Proplio vs COHO for Letting Agent Compliance: An Honest 2026 Comparison

The short version

COHO and Proplio overlap on exactly one module and differ on everything else. COHO is an all-in-one property management platform built from the ground up for shared living — HMOs and co-living — spanning tenancy onboarding, room-level rent management, maintenance, referencing, eSigning, marketing, and bookkeeping, with compliance as one dashboard among many. Proplio is a compliance platform that does none of that.

If you operate HMOs and the pain point is running the whole shared-living machine — rooms, tenants, rent reconciliation, maintenance tickets — COHO wins outright, and it is one of the few platforms genuinely shaped around that problem rather than retrofitted to it. Proplio does not compete in that lane. If the pain point is compliance oversight across a letting agent's whole book — the Right to Rent check nobody logged, the selective licence renewal three boroughs away, the council inspector due next week — Proplio is the deeper tool for that one job.

This is the honest 1:1 comparison. We make Proplio, so we are biased — we have tried to be fair about where COHO wins, and it wins more of this comparison than most platforms we have compared against.

What each product is actually for

COHO was built for shared living first. The unit of operation is the room, not just the property: room-level rent collection and reconciliation via Open Banking or GoCardless Direct Debit, tenant onboarding and referencing, eSigning, maintenance management, property marketing, and finance automation with a Xero integration. It has since broadened to handle single lets and mixed portfolios from one account, and it targets letting agents alongside landlords and rent-to-rent operators. Its compliance module tracks expiry dates for Gas Safety, EPC, EICR, HMO licences, PAT, fire safety, and legionella checks, alerts ahead of expiry, auto-creates a maintenance ticket assigned to your contractor when a renewal is due, and serves certificates to the tenant's dashboard for explicit acknowledgement. An encrypted document vault stores agreements, inventories, and compliance documents, and the latest compliance documents are auto-attached to every new agreement.

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 shows every property colour-coded red, amber, or green. There is no rent collection, no tenant portal, no maintenance ticketing, no referencing, no room model.

Choose based on which spine fits your operational reality. If you are an HMO operator or an agent whose book is predominantly shared housing, COHO's spine matches your business. If you are a letting agent with a mixed or mostly standard portfolio whose sharpest risk is compliance, Proplio's spine matches yours.

Compliance, head to head

This is the interesting part of the comparison, because COHO's compliance module is better than most platforms' — it is just built for a different shape of problem. 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 custom types per agency for anything else. COHO's coverage is genuinely broad too: its compliance page names Gas Safety, EPC, EICR, HMO licences, PAT, fire safety, health and safety, and boiler services, with legionella checks named elsewhere on its site. The core certificate overlap is real; the gap is at the edges of the register. Right to Rent, Smoke and CO alarm checks, Selective Licence, and the Renters' Rights-era PRS Database and Ombudsman entries are not named on COHO's public pages — and for an agency book those are exactly the items that slip. Verify the full list against your portfolio on a demo before relying on either summary.

HMO licence depth. Here COHO has a genuine structural edge: its room-level model matches how HMO operations actually run, and it auto-attaches current compliance documents to every new agreement. Proplio tracks HMO Licence and Selective Licence as first-class compliance types with expiry dates, reminders, and documents — the register view — but it does not model rooms. If your entire operation is licensed HMOs, COHO's native model is a real advantage. See the HMO licensing guide for what the licence regime demands.

Closing the loop to remediation. COHO wins this one, plainly. When a certificate comes up for renewal in COHO, a maintenance ticket is created and assigned to your chosen contractor automatically — reminder to remediation inside one system. Proplio's contractor module sends one-click renewal request emails with property details pre-filled, but the booking loop closes over email, not inside a ticketing system. If you want the platform itself to dispatch the work, that is COHO's design and not Proplio's.

Tenant acknowledgement. Also COHO's, and worth conceding clearly: COHO serves fresh certificates straight to the tenant's dashboard and requests explicit acknowledgement, so there is a record the tenant has seen them. For HMO operators, evidencing service of documents to tenants has real weight. Proplio does not do tenant-facing acknowledgement at all — its sharing runs the other direction, to landlords.

