Comparison
Cardinal beside the four systems you are probably also considering
Cardinal is a Canadian property management system at one published monthly price: reservations, folios, the ledger, tax, housekeeping and your own booking page in one model of the property. This page puts the decisions behind it beside the alternatives, then counts the steps each vendor's own documentation gives for a job you do every week.
How Cardinal decides
Seven decisions, and what each one saves you
The right-hand column is the category rather than any one company: dozens of systems sell into this market and they do not all do the same thing. Nothing in it is a claim about a named vendor. Those are in the table below, quoted from their own pages.
| The question | Cardinal | Most systems |
|---|---|---|
| What makes the bill go up? | Nothing you do on the property. Not a new cabin, not a busy July, not a seasonal hire | Rooms, sites, reservations, or a share of the rate |
| What does it cost to start? | Nothing beyond the monthly price. Your existing reservations come across as part of getting set up | Commonly a one-time implementation fee, with migration quoted separately |
| Who works out Canadian tax? | The system. GST, HST, QST and PST across all 13, stored per component, with Quebec's agency rule as a rule | Usually configured per property, then reconciled by hand at filing time |
| What do your French-speaking guests get? | A booking page they read in French, included, with no second data entry | Varies |
| Where does your guest data live? | Canada | Varies, and often the United States |
| What does leaving look like? | Self-serve and free: your guests, your reservations and the full ledger, whenever you want them | Often on request |
| What has to run before the books are final? | Nothing. Every charge posts into an append-only ledger the moment it happens | Commonly a night audit, which is why the balance on screen is a projection until it runs |
Side by side
The shape of each offer
Six things that change slowly, every filled cell taken from that vendor's own public pages. What a vendor charges this month moves faster than a page can be maintained, so the amounts live in the calculator instead, where you supply them.
| Question | Cardinal | Campspot | Cloudbeds | RMS Cloud | Newbook |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where is the company based? | Quebec, Canada | United States | San Diego, United States | Keilor Park, Australia | Queensland, Australia |
| How does the price scale? | It does not. One flat price for the property | Per reservation, plus commission on marketplace bookings | Per room | Per site, and by number of properties | Per booking at a flat rate, and by which modules you take |
| Is the price published? | Yes, on our pricing page | No. Quoted after a demo | No, quoted | No, quoted | No, quoted from a starting figure |
| Is there a setup or implementation fee? | None | None. They publish no setup or onboarding fee | Commonly, as a separate engagement | Yes, covering setup, migration and training | None on their single-site tier |
| What does bringing your existing reservations across cost? | Nothing. It is in the price, and you can import your own CSV | Not published | Not included in onboarding. Purchased separately | Covered by that one-time fee | Included, with four hours of training |
| Does somebody still have to close the day? | No. Every charge posts live to the ledger | Not documented in their knowledge base | Yes. Runs at 2:00 AM by default | Yes. A New Day utility, eight steps in their own guide | Not documented in their public help |
Where the cells come from. Every one is read off that vendor's own public pages, never off a review site, because half the material written about this category online is written by people selling against it. "Not published" means we went and looked and it is not there.
One at a time
One page per system, including where it is the better choice
Every one of these pages says where the other system is the better choice, because a comparison that never reaches that conclusion is an advertisement.
Cardinal vs Campspot
Their marketplace brings campers you did not have to find
Read the comparison →Cardinal vs Cloudbeds
Where the size of their platform is the right answer
Read the comparison →Cardinal vs RMS Cloud
On a large multi-property operation they are built for the job
Read the comparison →Cardinal vs Newbook
A broader platform, and fifteen years in holiday parks
Read the comparison →
Which one costs less on your property is arithmetic rather than opinion. Put your own numbers through the pricing comparison, including the break-even where the answer flips.
The part a table cannot hold
What a table cannot show: the work itself
A table can carry where a company is based and how its price scales. It cannot carry what it takes to bill a company, or whether somebody still has to close the day, which is what you feel every week.
So the individual pages count it instead. On Cardinal against Cloudbeds, billing a company for a stay is eight objects on their own published instructions and two here, and their night audit runs at 2:00 AM. On Cardinal against RMS, closing the day is an eight-step utility in their own guide. Every step is quoted from the vendor and linked, and the reason any of it is true is on how Cardinal is built.
See it running
Watch a day run before you talk to anyone.
Six real screens from a working property, in the order the day happens. Open it now and go at your own pace.