Mona House Alternative: Hausive

Mona House is one of the better-built tools in Vietnam’s nhà trọ and chung cư mini segment. Developed by MONA Software over 8+ years, it covers the basics solidly: utility billing, payment notifications, contract management, multi-property tracking, and a mobile app that works on budget Android phones. Its basic plan costs 190,000 VND per month with no room limit — and comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. For a landlord running a 20-room boarding house in Bình Dương, it’s a reasonable choice.

Where Mona House stops being enough is the moment your tenant mix includes expats, your leases need to be in English, your billing splits between VND and USD, or you need compliance documentation that survives a tax audit. The product was designed for the Vietnamese domestic rental market. That design runs deep enough that working around it creates more friction than switching.

This comparison covers what Mona House does well, where those limits appear, and how Hausive fills the gap for landlords who’ve outgrown the nhà trọ model.

Key Takeaways

• Mona House’s Basic plan is 190,000 VND/month (~$7.60/mo) with unlimited rooms — making it the most price-competitive option in Vietnam’s landlord software market (Mona.house, 2026)
• Mona House is built for nhà trọ and chung cư mini — it doesn’t support bilingual EN/VI leases, CT01 deadline tracking, or mixed VND/USD billing
• Hausive provides all the compliance and tenant-facing workflows that Mona House omits, at $29/month Starter for up to 20 units
• Vietnam’s PropTech market is growing at 18.7% CAGR through 2029, driven by landlords whose portfolios are outgrowing manual and basic-tool workflows (TechSci Research, 2024)

What Is Mona House?

Mona House is a rental management platform developed by MONA Software, targeting nhà trọ landlords, chung cư mini operators, service apartment managers, and student housing providers. The platform runs on web and mobile (iOS and Android), and its pricing structure is unusual in the Vietnam market: unlimited rooms on every paid plan, with the cost difference between Basic and Professional reflecting feature depth rather than unit count.

Pricing:

A 2-week free trial is available. All paid plans include a 30-day money-back guarantee.

The unlimited-rooms pricing model is Mona House’s clearest structural differentiator in the Vietnam market. Most competitors — ITRO, Landsoft — cap rooms at each price tier and charge for additional capacity. Mona House charges for features instead. That’s genuinely useful for a landlord with 80 budget rooms who wants all the billing automation but doesn’t need the advanced reporting or multi-manager workflows. Whether it stays advantageous as portfolios grow depends entirely on which features you need.

Best Property Management Software for Vietnam Landlords in 2026

Mona House vs Hausive: Feature Comparison

Vietnam’s residential rental segment needs 1.5 million new housing units annually to keep pace with urbanization (TechSci Research, 2024). That supply gap is concentrated in the budget and mid-market segments — exactly where Mona House operates. But the demand for professionally managed, lease-backed apartment rentals is also growing, particularly in HCMC and Hanoi, where Grade A/B occupancy sits at 88–92% (CBRE Vietnam, 2025). The tools that fit one segment don’t automatically fit the other.

Where Mona House Works Well

For the landlord that Mona House was designed for, the product genuinely delivers. The unlimited-rooms model means a nhà trọ owner with 60 budget rooms pays the same 190,000 VND as one with 15 — and gets every billing automation feature without calculating per-room upgrade costs.

The mobile-first approach matters in Vietnam’s landlord market. With 127 million active mobile subscriptions at end of 2025 (DataReportal, January 2026), a landlord management tool that doesn’t work flawlessly on a mid-range Android phone loses most of its audience. Mona House runs on low-configuration devices — which is a thoughtful product decision, not just a marketing claim.

The payment notification workflow is practical. Tenants get automatically reminded of upcoming rent via app and SMS. For a landlord managing 50 rooms whose tenants primarily use Zalo and Vietnamese phone numbers, automated reminders in Vietnamese cut down on the monthly collection chase significantly.

Where Mona House Falls Short

The gaps become visible at two inflection points: when a landlord’s tenant mix includes foreigners, and when an operator wants to run multiple properties with proper role separation.

No bilingual lease contracts. Mona House’s contract tools are Vietnamese-only. An expat tenant renting a furnished apartment in HCMC’s District 2 or 7 typically expects a signed English-language lease. Mona House can’t produce one — which means the landlord falls back to Word documents, lawyers, or generic templates that may not be legally sound.

No CT01 deadline tracking. Vietnam landlords must register new tenants at the ward police station within 24 hours of move-in. Mona House doesn’t track this deadline. For a landlord with high seasonal turnover — common in student housing, which Mona House also targets — missed CT01 registrations accumulate.

Single-property manager access. Mona House’s manager role is scoped to a single property. A landlord running three separate buildings needs three separate logins for their caretakers, or gives caretakers access they shouldn’t have. Hausive’s access model supports multi-property management with proper role separation from the start.

No AI features. Hausive’s Starter plan includes an AI agent that answers landlord questions and Hausive Pro adds AI invoice extraction — photograph a utility bill, the system reads it. Mona House has no equivalent. That gap grows as Vietnam’s landlord market matures and time-saving features become the differentiator.