Portfolio-wide dashboard. Proplio's home screen is the entire portfolio in one view, every property colour-coded by RAG status — red (overdue), amber (expiring within 60 days), green (compliant), grey (not applicable). COHO has a compliance dashboard too ("one compliance dashboard for complete control"), inside a platform whose home ground is operations. The question to ask on a demo is which screen your team actually lives in, and whether compliance is on it.

Reminder ladder. Proplio's reminder ladder is 90, 60, 30, 14, and 7 days before expiry, configurable per agency. The 90-day lead is the one that matters — time to book a Gas Safe engineer before there is any pressure on the date. COHO alerts ahead of expiry — its pages give a four-weeks-ahead example for Gas Safety certificates — and the full lead-time ladder and its configurability are the thing 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 for a council enforcement officer, a trading standards inspector, or an HMO licence renewal. COHO's compliance pages emphasise serving the documents you need "and most importantly being able to prove you have", and its document vault stores compliance documentation well — but a one-click compliance report or audit pack is not documented on its public product pages. Absence from marketing is not proof of absence in-product; check what the reporting surface actually exports before an inspection depends on it.

Landlord-facing visibility. Proplio offers a read-only share link per landlord — they see their own properties' compliance status live, no login needed. For agents managing HMOs on behalf of third-party landlords, this is the "is my property compliant?" email, retired. COHO's sharing emphasis is tenant-facing acknowledgement; landlord compliance reporting is not documented on the pages we reviewed.

HMO operations

COHO wins. Proplio does not compete here.

If you run shared housing, the operational surface is bigger than compliance: room-level rent and reconciliation, tenant swaps mid-tenancy, maintenance across communal areas, referencing, deposits, marketing empty rooms. COHO was built for those workflows from the start, and it replaces several tools at once. There is no honest version of this comparison where Proplio is the answer for running an HMO operation.

The trade-off is the flip side of the same coin: adopting COHO means adopting the whole machine. Onboarding a portfolio onto a full platform is real work (COHO's own FastTrack onboarding is a paid add-on at £7.50 per unit, and its reviews mention a learning curve at the start because the platform does a lot), and for an agent whose book is mostly standard single lets, the room-level model is overhead rather than value. A dedicated compliance register imports your properties from a CSV and starts reminding the same afternoon.

Pricing

Proplio: £29/month flat, unlimited properties, unlimited team, monthly or annual. No per-unit pricing, no tiers, no charges for adding users or properties.

COHO: per-unit pricing, published on its website at the time of writing. Compact is £30/month for 12 units or fewer; Growth is £2.50 per unit per month between 12 and 100 units; Scale (100+ units) is custom-priced. All prices are subject to VAT, with a 10% discount for an annual commitment. Add-ons are extra: eSigning at £1 per envelope, tenant referencing from £18.50, FastTrack onboarding at £7.50 per unit. And note how a unit is counted: COHO's pricing FAQ defines it as any lettable space — rooms, whole properties, even garages and parking spaces — chargeable whether occupied or vacant, with communal areas excluded and a £30 monthly minimum. An HMO-heavy book therefore scales cost with rooms, not front doors.

The published-price picture at three portfolio sizes, using COHO's own per-unit rates (ex VAT, before add-ons):

Two honest caveats. First, you are not buying the same product — COHO's price covers rent management, maintenance, onboarding, marketing, and bookkeeping as well as compliance; Proplio's covers compliance only. If you would otherwise pay separately for rent collection, referencing, and eSigning tools, COHO's per-unit price can be the cheaper total stack. Second, remember the unit definition: a book of twenty 6-bed HMOs is 120 units on room-level counting, not 20 — price it on your real unit count, not your property count.

Switching compliance tracking from COHO to Proplio

The Proplio side is an afternoon. The COHO side needs one check first.

