Cohiva Control vs Coast: an honest comparison

Coast and Cohiva Control overlap on maintenance work orders and checklists, but they sit at different ends of the scale. Coast is a light, mobile-first maintenance app for small teams. 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 Coast. Confirm current Coast capabilities and pricing on their own site before you decide.

Where Coast is strong

Coast is built to be simple and mobile-first. For a small team that wants to get work orders, checklists and basic maintenance running on a phone with very little setup, that simplicity is a genuine strength. A new user can pick it up in minutes, and there is no weight to carry that a small operation does not need. If your selection is being driven by a small team that wants a clean, light, phone-based maintenance app, and finance is handled elsewhere, Coast is a credible choice, and you would not be wrong to pick it.

Where Cohiva Control is strong

Cohiva Control covers the maintenance basics 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.

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, and it matters more as an operation grows. 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. Work orders also move through a server-enforced state machine with an append-only history, which gives a defensible record as the team scales.

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.
• 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 Coast if

• You are a small team that wants a light, mobile-first maintenance app with minimal setup.
• Your finance team depreciates assets in a separate system.
• Your priority is simplicity over breadth of capability.

The deciding question is scale and scope: a light mobile app, or maintenance plus the depreciation ledger and compliance gate behind it. See the best CMMS software buyer guide for the wider field.

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.