New report reveals where coworking operators lose their week

For most of the past decade, the hard question in flex software was which product to buy. Operators compared platforms, argued about feature lists, and worried about picking wrong.

That question is close to answered. Our 2026 survey of 334 operators, from single-site independents to 30-plus-location portfolios, shows category leadership that barely moved in a year.

Stripe is now used by 85% of operators, up 8 points. HubSpot holds 54% of CRM. Salto leads door access. A shortlist drawn up in 2025 is still the right shortlist in 2026.

So this year we asked a different question, and checked the answers against anonymised connection data from 1,276 accounts on our platform. Once you own good software, why is the job still manual?

The average operator has connected 1.65 of 5 systems

Five categories run a flex space: payments, accounting, door access, CRM and network. Across 1,276 accounts, the average operator has 1.65 of them actively connected.

14% have connected nothing. A third have exactly 1, and it is nearly always payments, because payments is the connection you cannot avoid making. Out of 1,276 accounts, exactly 1 has all 5.

Set that against what the same operators say they want. 57% call accounting a must-have integration. 40% have connected it. Every other category shows the same shape, and 3 of them are wider.

The market can name the connections that would help. Most have not switched them on, and several are already paying for the one they never turned on.

Connection depth is a margin question, not an IT question

This is where the report gets uncomfortable, and where it gets useful.

If you and the operator down the road run the same platform, the same payment gateway and the same door access system, your software is not what separates you.

What separates you is how many of those systems hand data to each other without a person in between. That difference shows up in payroll, in month-end close, and in how many hours your community manager spends on data entry instead of members.

68% of operators named integration gaps as their biggest technology challenge this year, ahead of cost, training and AI. That number went up, not down. Every gap between 2 systems gets filled by a person, a spreadsheet, or a paid connector, which is why the cost complaint and the integration complaint are usually the same complaint counted twice.

Flex is not unusual in this. Salesforce’s 2025 Connectivity Benchmark Report found 90% of IT leaders say data silos are creating business problems. What flex has that most industries don’t is a short, stable vendor list, which makes the connection work tractable. A 12-person operator can close this gap in a quarter. That is a genuine opening.

One example of the cost. An operator in this survey traced 44% of their annual member support tickets to access cards. Gather, 7 sites and 2,800 members in Virginia, runs door access so it follows the membership automatically, and that ticket category mostly stops existing.

Manual work doesn’t disappear as you grow. It relocates

We asked one open question with no answer options: what is the most repetitive, time-consuming process in your day? 142 operators answered in their own words, and billing came first for the market overall.

Run the same analysis on multi-location operators only and the ranking turns over almost completely. Billing falls from 1st place to 8th. A different process takes the top spot.

That reordering is the most strategically useful finding in the report, because it tells you what your week looks like at 7 sites while you are still running 2. Most operators solve the bottleneck they have today and get ambushed by the next one. The chart is in the report, and it is worth planning against.

One number from the same section, since it holds at every size: 36% of operators still write contracts and quotes by hand in Word, PDF or email. Only 7% pay for software that does it.

If billing is your current version of this, our guide to automated coworking billing across locations covers what changes when payments and accounting talk to each other.

AI inherits whatever your stack already is

Last year, 26% of operators told us they were using AI tools. This year it’s 18%, and the share ruling AI out more than doubled.

Part of that is a stricter question. The direction is still real, and the explanation sits in how those tools were connected, which the report shows in one chart. MIT’s NANDA study found 95% of enterprise AI pilots delivered no measurable return, with integration into existing workflows as the dividing line.

The practical version for operators: an AI tool that cannot read your live member, booking and invoice data will produce confident answers about nothing in particular. Connection depth is the prerequisite for the entire AI conversation, which is why we put the AI section after the integration data rather than before it. Our view on where to start is in practical AI for coworking.

Operators have already told the industry what they want

Asked whether they would rather their space management platform absorb more functionality so they can drop vendors, or connect better to the tools they already keep, 66% chose connection. 34% chose consolidation. That split held across every cut of the data, by portfolio size and by region, across 2 years of surveys.

It should change what gets asked in a demo. Not how many features the platform has, but which of your named vendors have native integrations, what those integrations actually sync, and what still needs a person. We made the longer argument in why open integration ecosystems win and in 8 must-have coworking software integrations.

Why read the full thing

This post gives you just the argument. The report gives you the numbers to act on it.

Inside: category leaders for all 5 systems with regional breakdowns, including why the global accounting chart misleads anyone operating outside North America.

The complete say-versus-connected table across 1,276 accounts. The time-sink ranking cut by portfolio size, so you can see your next bottleneck before it arrives. AI spend, use cases and connection methods. And 6 moves for your 2026 roadmap, ordered, where the first costs nothing and takes an hour.

If you are budgeting for next year, or deciding whether to buy another tool or connect the ones you have, this is the peer benchmark to do it against.