PropStream vs DealMachine (2026): Pricing, Data, Verdict

Every wholesaling forum has this thread: $150 a month to spend, both tools have loyal fans, forty replies, no straight answer. I don't sell either tool, so I will give you one: buy PropStream if you build lists from a desk. Buy DealMachine if your leads start in the car. Every price below was checked against the live pricing pages on August 5, 2026, which matters this year: DealMachine changed its plans in 2026, and most comparisons still quote the old ones.

PropStream is a desk-first property data platform: you filter 160+ million county records into a marketing list, then export it. DealMachine is a driving-for-dollars app: you drive neighborhoods, tag distressed houses from your phone, and it pulls the owner's contact info on the spot. Same goal, opposite workflows. That difference decides the purchase.

Both cover one slice of finding distressed properties: who owns it, and how to reach them. Where each sits in the wider stack is in my best real estate lead generation software rankings; this page is the head-to-head.

PropStream vs DealMachine at a Glance

Sources: PropStream's pricing page and DealMachine's pricing page, both pulled August 5, 2026.

PropStream vs DealMachine Pricing

The sticker prices look close. The models are not.

Annual billing drops PropStream to $81, $165, and $583 a month; DealMachine takes 17% off.

Three gotchas the pricing tables hide:

1. PropStream's cheap tier meters the thing you came for. On Essentials, every skip-traced contact costs 12 cents. Trace 1,000 owners a month and your $99 plan is a $219 plan. Pro at $199 includes skip tracing, so heavy tracers should price Pro from the start.
2. DealMachine repriced in 2026. DealMachine's help center documented Starter, Pro, and Pro Plus tiers at $119 to $279 a month as recently as this spring. The live pricing page now sells per-seat plans metered by data credits. Any comparison quoting a $119 Starter plan predates the change.
3. Mail is extra on both. PropStream postcards start at 57 cents a piece. DealMachine's 4x6 postcards run 75 cents on Basic and 70 cents on Pro. Neither number is in the subscription.

On pure dollars, a solo investor gets more raw data per dollar from PropStream. A solo driver gets more finished workflow per dollar from DealMachine. Which brings us to what each one is for.

Where PropStream Wins: Data Breadth and Comps

PropStream is a research platform. The company claims 160+ million property records, 308+ million deeds, 41+ million pre-foreclosures, and 165+ filters to slice them with. Whatever county you wholesale in, the assessor roll, mortgage history, and equity picture are already loaded.

That breadth is the honest win. If you work three markets, or run comps before every offer, or build lists by equity and ownership length, PropStream does in an afternoon what DealMachine was never designed to do. Its MLS-powered comps are the closest thing to an agent's CMA you'll get in a lead-gen tool, and practitioners notice: one title rep and investor in a BiggerPockets thread on whether PropStream is worth it credits PropStream lists for roughly 90% of his last 20 closings.

The war chest behind it got bigger too. Per the GlobeNewswire announcement, PropStream's parent Stewart acquired BatchLeads and BatchDialer in July 2025, which puts list building, skip tracing, and a power dialer inside one corporate family. If your operation lives on cold calls, that consolidation favors PropStream. The old PropStream-vs-BatchLeads rivalry now gets its own page: BatchLeads alternatives.

The caveat: none of this data is exclusive. PropStream licenses the same county records every aggregator licenses, on the same refresh lag. I wrote up where the property data tools get their data if you want the full plumbing. Breadth is the moat. Freshness is not.

Where DealMachine Wins: The Driving-for-Dollars Workflow

DealMachine is not trying to be a database. It is trying to be the entire loop from "that house looks rough" to a postcard in the owner's mailbox, and at that loop it is the best tool on the market.

