Plotbook vs Propwire
Propwire is free. That is a real advantage
Let us deal with the obvious thing first. Propwire's core property search costs nothing, needs no card, and is reported to cover 157 million properties including MLS and off-market listings. Plotbook starts at $79 a month and charges credits on top. On price this is not a close comparison and we are not going to pretend it is. The question worth asking is what you are actually trying to find out. Propwire answers what this property is. Plotbook answers who this owner is, what they do, and what they are plausibly worth. If the first question is yours, the free product is the right product and you can stop reading here.
Propwire details from public sources, checked August 2026. Propwire does not serve its published pages to automated requests, so unlike most of this collection nothing below is quoted from the vendor. The figures come from two independent third-party reviews read in August 2026, and are labelled as reported rather than stated as fact. Where those sources disagree, notably on whether free downloads are capped monthly, this page says so rather than picking the more convenient number. If you work at Propwire and any of this is wrong, write to us and we will correct it. Check the official Propwire product page. Plotbook is the vendor here, so read this as our argument and check it against theirs.
The short answer
Are you researching the property, or the person on the deed
Propwire is a free property database aimed at real estate investors, built around finding and evaluating properties. Plotbook is a paid research product aimed at advisors and fundraisers, built around identifying and understanding owners. The overlap is that both start from a US property. Everything after that first click diverges, and the price difference tells you which one is doing the expensive part.
Pick Plotbook if the owner is the point
- You need the human behind an LLC, trust, or estate deed, researched rather than skip traced.
- You need wealth context on that person: net worth, income, investible assets, total assets, each as a range.
- You want their profession, employer, and role, not just a phone number.
- You are advising, fundraising, or selling to the owner rather than buying their house.
- You want a visible record of where every claim came from, because someone may ask you.
Pick Propwire if the property is the point
- You want nationwide property records without paying anything at all.
- You are sourcing deals: pre-foreclosure, vacant, absentee, auction, bankruptcy.
- You want comparables and investment analysis on a specific address.
- You need cheap contact appending at volume, reported at around ten cents per trace.
- You are an investor or wholesaler, which is who the product is built for.
Neutral ground
What each product actually is
Both begin at a US property record. One is a free search over a large property database with paid contact appending bolted on. The other is a paid research agent that treats the property as the starting clue rather than the answer.
Plotbook
A map of US property colored by assessed value, with an AI agent that identifies the owner behind a deed and estimates their wealth in ranges.
- Built for
- Advisors, fundraisers, and luxury agents
- The question it answers
- Who owns this, and what are they worth
- Property data
- 150M+ parcels from Regrid, colored across six assessed-value bands
- Owner output
- A named person with role, employer, contacts, and four wealth ranges
- Contact method
- Licensed records plus agentic research, per person
- Pricing
- $79 to $499 per month plus credits, published
Propwire
A free nationwide property search for real estate investors, reported at 157 million records, with skip tracing sold separately per hit.
- Built for
- Real estate investors and wholesalers
- The question it answers
- What is this property, and is it a deal
- Property data
- Reported at 157M properties including MLS and off-market
- Owner output
- Owner of record, with contact details via paid skip tracing
- Contact method
- Skip tracing, reported at around $0.10 per trace
- Pricing
- Core search reported free; a paid membership tier exists
Side by side
Capability by capability, starting with the one we lose
Phrases rather than checkmarks, and the price row goes first because it is the one most people came to check. Propwire figures are as reported by third parties in August 2026, not quoted from the vendor.
