You have twelve cars and you want to stop running the business out of a spreadsheet. So you line up five vendors, open five pricing pages, and discover that three of them do not have one. They have a form.
That is the first real finding about this category, and it is worth saying before any feature table: half the market will not tell you what it costs until you have spoken to somebody. Below is what the six platforms an independent agency actually shortlists were charging in September 2026, taken from their own pages and from the directories they publish through.
The table
| Platform | Published price | Entry point | Model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rentclic | Yes | €29 / month billed yearly, 10 vehicles | Flat, per tier |
| HQ Rental Software | Yes | $120 / month, Basic | Flat, per tier |
| RentSyst | Yes | €55 / month up to 15 vehicles | Flat, then per vehicle |
| Easy Rent Pro | Yes | $399 one-time licence | Perpetual licence |
| RENTALL (formerly Navotar) | No | "Pricing available upon request" | Quote |
| Coastr | No | "Contact vendor for pricing" | Quote |
Figures checked in September 2026 against each vendor's own pricing page or its listing on Capterra and Software Advice. They move. Check them again before you sign anything.
What each one is actually for
HQ Rental Software is the most established of the group and prices like it. Basic is $120 a month, Standard $175, Professional $250, and Enterprise is a quote. It is a serious, wide product with a long feature list, and if you run several locations it is on most shortlists for a reason. At ten cars, $120 a month is a real line in your accounts.
RentSyst publishes the most honest grid in the category, and it is worth studying even if you buy elsewhere, because it shows you the shape of per-vehicle pricing. A flat €55 a month up to fifteen vehicles, then €3.00 per vehicle per month from sixteen to fifty, €2.70 to a hundred, €2.50 to two hundred, €2.00 beyond. Notice what happens at the boundary: car sixteen costs you €48 a month by itself, because you leave the flat tier and start paying for all sixteen.
Easy Rent Pro is the odd one out and the reason it stays on lists: it sells a licence rather than a subscription, from $399 once, and it lists a free Standard version. If you want software you own outright and you can live with installing and maintaining it, nothing else here competes on that. If you want somebody else to run the servers and ship updates, this is not the shape you want.
RENTALL, which most people still call Navotar, sells Essential, Business and Enterprise, and publishes no figure for any of them. It is aimed upmarket, at franchises and multi-branch operators, and the sales process reflects that.
Coastr is a newer, UK-rooted platform with a genuine speciality in connected-car data, keyless access and telematics. It also asks you to contact them for a price.
Rentclic is ours, so read this paragraph with that in mind. €29 a month billed yearly for ten vehicles and two users, €49 if you pay monthly. The two things that actually distinguish it are that the figure is on the page, and that the whole product runs in twelve languages rather than English with a translated marketing site.
Why a quote is not automatically a bad sign
It is easy to read "contact us" as something to hide, and sometimes it is. But there are honest reasons: a platform that sells to a franchise with forty branches genuinely cannot put one number on a page, and a vendor doing real migration work has to look at your data before promising a figure.
The problem is not the quote. The problem is what the quote does to your afternoon. You wanted to compare five options on Tuesday. Instead you booked three calls for next week, and by the time the numbers arrive you have spent two weeks and a certain amount of willpower, which is precisely the friction that makes people give up and stay on the spreadsheet for another year.
If you are going to ask for quotes, ask all of them the same three questions in the same email, so the answers are comparable: the total for your exact fleet size, what a second user costs, and what happens to the price when you add ten cars.
What a published price still leaves out
A number on a page is better than no number, but it is rarely the whole figure. The four things that move it most:
Setup and migration. Getting your existing fleet, customers and open contracts into the new system. Sometimes free, sometimes a four-figure one-off.
Users. Per-vehicle pricing is the headline; per-user pricing is where a two-person agency quietly becomes a four-seat licence.
Payments. If the platform takes card payments, there is a processing rate underneath the subscription, and it is not always the one you would get direct.
The cars that do not earn. Under per-vehicle pricing you pay for the car in the workshop and the car you take off the road in February. On a seasonal fleet that is not a rounding error. We worked through the arithmetic in what car rental software actually costs.
The two capabilities that now separate them
Every platform on this page does reservations, contracts and invoices. Two things are not yet standard, and that is where the real gaps are.
Reading your trackers. Most agencies already have trackers fitted and a second website to look at them in. A platform that reads that website's data directly puts the fleet on one map beside the contracts; one that does not leaves you with two logins and nothing joining the car to the rental it is on. Coastr built its reputation here. Rentclic reads Traccar, Wialon, flespi and Samsara. Ask any vendor which platforms they speak to by name. "GPS integration" on a feature grid can mean a field where somebody types the odometer in.
Answering the marketplaces. Rentalcars, DiscoverCars, Expedia and Kayak own no cars. They resell the fleets of agencies whose software can answer their availability and booking requests, and that requirement is a software requirement, which is why an agency is turned away before anyone discusses rates. If you want that channel, it is not a feature to compare later; it decides your shortlist.
Both sit in the upper tiers of the platforms that have them at all, ours included. So the question is not whether a vendor has them, but at which tier and for how much.
How to compare in one afternoon
Ignore feature lists. Every platform here does reservations, contracts and invoices, and the tick-box grid on a comparison site will tell you they all do everything.
Instead, take the three things that actually take your time this week, and do exactly those in a trial. For most independent agencies that is: create a booking with a customer who already exists, produce a signed contract from it, and get a month's revenue out as a report your accountant will accept. If a platform makes those three awkward, no feature list rescues it. There is a fuller version of this test in how to choose car rental software.
Then check the one number nobody puts in a comparison table: your own utilisation rate. A platform that raises it by five points is worth more than the entire difference in subscription price between everything on this page. That calculation is here.
Questions people ask
How much does car rental software cost for a small fleet?
For an independent agency with about ten vehicles, the published prices in September 2026 run from roughly €29 to $120 a month, and one vendor sells a perpetual licence from $399 instead. Platforms that do not publish a price generally sit at the upper end, because they are built for multi-branch operators.
Why do so many car rental software vendors hide their pricing?
Some genuinely cannot put a single figure on a page, because they sell to operators whose size and migration needs vary enormously. Others use the call to qualify you and to set the price against what they think you will pay. From the buyer's side the effect is the same either way: comparing five vendors becomes a fortnight instead of an afternoon.
Is per-vehicle or flat-rate pricing better?
Per-vehicle is kinder when you are small and painful as you grow, and it charges you for cars that are off the road. Flat tiers are predictable but you pay for the whole tier from the first day you enter it. The figure that decides it is your seasonal minimum: count the vehicles you keep earning in your quietest month, not the ones on your books in August.
Can I move my data from one car rental platform to another?
Usually yes for vehicles and customers, which are ordinary lists, and often painfully for open contracts and historical bookings. Ask specifically what comes across before you sign, and ask for an export of your own data in a plain format as a condition. A vendor that cannot export is a vendor you cannot leave.