You drive, the app tracks your route, you tag a property from the curb, and the owner's name, mailing address, phone numbers, and email are on your screen before you pull away. Mail sequences fire automatically. On team plans, every driver's routes and tag counts are visible, which turns driving for dollars from a weekend habit into a process you can manage people around. DealMachine's own comparison page leans on exactly these points: live navigation to the next property, driver and route analytics, and contact info bundled into every plan instead of billed per hit.

Vendor framing, sure, but the bundled contact data is a real economic difference. A driver tagging 40 houses a day would bleed money on per-contact skip fees; inside DealMachine's credits it's just part of the plan. That, plus route accountability, is why driving teams standardize on it.

The ceiling is structural. Your lead volume is capped by hours behind the wheel, and the app only knows about houses someone drove past. I broke down that math in code violations vs driving for dollars: a good half-day route surfaces 20 to 30 candidates, and no amount of software makes the windshield wider.

The Verdict, by Use Case

People phrase this question both ways, DealMachine or PropStream, PropStream or DealMachine, and the answer is the same: match the tool to where your leads come from.

Plenty of investors run both: PropStream builds the list at the desk, DealMachine works the streets. That stack runs roughly $250 a month before mail, so most people should start with one and add the second once the first pays for itself. If neither model fits, I keep running lists of PropStream alternatives and DealMachine alternatives for the tools that specialize harder, including PropertyRadar for the data-plus-driving hybrid.

The Signal Neither Tool Carries

Here is the referee's closing note, and the reason this page lives on my site.

Both tools resell county records: assessor rolls, deeds, mortgages, tax status. Useful, but every subscriber in your market is querying the same rows. What neither carries is live code enforcement data. A vacant-building order, an emergency repair case, a stack of housing violations on one rental: those records sit in city open-data portals and code enforcement systems, not in the county extracts the aggregators license. A code violation is a leading indicator of a motivated seller, and it is invisible in both tools.

That gap is what I built FlaggedLeads to close, in one region. We pull code violation records daily across 7 Puget Sound markets: 86,028 violations on 47,933 properties as of August 2026, each case typed, statused, and scored. In Seattle we stack the adjacent signals on top: 2,720 fire incidents, 12,912 expired building permits, and about 231,000 distress-adjacent 311 complaints (FlaggedLeads database, August 2026). If you invest in Puget Sound, browse the free map and compare it against whatever list your current tool gives you. If you invest anywhere else, buy the tool that fits your workflow, then find your city's code enforcement portal, because that layer is where the lists stop overlapping.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is PropStream worth it in 2026?

For list-driven investors, yes. $99 a month buys filters over 160+ million property records and real comps. The catch is Essentials' 12-cent skip tracing: trace at volume and the $199 Pro tier is the honest price.

Is DealMachine free to use?

There is a free browse mode with no card required, but owner names and contact details stay blurred until you pay. Paid plans start at $99 per seat per month, with contact data metered through plan credits, per DealMachine's help center. The free tier is a demo; budget for a seat before you plan a campaign.

Which is better for running comps, PropStream or DealMachine?

PropStream. Its comps draw on MLS data and a deeper sales record set, and the desktop workflow is built for underwriting. DealMachine's comps are designed to sanity-check a house from the curb, which is a different job.

Can you use PropStream and DealMachine together?

Yes, and the pairing is common: PropStream builds and filters lists at the desk, DealMachine handles street sourcing and mail. Budget roughly $250 a month for the pair before mail costs.

What did the BatchLeads acquisition change?

As of July 1, 2025, PropStream's parent company Stewart acquired BatchLeads and BatchDialer. The announcement promised no immediate pricing changes, and the tools still run separately, but list building, skip tracing, and dialing now sit inside one family, which strengthens PropStream's hand for cold-call-heavy operations.

Does PropStream or DealMachine show code violations?

Not as a live feed. Both are built on county-level records, and code enforcement cases live in city systems that county extracts do not include. If violation-based leads matter to you, you have to pull that layer separately: FlaggedLeads covers it for 7 Puget Sound markets, and most cities with open data portals let you pull your own.