Placy Pro vs Automations
How to select the best solution for your real estate team?
When you’re deciding between Placy Pro and hiring a freelancer or a small agency to build custom workflows with tools like n8n, Make, or Zapier, the choice comes down to speed, consistency, and long-term reliability. Placy Pro delivers a smoother, faster, and more consistent client experience out of the box. It comes ready with multilingual AI, voice support, and automated follow-ups — all maintained and scaled by the provider.
A custom-built solution can replicate some of these functions, but it requires significant time, developer input, and ongoing upkeep, and often struggles to match the real-time interactivity and unified client experience of Placy Pro. In short, Placy Pro offers a turnkey path to responsiveness and reliability, while freelancer-built workflows involve more complexity, hidden costs, and risk of service gaps.
Real Estate Specialization
The entire service is built around real estate processes. Placy's team understands the industry's specific needs, terminology, and challenges without explanation.
Typically No Specialization
You're hiring a generalist developer. You must spend significant time (and money) educating them on how your real estate business operates from the ground up.
Predictable & Transparent
Usually a clear subscription or service fee (SaaS model). Costs for setup, maintenance, and support are bundled, avoiding financial surprises.
Unpredictable & Variable
Often involves hourly rates or a project fee plus ongoing retainers for fixes. Prone to "scope creep," leading to costs far exceeding the initial estimate.
High Accountability & Reliability
As an established business, Placy has a reputation to protect and service level agreements (SLAs). You have a clear point of contact and recourse if issues arise.
Varies Wildly
You are dependent on an individual or small team. They could be excellent, but there's a significant risk of them disappearing, de-prioritizing your project, or delivering a subpar product.
Maintenance
The platform is continually updated, secured, and maintained as part of your fee. They proactively fix issues when integrated apps (like your CRM) change.
Costly & Reactive
Maintenance is an extra, ongoing cost. When an automation breaks, you must hire again to fix it. If they are unavailable, you must find a new developer to decipher the old work
Professionally Engineered
The core platform is built by senior engineers to be robust, secure, and scalable, ensuring it can grow with your business without breaking.
Often Poor
A non-senior developer is more likely to create "brittle" or inefficient workflows that don't follow best practices. These systems may not scale and can be difficult for others to manage later.
Low Management Overhead
You are the client, not the project manager. Placy's team manages the development process, requiring minimal oversight from you.
High Overhead
You must take on the role of a project manager—defining the exact scope, managing timelines, testing deliverables, and chasing the developer for updates.
Integrated System
You get a cohesive system where different workflows are designed to work together based on proven industry best practices.
Piecemeal Automations
A developer will build exactly what you ask for, piece by piece. This can result in a collection of disconnected automations rather than a unified, strategic system.
