Cohiva Control vs Asset Panda: an honest comparison

Asset Panda and Cohiva Control both put an asset register at the centre, but they are built for different jobs. Asset Panda is a flexible asset-tracking platform with strong mobile scanning and customisable fields. Cohiva Control is a maintenance system that carries each asset through to its depreciation on your books. This page is honest about which buyer each suits, with no invented pricing or fabricated feature claims.

At a glance

Treat the right-hand column as category framing rather than a line-by-line audit of Asset Panda. Confirm current Asset Panda capabilities and pricing on their own site before you decide.

Where Asset Panda is strong

Asset Panda earned its reputation on flexibility. If you need to track many kinds of assets, equipment, devices, tools, IT hardware, with customisable fields, strong mobile scanning and configurable workflows, it is a capable, well-regarded platform. Teams that primarily need to know what they own, where it is and who has it, with audits and check-in and check-out, get a lot from a tracking-first product. If asset tracking is the core problem and maintenance is a smaller part of the picture, Asset Panda is a credible choice, and you would not be wrong to pick it.

Where Cohiva Control is strong

Cohiva Control is a maintenance system first, with the asset register feeding both the maintenance workflow and the finance layer. Every asset you maintain is the same asset your accountant depreciates. The depreciation engine runs six methods, straight-line, diminishing value, double declining balance, units of production, sum of years digits and AASB 16 leases, and each monthly run writes to an append-only ledger and can post journals to Xero, QuickBooks, NetSuite or Cohiva Crunch. The monthly run is idempotent, so re-running it does not double-post.

Money is held as a fixed-precision decimal, rounded half up. Depreciation never takes book value below the residual value, a deliberate floor.

Work orders move through a server-enforced state machine with an append-only history, preventive maintenance generates work orders on a time or meter interval without duplicates, and inspections can raise a work order automatically when an item fails. The contractor-compliance gate is a hard 422 with no override: a contractor with expired, missing or unverified insurance, licence or induction cannot be assigned to a work order.

Cohiva Control is database per tenant, so each operator’s data sits in its own isolated database.

Choose Cohiva Control if

• You want maintenance, an asset register and fixed-asset depreciation in one system, with journals posted to your accounting suite.
• You run regulated or insured contractors and want a hard, non-overridable compliance gate.
• You value an append-only audit and depreciation ledger and database-per-tenant isolation.
• You are an Australian operator and need AASB 16 lease treatment alongside the standard methods.

Choose Asset Panda if

• Your main need is flexible tracking of many asset types with strong mobile scanning and audits.
• Maintenance workflows are secondary to knowing what you own and where it is.
• Your finance team depreciates assets in a separate system.

The deciding question is whether your problem is tracking assets, or maintaining and depreciating them in one place. See the asset register use case and CMMS with fixed-asset depreciation.

Part of the Cohiva platform

Cohiva Control is one product in the Cohiva platform. Leisure and aquatic operators often pair it with Cohiva Complex for centre management, and finance teams connect it to Cohiva Crunch for the general ledger and consolidation. See the whole platform at www.cohiva.app.