LetCompliance vs August

For most self-managing landlords, yes, and it covers a good deal more: August runs the money side well, while LetCompliance runs the whole let — advertising, applications, viewings, referencing, e-signed tenancies, rent collection, arrears, compliance scoring, Section 8 and Section 13 notices, and SA105 tax prep. The one thing August does that we do not is Open Banking bank-feed matching, reading transactions straight from your accounts. If that automation is the reason you would buy software at all, August is built for it.

August Portfolio is £14.99 for up to 20 tenancies and LetCompliance is £14.99 for your portfolio, so the price is not the deciding factor. The difference is scope. August starts at the point where a tenant is already in place and paying: it matches the rent, tracks expenses and files MTD. LetCompliance starts earlier and finishes later: it advertises the room or property, takes applications, books viewings, references the tenant, generates and e-signs the tenancy, then collects rent, chases arrears, scores compliance and serves the notice if it goes wrong. If you already have tenants and an agent, August is enough. If you find and manage the tenants yourself, most of that work is outside August.

August is genuinely good here — room-level rent, per-room payment dates and HMO licence→ reminders, built around shared housing rather than adapted to it. LetCompliance also treats HMOs as first-class: rooms with their own rent and deposit, each tenant linked to their room, per-room arrears, licence tracking and fire-safety records. What we add is the rest of the tenancy: referencing and guarantors for sharers and students, e-signed agreements, and the Section 8 route with the Ground 8 arrears→ calculation if one room stops paying. If your HMO problem is matching the money to the rooms, August solves it. If it is letting the rooms and keeping them lawfully let, that is the wider job.

Not as tooling, on the evidence of their own site: their pricing page lists every feature in every tier and the Renters’ Rights Act does not appear on it, nor do Section 8, Section 13, possession notices or prescribed forms. Their compliance feature is a task tracker with certificate reminders and an audit trail, which is a real and useful thing — it is simply not the possession and notices layer. That layer is what LetCompliance is built around: Section 8 with the correct Schedule 2 grounds and notice periods taken from the post-1 May 2026 rules, Section 13 rent increases on the correct prescribed form, the pet request→ 28-day tracker and PRS Database→ readiness.

No, and it is the clearest gap between us. August is registered with the FCA as an agent of Plaid to make Open Banking connections, and it reads your bank transactions to match rent automatically across several accounts. LetCompliance collects rent instead of reading it: Bacs Direct Debit through Stripe Connect, paid into your own bank account, so the payment is initiated by us and reconciled by definition. If you want your existing bank feed read and categorised, August does that and we do not.

Not on the evidence of their site — referencing and credit checks appear nowhere across their home page, pricing page or their HMO and portfolio landlord pages. LetCompliance references tenants and guarantors through a regulated UK credit reference agency, pay-per-check, with the result stored against the tenancy, and Right to Rent→ checks sit alongside it. For a self-managing landlord that is usually the single most valuable thing in the whole process, because it is the decision you cannot undo.

Their pricing page lists "Electronic contract signing", so yes, though what the signed file contains is not documented publicly. What we can tell you is what ours does: LetCompliance generates the correct tenancy agreement for the current law and seals the signed PDF with an audit certificate recording who signed, when, from which IP address and on which device, and in what order. Section 7 of the Electronic Communications Act 2000 makes exactly that certification admissible in evidence on any question about whether the document is authentic or has been altered.

It runs the whole let, not just compliance. In one login you advertise, take applications and viewings, reference tenants, e-sign the tenancy, collect rent by Direct Debit and chase arrears, track a 0-100 compliance score, draft Section 8 and Section 13 notices, manage HMO rooms, book done-for-you property services and prepare your SA105 tax. The compliance score is one feature among many, not the whole product.

The table above compares them feature by feature. For most UK landlords and small-to-mid agencies who want the whole tenancy in one place, LetCompliance covers more of the let; August is the better pick for the specific areas it leads on, which are called out honestly above. LetCompliance is free for your first property, then from £14.99/mo.

LetCompliance ships an SA105-shaped Tax Pack, a Section 24→ personal-vs-limited-company calculator, MTD-dated quarterly summaries, a capital-gains calculator and a mileage log — the landlord tax layer most tools skip. It is not HMRC-recognised for the direct press-submit step, so above the £50,000 MTD threshold you pair it with a recognised filer or hand the pack to your accountant.

They are written by the LetCompliance team, and we say so plainly — but each one names where August is the better choice and the two things LetCompliance does not do (Open Banking bank-feed reconciliation and HMRC direct-submit filing). Pricing and feature rows are re-verified every quarter.