Cohiva Control vs Brightly (Dude Solutions): an honest comparison

Brightly, the platform formerly known as Dude Solutions and now part of Siemens, and Cohiva Control both manage assets and maintenance, so they overlap on the basics. The difference is breadth and direction: Brightly is a broad asset and facilities suite with deep roots in the public sector, while Cohiva Control runs the maintenance core and then 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 Brightly. Confirm current Brightly capabilities and pricing on their own site before you decide.

Where Brightly is strong

Brightly has spent years building a broad asset and facilities-management platform, with a particularly strong footprint in education, local government and healthcare. For a large school district, council or health network, the breadth of the suite, the capital-planning and asset-lifecycle tooling, the sector-specific modules and the backing of a large vendor are real advantages, and established procurement relationships matter at that scale. If your selection is being led by a public-sector asset team that wants a broad, sector-aware platform, Brightly is a credible, well-established choice, and you would not be wrong to pick it.

Where Cohiva Control is strong

Cohiva Control starts from the maintenance core and then keeps going into finance. 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, and posting state is tracked separately from the immutable ledger row.

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

The contractor-compliance gate is the second differentiator. A contractor whose public liability insurance, trade licence or site induction is expired, missing or unverified cannot be assigned to a work order. The block is a hard 422 at the API with no override. The gate enforces the document set you configure; what is not configurable is whether the rule is enforced.

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

Choose Cohiva Control if

• You want maintenance and fixed-asset depreciation in one system, with journals posted to your accounting suite instead of re-keyed.
• 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 Brightly if

• You are a large public-sector or education organisation that wants a broad asset and facilities suite with sector modules and capital planning.
• Your finance team already depreciates assets elsewhere.
• You value the backing and procurement track record of a large vendor.

Both can run maintenance across many sites. The deciding question is whether your assets should leave the maintenance system to be depreciated, or stay in it. See Cohiva Control for local councils, for schools and education, and the best CMMS software buyer guide.

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.