OpenHouse vs Open Home Pro is a comparison between two generations of the same idea. Open Home Pro is one of the original tablet sign-in apps. It has been on agents' iPads for over a decade, and plenty of brokerages still recommend it by default. OpenHouse is a newer iOS app built around a different bet: that sign-in should work on the phone already in your pocket, finish on a single screen, and never depend on a network connection. If you are weighing OpenHouse vs Open Home Pro for your next listing, this page walks through where they genuinely differ. That means devices, offline behavior, the sign-in flow itself, and what happens to your leads afterward. It ends with the cases where Open Home Pro is still the right pick, because there are some.
The short version
- Choose Open Home Pro if you want a free tier, you run sign-in on an Android tablet, or your brokerage already standardized on it and the workflow works for you.
- Choose OpenHouse if you want sign-in on iPhone as well as iPad, a single-screen flow visitors actually finish, true offline capture with no sync step, and leads exported to your CRM before you lock the front door.
Both apps will record a visitor's name. The differences show up in the messy moments. The vacant listing with no Wi-Fi. The visitor who stalls halfway through a form. The Sunday night when you need the lead list in your CRM, and it's sitting in a web dashboard instead.
Device support: tablet-only vs iPhone and iPad
The first practical difference in the OpenHouse vs Open Home Pro decision is what hardware you have to bring. Open Home Pro built its sign-in experience for tablets, meaning iPad and Android tablets, and that is still how it works today. There is a companion experience for managing leads, but the visitor-facing sign-in itself is tablet-only. If your iPad is dead, left at the office, or parked at another listing, you do not have a sign-in kiosk.
OpenHouse runs the complete capture flow on both iPhone and iPad. The iPad-on-a-stand kiosk is the polished setup, but the identical sign-in works on the iPhone you are already holding. Agents covering a colleague's open house on short notice, or running two listings in one weekend with one tablet, feel this difference fast. The fallback device is the one that is always in your pocket.
To be fair to Open Home Pro: if your hardware is an Android tablet, this point flips entirely. No sense dancing around it. OpenHouse is iOS and iPadOS only, there is no Android version, and none is promised. Android tablet users should shortlist Open Home Pro, not OpenHouse.
Offline models: sync-later vs zero-network
Both apps acknowledge the same reality. Open houses happen in vacant homes with dead spots and no Wi-Fi. They solve it in structurally different ways.
Open Home Pro uses a sync-later model. Sign-ins are captured locally on the tablet, then uploaded to Open Home Pro's servers when connectivity returns. This works most of the time, and for many agents it has worked for years. But sync-later means there is a queue, and a queue is a thing that can fail. An app update lands mid-event, or a session never reconnects before the tablet gets wiped. Your leads exist in a pending state until the round trip completes.
OpenHouse takes the other path: zero network calls, ever. There is no server, no account, and no sync step, so there is nothing to queue and nothing to reconcile. A sign-in is committed to the local database the instant the visitor taps done, and it is exportable from that same moment. If you want the deeper technical reasoning, read about true offline capture vs sync-later. The short version: "works offline" and "doesn't need a network at all" are different guarantees, and only one of them has no failure mode at the listing.
The same architecture is why OpenHouse is private by default. Visitor data never leaves the device unless you deliberately export it. There is no vendor server holding a copy of your sign-in sheet, no lender ads, and no data resale. With any cloud-synced tool, your leads also live on someone else's infrastructure. That is not sinister, but it is a real difference worth knowing about before you commit.
The sign-in flow: multi-page vs single screen
This is the difference visitors notice, and the one most agent reviews of Open Home Pro circle back to. Open Home Pro's sign-in walks visitors through multiple pages of questions: contact info on one screen, then follow-on questions screen by screen. The most common complaint from agents who have run it at busy events is exactly what you would predict. Visitors finish page one, hand the tablet back or wander off at page two, and the record ends up partial. At a packed open house, a line forms behind the tablet and people start skipping sign-in altogether.
OpenHouse was built to prevent that exact failure. The entire sign-in is one screen. Name, contact details, representation status, and the qualification questions you chose all sit in a single view the visitor can take in at a glance. Nobody is surprised by a page three, because there is no page three. The form is short enough to finish in the time it takes you to say hello, and the visitor hands the device back with a complete record, not a fragment.
One screen also pairs naturally with kiosk mode. OpenHouse ships with a built-in kiosk lock, and on iPad you can stack Apple's own Guided Access on top so visitors cannot leave the app or read earlier sign-ins. A self-serve kiosk only works when the form is simple enough that nobody needs help finishing it, which is the whole argument for single-screen design.