| Capability | Plotbook | Propwire |
|---|---|---|
| Cost of entry | Plotbook$79 per month minimum, plus credits per lookup | PropwireCore property search reported free, no card required |
| Property records covered | Plotbook150M+ parcels, from Regrid | PropwireReported at 157M properties, including MLS listings |
| Deal signals | PlotbookNone. Assessed value band is the only filter. | PropwirePre-foreclosure, vacant, absentee, bankruptcy, auction |
| Comparables and investment analysis | PlotbookNone at all | PropwireComps and analysis tooling included |
| Bulk export economics | PlotbookCSV on Professional and Enterprise, 5 credits, 5,000 row cap | PropwireFree downloads; sources disagree on whether a monthly cap applies |
| Wealth estimation on the owner | PlotbookFour AI-generated ranges with a confidence score, per researched person | PropwireNone. Not a wealth product. |
| Professional identity of the owner | PlotbookRole, employer, employment and education history, LinkedIn where found | PropwireOwner of record, plus skip-traced phone and email |
| Naming the human behind an LLC or trust | PlotbookEntity classification, then registry, county record, and open-web research behind a disambiguation gate | PropwireSkip tracing against the entity as recorded |
| Map shaded by value | PlotbookSix assessed-value bands as the default view, free to browse | PropwireProperty search and filters rather than value shading |
| Audit trail behind each claim | PlotbookEvery tool call, source link, and reasoning step, kept with the profile | PropwireNot a research product; no equivalent |
| Fit for financial advisors and fundraisers | PlotbookThe intended buyer | PropwireNot built for them; no wealth layer and no advisor workflow |
Propwire rows are third-party reported, read in August 2026, and are not quoted from the vendor because Propwire does not serve its pages to automated requests. The download row genuinely is contested: one review describes unlimited free downloads and another describes a 10,000 per month cap, so we state neither as fact. Correct us if you know better.
What free actually buys
A record is not the same as an answer
A free property database is genuinely useful and there is no reason to be sniffy about it. You type an address and you learn the parcel, the owner of record, the characteristics, the estimated value, and whether anything about the property suggests a motivated seller. For sourcing deals that is most of the job, and paying nothing for it is a good outcome.
The trouble starts when the owner of record is not a person. A deed reading 1247 Wentworth Trust, or Sandhill Holdings LLC registered in Wyoming, is where a property database stops. It has told you the truth. It just has not told you anything you can act on, because you cannot advise a trust or take an LLC to lunch.
That gap is the entire reason Plotbook charges money. The owner entity is classified deterministically before any model runs, and then the research follows the playbook for what the deed actually names. An LLC goes to registry aggregators for members, managers, officers, and organizers, with explicit handling for Wyoming, Delaware, New Mexico, and Nevada, where a commercial registered agent is never reported as the owner. A trust goes to county records for the trustee and then the open web for the beneficial owner, with trustee and principal labelled separately. An institution short-circuits entirely and is never charged.
- Deterministic owner-type classification before any AI runs
- Anonymity-state handling so a registered agent is never returned as the owner
- A disambiguation gate that requires corroboration before anyone is named
- A resolution tier on every run, including the honest NONE
Skip tracing and research
Ten cents buys a number, not a picture
Skip tracing at around ten cents a hit is excellent value for what it is. Give it a name and an address and it returns a phone number and an email, so a campaign can go out to a thousand households for the price of lunch. If your next step is a mailer or a dialer, nothing here beats it and Plotbook is not trying to.
For an advisor the phone number is the least useful part of the record. What decides whether a household is worth an hour of your time is who the person is: what they do, what they built, whether they recently sold it, and roughly what tier of wealth that puts them in. A skip trace has no view on any of that.
A Plotbook run returns the picture instead. A named person with title and employer, full employment and education history, every professional and personal email and phone found, a photo and LinkedIn where they exist, a research summary, a 0 to 100 confidence score, and a four-band wealth estimate covering net worth, income, investible assets, and total assets, each as a range rather than a single number. It costs 25 credits and is charged only when it succeeds.
The other side
What Propwire does better than us
More than most pages in this collection, because a free product with a large database is a hard thing to compete with on anything except the question being asked.
It costs nothing
No card, no trial clock, no credits to ration. Plotbook's cheapest plan is $79 a month and the trial takes a card. For anyone testing whether property data is useful to them at all, starting free is obviously correct.
More property records, and MLS with them
Reported at 157 million properties including MLS listings and off-market inventory. Plotbook carries 150M+ parcels from Regrid and no MLS data of any kind, so there is no listing status, no days on market, and no asking price.
