Kijiji vs Happipad | A secure way to rent your room

Kijiji and Happipad are both websites that allow you to rent your room or parts of a home. Beyond this basic feature of posting a rental the two websites differ significantly. Read on to find out what is best suited for you.

1. Overview of Happipad and Kijiji

You are likely familiar with Kijiji, a general classified posting website owned by eBay, launched in 2005. Kijiji is a website that allows you to post virtually anything for sale, from cars to homes, jewelry, and even lawnmowers. Kijiji is a relatively unregulated platform and does not provide any guarantees or quality control on listings. Kijiji remains a popular option for people to post homes, apartments, and rooms for rent.

Happipad is a social enterprise founded in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada by a student-professor team from the University of British Columbia. Happipad was launched in 2018 as a service to make it safer and easier for mature home owners to rent spare bedrooms to vetted, like-minded people, for medium-long term stays. Happipad is a regulated and secure platform that only allows renting of bedrooms or parts of a home. Unlike Kijiji, Happipad is a rental specific service that provides a complete list of services and support during the entire rental period.


Kijiji’s service fees vary significantly from free up to $123 per listing, charged monthly. You can post up to two standard free listings, then Kijiji requires you to purchase a premium paid listing package. Kijiji does not offer any additional services beyond paid advertising. If you want your listing to remain visible on the first few pages you will likely need to purchase a premium advertising plan.

Happipad’s service fees are straightforward. Happipad is free to register and post. If you are successful finding a renter there is a one-time contract fee of $50. In addition, there is a monthly service fee of 5% deducted from your monthly rent. Happipad provides many more services to make it a complete solution including background screening and identity verification of renters, automatic rent collection (rent automatically deposited in your account), legal rental contract generator, and support with any problems or conflicts with your renters.  

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