OpenHouse vs Open Home Pro at a glance
| OpenHouse | Open Home Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Visitor sign-in devices | iPhone and iPad | Tablet-only (iPad and Android tablets) |
| Android support | No | Yes (Android tablets) |
| Offline model | Offline-first, zero network calls | Sync-later (captures locally, uploads to servers) |
| Sign-in flow | Single screen | Multi-page questionnaire |
| Account required | No | Yes |
| Lead storage | On your device until you export | Open Home Pro's cloud dashboard |
| Exports | CSV, PDF, Contacts/vCard, CRM handoff (on device, immediately) | Via web dashboard |
| Kiosk mode | Built in, plus Guided Access compatible | Guided Access on iPad |
| Seller report | Built in | Listing follow-up emails on paid tier |
| Pricing | $9.99/mo or $79.99/yr, 1-month free trial, read-only if lapsed | Free tier; paid Premium plan |
| Update cadence | Actively developed | Long gaps in public release history |
Getting leads out: exports and follow-up
A sign-in app earns its keep after the event, when the lead list has to land wherever you actually work. Open Home Pro routes leads into its cloud dashboard. From there you can view them, send its automated follow-up emails, and pull data out, but the workflow assumes you will sit down at the web app. For agents who live in that dashboard, fine. For agents whose real system is a CRM, a spreadsheet, or their phone's contacts, it is an extra hop, and the hop happens hours after the conversations were fresh.
OpenHouse is built export-first. The moment the last visitor leaves, you can, from the same device that ran sign-in, share a CSV to your CRM's import, generate a PDF sign-in sheet for the seller file, push Contacts/vCard entries straight to your phone, or fire the CRM handoff so follow-up starts before you get home. Leads are also pre-sorted as they come in. Represented buyers, unrepresented hot leads, neighbors, and investors are already separated, so Monday morning starts with a triaged callback list instead of a flat spreadsheet. Independent roundups like The Close's open house app guide score sign-in tools on exactly this, how fast captured visitors become usable contacts, and it is where the two apps differ most.
Pricing, and the stagnation question
Open Home Pro's pricing is its strongest card. There is a free tier that covers simple tablet sign-in, with a paid Premium plan adding lead routing, branding, and follow-up extras. OpenHouse is a flat $9.99/month or $79.99/year with a one-month free trial. If you ever stop paying, it drops to a data-safe read-only mode where every lead you captured stays viewable and exportable forever. No hostage data.
The harder question for Open Home Pro is momentum, and it deserves a factual treatment rather than a cheap shot. The app still works and is still available, but its public release history shows long gaps between updates, stretches where iPadOS moved several versions and the app did not. Third-party comparisons such as Showable's sign-in app breakdown note the same pattern when stacking current options. That does not make Open Home Pro a bad choice today. It does mean you are betting on a tool whose pace of investment is visibly slower than it once was. Before standardizing your business on it, check the version history on its App Store listing and decide whether that cadence worries you. Free is only cheap if the tool keeps working on next year's devices.
When Open Home Pro is the right choice
A fair OpenHouse vs Open Home Pro verdict has to include the cases where the older app wins:
- You need Android tablet support. OpenHouse does not run on Android, period.
- You want free. Open Home Pro's free tier handles simple sign-in without a subscription, and for an agent running a handful of open houses a year, that may be all the tool you need.
- Your team already runs it. If a brokerage has Open Home Pro dashboards, training, and habits in place, the switching cost is real and the multi-page flow may be a tolerable tax.
- You want its built-in follow-up emails. Open Home Pro sends automated listing follow-ups from its platform. OpenHouse deliberately does not do marketing automation; it hands leads to the tools you already use instead.
If none of those describe you, meaning you are iPhone/iPad based, you run open houses where the signal is unreliable, and you judge a sign-in app by how complete and exportable the lead list is at 5 p.m., that is the agent OpenHouse was built for. You can try OpenHouse free for a month and test it at a live event.
The verdict
Open Home Pro earned its install base by being early, free, and good enough on a tablet. OpenHouse competes by removing the three things that age worst about that model: the tablet-only requirement, the sync-later queue, and the multi-page form that visitors abandon. Weigh your own hardware, your tolerance for cloud dependence, and what a complete lead list is worth to you per event. If you want the wider field, you can compare every open house app we cover, or see where both rank in our best-apps list against Curb Hero and the rest.
Frequently asked questions
Is Open Home Pro free?
Open Home Pro has a free tier for basic tablet sign-in, with a paid Premium plan for extras like lead routing and branding. OpenHouse is a paid subscription at $9.99/month or $79.99/year with a one-month free trial, and it stays in a data-safe read-only mode if you ever stop paying.
Does Open Home Pro work on iPhone?
Not for visitor sign-in. Open Home Pro's sign-in app is tablet-only, built for iPad and Android tablets. OpenHouse runs the full sign-in and lead capture flow on both iPhone and iPad, so a forgotten tablet does not cost you the event.
Does Open Home Pro work offline?
Open Home Pro uses a sync-later offline model: it captures sign-ins locally and uploads them to its servers when the connection returns. OpenHouse is offline-first by architecture — it makes zero network calls, so there is nothing to sync and nothing waiting in a queue.
Which app exports leads better?
OpenHouse is export-first: CSV, PDF, Contacts/vCard, and a direct CRM handoff happen right on the device the moment the open house ends. Open Home Pro routes leads through its web dashboard, so getting a clean file usually means a laptop session after the event.
Is Open Home Pro still being actively updated?
Open Home Pro still works and is still available, but its public release history shows long gaps between updates. Check its current App Store version history before committing, especially if you depend on timely iPadOS compatibility fixes.