1. 1Ask COHO whether your compliance register and certificates can be exported. COHO publicly documents CSV export of rent and invoice data (for Xero); a compliance-register or document bulk export is not publicly documented at the time of writing — it may exist, so ask support before assuming either way.
2. 2Import your properties into Proplio from CSV — the import template maps address, property type, tenant, and landlord columns, and the full portfolio loads in minutes.
3. 3Key each certificate's expiry date against its property — whether from an export or, worst case, read off COHO's compliance dashboard. A few hundred expiry dates re-key faster than you would think.
4. 4Upload existing certificate PDFs against each compliance item. Optional but worth doing for the audit pack; it can happen gradually.
5. 5Reminders start firing automatically as the dates go in. No manual setup of individual deadlines.

If you are keeping COHO for operations, nothing else changes — COHO keeps running rooms, rent, and maintenance while compliance moves to its own system of record.

Side-by-side

Which to choose

Choose Proplio if:

• Compliance oversight across a mixed or mostly standard portfolio is the risk that keeps you up at night
• You want a flat monthly cost that does not grow with your portfolio — or your room count
• You need the audit-ready PDF pack for council inspections, trading standards visits, or licence renewals
• Your landlords want live compliance visibility without a login
• You want all twelve UK compliance types covered out of the box — including Right to Rent, Smoke and CO, Selective Licence, and PRS Database / Ombudsman — plus custom types for anything else

Choose COHO if:

• You operate HMOs or shared housing and want the whole operation — rooms, rent, tenants, maintenance, compliance — in one system
• The reminder-to-remediation loop matters more to you than the edges of the register: auto-created, contractor-assigned renewal tickets are a real workflow win
• Evidencing that tenants have seen their certificates is part of your compliance posture
• You would otherwise be paying separately for rent collection, referencing, and eSigning — the per-unit price can be the cheaper total stack

Run both if:

• Your book mixes COHO-managed HMOs with standard lets that do not justify per-unit platform pricing, and you want one compliance view across everything
• A council inspection or licence renewal is on the horizon and you need a defensible one-click audit pack now, without re-platforming your operations

For the broader landscape, see the compliance software comparison. For head-to-heads with the general-purpose platforms, see Proplio vs Arthur Online and Proplio vs Goodlord. For the breakpoint where any tool starts paying for itself versus a spreadsheet, see the spreadsheet-to-software switch guide.

Running both

The combined stack looks like this:

• COHO for the HMO operation — rooms, tenancies, rent reconciliation, maintenance tickets, referencing, tenant communication and acknowledgements
• Proplio for the compliance system of record across the whole book — every certificate and licence, every expiry, the 90/60/30/14/7 ladder, audit packs, landlord share links

The two do not need to integrate. Operational data lives in COHO; compliance data lives in Proplio. At £29/month flat, Proplio adds little to the combined bill, and the cost of a missed deadline — up to £30,000 for an EICR breach, up to £40,000 per unlicensed HMO (raised from £30,000 on 1 May 2026), 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.

Key takeaways

• COHO is an HMO-native property management platform with compliance as one module; Proplio is a compliance platform that does not do property management. They overlap on one module, not the product.
• For running shared housing end to end, COHO wins outright — and its compliance module has two genuine edges a dedicated tool lacks: renewals that auto-create contractor-assigned maintenance tickets, and tenant acknowledgement of served certificates.
• For the register itself, Proplio goes deeper at the edges and on evidence — all twelve UK types including Right to Rent, Selective Licence, and PRS Database / Ombudsman, the configurable 90/60/30/14/7 ladder, the one-click audit PDF with verification ID, landlord share links.
• Pricing models diverge structurally: Proplio is £29/month flat; COHO is per unit (£2.50/unit/month on its published Growth plan), and a unit is any lettable space including rooms — an HMO-heavy book scales cost with rooms, not properties.
• The right question is not "Proplio or COHO". It is "is my business an HMO operation that needs an operating system, or a letting agency that needs a compliance system of record" — and for some mixed books, the answer is both.

This article reflects our honest read of the Proplio vs COHO comparison as of August 2026. Proplio is our product. COHO pricing and feature claims are taken from COHO's published website at the time of writing — pricing and coverage change, so verify current details with COHO before deciding.