Visual Lease vs FinQuery (formerly LeaseQuery): Lease Accounting and AI Lease Abstraction Compared

First, two changes most comparisons miss

If you are reading an older comparison of these two, it is probably out of date on two counts. First, Visual Lease is no longer independent: CoStar Group acquired it in a deal that closed on November 1, 2024 for $276.0 million, and it now sits alongside CoStar Real Estate Manager. That matters because CoStar's property dataset is now wired into Visual Lease's AI validation. Second, LeaseQuery is now FinQuery. The company rebranded in February 2024 to reflect a wider focus on contract and spend intelligence. The confusing part, and the reason both names still get searched, is that LeaseQuery survives as a product name: the lease accounting product is branded LeaseQuery powered by FinQuery, and the small-portfolio product is LeaseGuru powered by FinQuery. So if someone tells you they use LeaseQuery, they are using FinQuery.

What Visual Lease does well

Visual Lease has been at this since 1996 and serves more than 1,500 organizations, and its center of gravity is lease administration rather than pure accounting. It manages the full lifecycle from acquisition through renewal to termination, with critical-date and renewal alerts, real estate and equipment workflows, and sustainability and emissions reporting for leased and owned assets, which is unusual and genuinely useful if you have an ESG reporting obligation. Its AI lease abstraction is a real pipeline rather than a checkbox: OCR classification routes documents by jurisdiction and asset type, the OCR layer handles tables, strikeouts, and margin notes, prompts written by lease experts drive the extraction, and then more than 40 validation checks run the output against CoStar's property dataset to flag rent anomalies, square-footage mismatches, and out-of-band TI allowances. That last step is something only a CoStar-owned product can do. Honest caveats: reporting is the recurring reviewer complaint, described as confusing for new users and limited in customization; the workflow is rigid, and reviewers specifically flag that leases flip automatically from Active to Historical at term end and you cannot run a modification on a Historical lease without recapturing it; and ERP integration sometimes needs troubleshooting. It rates 4.7 out of 5 across 55 Capterra reviews as of July 2026, and roughly three quarters of its reviewers are enterprise, which tells you where it fits. Our Visual Lease alternative page covers the rest of the field.

What FinQuery does well

FinQuery was designed by accountants for the close, and it shows. The lease accounting subledger produces amortization schedules, journal entries, and quantitative disclosures, and it ships with more than 100 standard reports. It has the broadest standards coverage of the two: ASC 842, IFRS 16, GASB 87 and 96, FRS 102 for UK GAAP, and SFFAS 54 for US federal reporting, so government and federal reporters have somewhere to go. Its AI is framed more modestly than Visual Lease's, as AI-assisted lease entry: the AI reads the uploaded lease and surfaces the key fields as suggestions you approve, with bulk lease upload to speed up onboarding. That is an accounting data-capture assist rather than a full commercial-real-estate abstract with clause-level summaries, and it is worth being clear-eyed about the difference. FinQuery also reaches further down-market than Visual Lease: Capterra segments its reviewers as roughly a third enterprise and a third small business, and it rates 4.7 out of 5 across about 106 Capterra reviews. Honest caveats: report customization is described as clunky and prebuilt reports often need downstream work for consolidated accounting; the interface is called dated; performance can slow during peak reporting periods; and API access is deliberately restricted, which is a genuine frustration for teams that wanted deep automation. See our LeaseQuery alternative page for the wider comparison.

Pricing: the one place there are real numbers

Visual Lease does not publish pricing. Its pricing page is a request-a-quote form, Capterra confirms there is no free trial, and the third-party estimates floating around the internet contradict each other so badly, ranging from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands, that repeating any of them would be dishonest. So: quote only, expect a demo and an annual contract. FinQuery is different, and this is a real advantage for smaller teams. It publishes pricing for LeaseGuru, its small-portfolio product: a free forever tier covering up to 2 leases with one contributing user and no credit card, then $999 per year for up to 10 leases and $1,750 per year for up to 15, with multi-company plans running from $750 to $2,750 per year. The full LeaseQuery product, with unlimited leases and users, is quote-based like everyone else. If you have a handful of leases and an ASC 842 obligation, FinQuery is the only one of the two you can actually start using this afternoon without talking to anyone.

Neither one is an abstraction service

Here is the thing both have in common that is easy to miss. Abstraction, in both products, is a feature that feeds their own database. It is not a deliverable you can take somewhere else. If you buy Visual Lease or FinQuery, the AI reads your leases into their system, and that is the point. That is fine if you are committing to the platform. It is a problem in three common situations: you are doing acquisition diligence and need abstracts before you own anything; you are evaluating platforms and want to compare their output against your own reading of the lease; or you already run a system of record, Yardi or MRI or NetSuite, and you just need the documents turned into clean data you can import. In all three, a standalone abstraction tool is the right shape. We explain why the categories keep getting confused in lease abstraction vs lease accounting software.

Where LeaseAbstractors fits

LeaseAbstractors does exactly one job: it turns lease documents into structured, verified data you own. Upload a PDF or a scan, and the AI reads the full document set including amendments and exhibits, then returns a review-ready abstract in minutes with every value linked back to its source page. You can test it on your own lease right now, free, with no demo, which is something Visual Lease does not allow at all and FinQuery allows only within a two-lease free tier tied to its own platform. It exports clean Excel, CSV, and JSON and offers an API, so the abstracts load into Visual Lease, FinQuery, Yardi, MRI, or NetSuite without anyone re-keying them. The honest trade-off: we are not a lease accounting engine. We do not book journal entries, we do not produce your disclosures, and we do not do your ESG reporting. If you have a financial statement to sign, you still want one of these platforms underneath. What we replace is the slow, expensive step of getting the terms out of the documents. See the full lease abstraction software overview, or the best lease abstraction software roundup.

Which should you choose?

Choose Visual Lease if you are a real-estate-heavy enterprise with a large, complex property portfolio, you want lease administration and accounting and ESG reporting in one system, and CoStar's market data validating your abstractions is worth something to you. Be ready for a sales-led quote and for reporting that reviewers find rigid. Choose FinQuery if your primary driver is compliance and the close, especially if you report under GASB or FRS 102 or SFFAS 54, or if your portfolio is small enough that LeaseGuru's published tiers, including the free two-lease plan, get the job done for a fraction of an enterprise contract. Choose a dedicated abstraction tool first, whichever platform you end up on, if what you have today is a folder of lease PDFs, because both of these systems start by asking you for data you do not yet have in clean form. Abstract, verify, then load. If you are weighing an outside abstraction service against software, our breakdown of lease abstraction services vs software covers cost per lease, turnaround, and who keeps control of your documents.