fire Safety, PRS Database, and PRS Ombudsman — plus the ability to define custom types per agency for anything else you track. Alto covers the core certificates well, but agents commonly report having to track selective licensing conditions, PAT renewals, legionella reviews, and PRS Database / PRS Ombudsman registrations outside the platform in a spreadsheet or separate diary. Both tools evolve their coverage; check current Alto coverage against your specific portfolio mix when evaluating.
Portfolio-wide compliance dashboard. Proplio's home screen is the entire portfolio in one view, every property colour-coded by RAG status. You see at a glance which properties are red (overdue), amber (expiring within 60 days), green (compliant), or grey (not applicable). Alto's home screens are shaped around the applicant and vendor pipelines, the sales and lettings progression, and the diary — compliance is reachable in a couple of clicks but it is not the thing the most-watched screen is shaped around. For an agency where compliance is the operational risk, the difference is whether the screen the team starts the day on surfaces it or hides it.
Reminder ladder. Proplio's reminder ladder is 90, 60, 30, 14, and 7 days before expiry, configurable per agency in settings. The 90-day lead time is the one that matters most — it gives you time to book a Gas Safe engineer or an EPC assessor before there is any pressure on the date. Alto's diary and workflow tools can surface compliance dates too; the configurability and the early-warning lead time are the part to compare on a demo.
Audit-ready PDF report. Proplio generates a single PDF compliance pack per property in one click — every certificate bundled, full audit trail of who did what and when, unique verification ID. That is a defensible artefact you can hand straight to a council enforcement officer, a trading standards inspector, or attach to an insurance renewal. Alto stores documents against the property and gives you per-property visibility, but assembling a one-click verifiable audit pack typically means downloading certificates and combining them. For agents whose council relationship matters, the one-click PDF is the practical difference.
Landlord-facing visibility. Proplio offers a read-only share link per landlord — they see their own properties' compliance status without needing a login. No more emailing PDFs every quarter. Alto has landlord and tenant portals that cover a broader set of operational updates — statements, tenancy details, repairs — and compliance status sits inside that. The two solve different versions of the same problem; the Proplio version is narrower, instant to set up, and does not require a portal seat for every landlord.
Contractor management. Proplio's contractor module is specifically for compliance contractors — gas engineers, electricians, EPC assessors, legionella assessors — with one-click renewal emails carrying property details pre-filled. Alto's contractor and works management is broader because it covers all maintenance contractors and the repair workflow as well, with work orders on top.
Sales, lettings progression, accounting, CRM
Alto wins. Proplio does not compete here.
If your team's biggest daily friction is running the operational backbone of a sales-and-lettings business — keeping a clean CRM across applicants and vendors, progressing sales through to exchange, progressing lettings through to move-in, reconciling client account, feeding Rightmove and Zoopla, running the diary — you need a sales-and-lettings platform. Alto's applicant management, sales and lettings progression, client accounting, and portal integrations are the core of what Houseful has built the product around. There is no honest version of this comparison where Proplio is the answer for CRM, sales progression, or accounting.
This is why "Proplio vs Alto" is rarely the right question. The right question is "what tool runs which part of my operation, and what does the combined cost look like".
Pricing
Proplio: £29/month flat, unlimited properties, unlimited team, monthly or annual. No per-seat pricing, no per-property pricing, no feature tiers, no charges for adding users or properties.
Alto: subscription pricing, quote-based, not published publicly. Agencies typically report a per-branch or per-user monthly subscription plus setup and portal-feed costs, with bolt-ons for additional modules and integrations. The realised cost depends heavily on branch count, user count, module mix, and contract length, so the only reliable figure is a quote sized to your operation.
Because Alto does not publish a price list, the table below shows Proplio's flat fee against the shape of an Alto bill rather than precise numbers. Treat the Alto column as a structure to ask about on a demo, not a quote.
| Letting team | Proplio | Alto (structure) |
|---|---|---|
| 2 people | £29 flat | Per-branch / per-user subscription + setup |
| 4 people | £29 flat | Scales with users and modules added |
| 8 people | £29 flat | Scales further; portal feeds and bolt-ons on top |
The point of the table is not that Proplio is cheaper than Alto in absolute terms — they are different products. The point is that Proplio's compliance depth does not scale its price with your team or portfolio, whereas the compliance slice of an all-in-one CRM is bundled into a bill that does. If compliance is the specific thing you want to get right, paying a flat £29 for the deeper tool is hard to beat. For the wider build-vs-buy picture, see the compliance software comparison and the spreadsheet-to-software switch guide.
Switching, or running alongside
You do not have to choose. The cleanest setup for most agencies that already run Alto is to keep it for everything it is good at and add Proplio as the compliance system of record:
- 1Export your compliance register from Alto as CSV — property, compliance type, last done date, expiry date, contractor.
- 2Map the columns to Proplio's import template and upload. The full portfolio loads in minutes.
- 3Upload the existing certificate PDFs against each compliance item.
- 4Set your reminder ladder in settings and let the 90/60/30/14/7 reminders start firing.
Alto keeps running for sales, lettings, and accounts. Compliance moves to its own system of record with no integration work and no disruption to the rest of the operation. For the wider handover picture when a landlord or portfolio moves between agents, see the compliance handover guide.
Running both
The combined stack looks like this:
- Alto for the sales-and-lettings backbone — CRM, applicant matching, sales progression, lettings progression, client accounting, diary, portal feeds, landlord and tenant portals
- Proplio for the compliance system of record — every certificate, every expiry, every audit trail, every landlord share link, the one-click PDF pack for council inspectors
The two do not need to integrate. Sales, lettings, and financial data lives in Alto. Compliance data lives in Proplio. The agency-side workflows touch each tool for the part it owns. The combined monthly cost at most team sizes is materially lower than moving up an Alto tier or adding seats to deepen the compliance side — and you get a better compliance tool at the same time.
The objection here is "another tab open". That is real. The counter is that the cost of a missed compliance deadline — up to £30,000 for an EICR breach, up to £30,000 per unlicensed HMO, up to £20,000 per Right to Rent failure — makes the cognitive cost of a second tab cheap. See the full landlord fines guide for the penalty regime in 2026.
For the head-to-head with the other major operations platforms in the lettings space, see Proplio vs Reapit, Proplio vs Arthur Online, and Proplio vs Goodlord, and against the dominant repairs platform, Proplio vs Fixflo.
Key takeaways
- Alto by Houseful is a sales-and-lettings CRM and operations platform with compliance as a workflow. Proplio is a compliance platform that does not do CRM, sales progression, or accounting. They overlap on one workflow, not on the whole product.
- For applicants, sales progression, lettings progression, client accounting, and portal feeds, Alto wins outright. For compliance depth — twelve UK types, configurable reminder ladder, one-click audit PDF, portfolio-wide RAG dashboard, landlord share links — Proplio wins.
- Pricing is not directly comparable. Proplio is £29/month flat; Alto is quote-based per-branch/per-user subscription that scales with your team and modules. The compliance slice of an all-in-one bill is rarely the deepest version of compliance you can buy.
- Many agencies run both. The combined cost is typically less than upgrading Alto's tier or adding seats to expand the compliance side, and you get a stronger compliance tool either way.
- The right question is not "Proplio or Alto". It is "which tool runs which workflow, and what is the combined cost".
This article reflects our honest read of the Proplio vs Alto comparison as of May 2026. Proplio is our product. Alto does not publish a public price list, so we have described the shape of its pricing rather than quoting figures — always get a quote sized to your branches, users, module mix, and contract length.