TOPS was built for management companies.
Hivepoint is built for your board.

No. TOPS (now operated as part of the Yardi ecosystem following acquisition) was built for professional community association management companies — organizations that manage portfolios of dozens or hundreds of HOA communities and employ licensed, trained community managers. Its feature set, pricing model, and interface architecture are all built around the management company workflow: a manager switches between client communities, tracks billing to multiple HOA clients, and manages staff workflows. A self-managed HOA board — volunteer treasurer, part-time secretary, occasional board meetings — is a fundamentally different use case. Self-managed boards that evaluate TOPS consistently find it over-engineered, priced for a business model they don't have, and structured in ways that assume professional staff rather than volunteer board members.

TOPS Software was a long-standing independent HOA management software company that was acquired by Yardi Systems in 2023. Yardi is one of the largest real estate software companies in the world, primarily known for enterprise property management platforms. Following the acquisition, TOPS products have been operating under Yardi's umbrella. For self-managed HOA boards, this matters because Yardi's overall product direction is enterprise and management-company focused — the opposite of what a volunteer-run community needs. Communities currently on TOPS are evaluating their options, and that's a reasonable trigger to look at purpose-built self-managed alternatives.

TOPS pricing was structured for management companies managing community portfolios — typically per-unit fees across a portfolio, with pricing tiers designed for management businesses, not individual communities. Hivepoint is priced per community at a flat annual rate — the same price regardless of whether your community has 30 homes or 300. There are no per-unit fees, no per-module add-ons, and no pricing model that assumes you're running a management company. For a self-managed volunteer board, the pricing difference is significant: you pay for one community, you get the full feature set.

Hivepoint was designed with the self-managed volunteer board as the primary user — not professional managers. This means: setup takes hours, not weeks; the interface is straightforward enough that a new treasurer can be productive on day one without training; the Windows desktop app works for board members who do HOA work on a personal PC between other tasks; and the pricing doesn't assume a management company billing model. The core features — dues tracking, violation management, ARC requests, document library, financial reports, and an optional resident portal — are exactly what a self-managed board needs, without the multi-portfolio complexity a management company requires.

Yes. The most common data to migrate is the homeowner roster, dues history, and governing documents. We work with communities on data migration as part of onboarding — you don't need to figure out export formats and import procedures yourself. If you're on TOPS (or any TOPS-derived product) and evaluating options, the live demo is a good way to see what organized self-management looks like before committing.

The HOA software market has two distinct segments that often get conflated: professional management company software (TOPS, Vantaca, Enumerate/CINC, AppFolio, Buildium) designed for companies managing portfolios of HOAs, and self-managed community software designed for a single board managing its own community. Hivepoint is in the second category — purpose-built for the volunteer board that self-manages. If you are a self-managed community evaluating professional management software, the mismatch you're feeling is real: those products are built for a different customer. Our comparison page walks through how Hivepoint stacks up against the major alternatives.