Deal signals we simply do not have
Pre-foreclosure, vacancy, absentee ownership, bankruptcy, auction. Plotbook has no equity data, no mortgage position, no lien or distress data, and no way to filter on any of it. For acquisition this is disqualifying and we would rather say so here.
Comparables and investment analysis
Comps and analysis tooling on a given address. Plotbook shows the county's assessed value and nothing else, which is a much weaker basis for valuing anything.
Contact economics at volume
Around ten cents per skip trace against 15 credits for a Plotbook reverse lookup. If you need a thousand phone numbers this month, the arithmetic is not close and it is not in our favour.
Bulk downloading without a paywall
Free property downloads, where Plotbook's CSV export requires Professional at $199 a month, costs 5 credits, and caps at 5,000 rows per export.
If what you want is property records, take the free one. Propwire covers more properties than we do, includes MLS data we do not have, and charges nothing for it. Plotbook is worth paying for only when the deed leads to an entity you need pierced, or when the owner as a person is the thing you are actually trying to understand.
Running both
The obvious and cheap sequence
Because Propwire is free, running both costs no more than running Plotbook alone, and the division of labour is unusually clean. Use the free product for everything about the property. Use the paid one only at the point where the property record has stopped being able to help you.
In practice that means Propwire for the address, the characteristics, the value, and the owner of record, and Plotbook for the two cases where that record is a dead end: the deed names an entity, or the deed names a person and you need to know who that person actually is before you spend an hour on them.
Anything you keep in Plotbook lands in a saved profile with the contacts, the four wealth ranges, the linked parcel, the confidence score, and the full research trail. Export is CSV on Professional and Enterprise. There is no integration between the two products and we are not going to imply one.
- Propwire for the property record, Plotbook when the record names an entity
- Free tools on this site run without an account if you want to test the idea first
- Institutional owners are detected and never charged, so a REIT-held parcel costs nothing
- CSV export requires Professional ($199/month) or Enterprise ($499/month)
What it costs
Free against per answer
There is no honest way to make this table flattering, so here it is plainly. Propwire's search is free and its skip tracing is reported at around ten cents. Plotbook charges a subscription and then credits per action. What you are buying with the difference is research rather than records.
- Browsing the map and filtering by value band
- included
- Opening a parcel Plotbook has not seen before
- 1 credits
- Instant owner lookup on a residential address
- 15 credits
- Full research run on an entity-held deed
- 25 credits
- Keeping the result as a profile
- 10 credits
- Exporting to CSV
- 5 credits
Panning, zooming, the six value-band filters, and deed owner names printed on parcels from zoom 16. Free on every plan, including the trial.
First lookup of a given parcel. Cached afterwards, so returning to it is free.
Reverse lookup against licensed residential records. This is the row that compares to a ten cent skip trace, and it loses badly on price.
Classification, registry and county records, contact databases, disambiguation, wealth estimate. Charged only if it succeeds. This row has no Propwire equivalent.
Enrichment and permanent storage in your prospect book, with the research trail attached.
Professional and Enterprise only. Starter cannot export at all.
Work out your own arithmetic before switching anything. Professional at $199 a month carries 2,500 credits, which is roughly 60 full research runs or 160 reverse lookups. If your job needs a thousand contacts a month, a free database with ten cent skip tracing wins by an enormous margin and we would rather you saw that here than after paying us. New subscribers get 7 days and 100 credits; the trial takes a card and converts on day 8.
Questions
Plotbook and Propwire, asked directly
Keep comparing
Plotbook vs PropStream
The paid version of the same comparison, against the larger and better known investor platform.
Free tools
Deed reader, entity decoder, and owner search guide. No account, no card, no email.
AI owner research
The research loop that runs when a deed names a trust, an LLC, or an estate.
For real estate investors
The narrow set of jobs Plotbook does well for investors, and the many it does not.
Free is the right price for a record
Take the free database for the property. Come back when the deed says trust, LLC, or estate, and the record has stopped being able to help you. That is the only part we are asking you to pay for.
New subscribers start with 7 days and 100 credits. We email you before the trial ends.