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Hausive: What Changes at the Apartment Level

The same academic study that mapped PropTech adoption in Vietnam (n=142) found that ease of use predicts switching intent more strongly than price (ArXiv, Le Tung Bach, 2312.06994). For landlords coming from Mona House, the switch usually isn’t triggered by price — it’s triggered by the first time a tenant asks for an English lease, or the first time a utility dispute turns into a multi-day back-and-forth with no paper trail.

What Hausive covers at the unit-management level that Mona House doesn’t:

• Bilingual EN/VI lease contracts — legally valid under Vietnamese law, readable by expat and corporate tenants
• CT01 deadline tracking — the 24-hour registration window surfaces automatically, not from a manual calendar reminder
• Six-tier VND electricity billing — calculated automatically against Vietnam’s progressive rate structure per unit, not manually entered
• Mixed VND/USD billing — for portfolios where expat tenants pay in USD and local tenants pay in VND
• Multi-property manager access — proper role separation across multiple buildings without workaround logins
• AI invoice extraction (Pro) — photograph a utility bill, Hausive extracts the figures
• Move-in/out inspection checklists (Pro) — timestamped photo documentation that pre-empts deposit disputes
• AI landlord assistant (Starter+) — answers day-to-day operational questions without a manual records lookup
• PIT-ready financial reporting — monthly rental income records formatted for annual personal income tax filing

Plans and pricing:

Annual billing saves 17% on Starter and Pro. Contact Hausive for Enterprise pricing.

The price gap between Mona House Professional (440,000 VND/month) and Hausive Starter (749,000 VND/month) is roughly 309,000 VND — less than a single utility dispute’s resolution cost in administrative time. For a landlord billing 10 apartments at 8–15 million VND each per month, that difference is under 0.5% of monthly rental revenue. The question isn’t whether 749k is affordable. It’s whether the added workflows — bilingual leases, CT01 tracking, AI tools — change how the portfolio runs. For any landlord with expat tenants or compliance requirements, they do.

See the full Vietnam software market comparison

Which Tool Is Right for You?

The decision point is tenant mix. If every tenant is a Vietnamese national paying in VND for an unfurnished room, Mona House covers the core workflow efficiently and cheaply. The moment an expat signs a lease or a corporate entity becomes the billing party, Mona House’s Vietnamese-only design becomes a structural constraint — not a missing feature you can work around.

Understand your obligations when registering tenants

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Mona House have a free plan?

Mona House offers a 2-week free trial with full features and unlimited rooms. After the trial, paid plans start at 190,000 VND/month (~$7.60) for the Basic tier — also with unlimited rooms. There’s no permanently free tier, but all paid plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Hausive also offers a free trial; paid plans start at $29/month for up to 20 units.

Can Mona House handle bilingual English-Vietnamese lease contracts?

No. Mona House’s platform and contract tools are Vietnamese-only. For landlords managing expat or corporate tenants who expect English-language lease documentation — increasingly common in HCMC’s District 2, 7, and Bình Thạnh — this is a hard limitation. Hausive includes bilingual EN/VI contracts across all paid plans.

Does Mona House support multiple properties with separate manager access?

Mona House’s manager (kế toán) role is limited to web-app access, and property managers are restricted to single-property access. For a landlord managing three buildings with separate caretakers, this creates role-management complexity. Hausive supports multi-property portfolios with proper role separation across locations from the Starter plan.

How does Mona House handle the CT01 tenant registration requirement?

Vietnam law requires landlords to register new tenants at the ward police station within 24 hours of move-in. Mona House stores tenant information but doesn’t surface CT01 registration deadlines. Hausive includes CT01 deadline tracking as part of its tenant management workflow. Vietnam Tenant Registration Guide

Is Mona House suitable for landlords with expat tenants in HCMC?

Only partially. Mona House handles the billing automation and payment notification workflow, but it doesn’t provide bilingual EN/VI lease contracts, CT01 deadline tracking for international tenants, or mixed VND/USD billing — all of which are practical requirements for managing expat tenants in HCMC. Hausive was built specifically for landlords managing a mix of Vietnamese and international tenants.

The Bottom Line

Mona House is a well-built tool for the Vietnamese domestic rental market. Its unlimited-rooms pricing model, mobile-first design, and solid billing automation make it a genuinely useful upgrade from WhatsApp and Excel for nhà trọ and chung cư mini landlords. If your tenant base is entirely Vietnamese nationals paying in VND, it’s hard to argue with 190,000 VND a month for the core workflow.

The limitation isn’t price — it’s scope. Mona House was designed for one tenant profile, and that profile doesn’t include expats, bilingual leases, dollar-denominated billing, or the compliance documentation that comes with a professionally managed apartment portfolio. When those requirements appear, the workarounds compound faster than the software helps.

Hausive fills that gap: a Vietnam-built platform with the compliance and tenant-facing workflows that Mona House omits, self-serve setup, and transparent pricing from $29/month.

Start with Hausive Starter for $29/month — no sales call, no implementation project.

Understand how to reduce vacancy in your Vietnam rental properties

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Comparisons:

• Best Property Management Software for Vietnam Landlords in 2026
• ITRO Alternative: Hausive
• CyHome Alternative: Hausive

Operations:

• Managing Corporate and Expat Tenants in HCMC
• How to Register New Tenants with Ward Police in Vietnam

Finance:

• Vietnam Rental Income Tax Guide for Landlords
• How to Reduce Vacancy in HCMC Rental Properties