Cohiva Control vs UpKeep: an honest comparison
UpKeep and Cohiva Control are both computerised maintenance management systems, so on the maintenance basics they overlap heavily. The real decision is narrower than feature counts: do you want maintenance software, or do you want one system that runs maintenance and then carries each asset through to its depreciation on your books? This page sets out where each product is the better fit, with no invented pricing or fabricated feature claims.
At a glance
| Capability | Cohiva Control | UpKeep |
|---|---|---|
| Asset register, work orders, preventive maintenance | Yes | Yes |
| Inspections and parts or inventory | Yes | Yes |
| Mobile technician app | Yes | Yes, a long-standing strength |
| Fixed-asset depreciation in the same system | Yes, six methods including AASB 16 | Not the product’s focus |
| Posts depreciation journals to Xero, QuickBooks, NetSuite | Yes | Not the product’s focus |
| Contractor-compliance gate with no override | Yes, a hard 422 | Configurable as the product allows |
| Data isolation | Database per tenant | As the vendor provides |
| Community and learning content | Growing | Large and well established |
Treat the right-hand column as category framing rather than a line-by-line audit of UpKeep’s roadmap. Confirm current UpKeep capabilities and pricing on their own site before you decide.
Where UpKeep is strong
UpKeep earned its place by making maintenance approachable on a phone. For a frontline team that lives in the field, a clean mobile app that a new technician can pick up in a shift is worth a great deal, and UpKeep has years of refinement there. It also has a large body of help content, templates and an active user community, so when a maintenance manager searches for how to set up a meter-based PM or a request workflow, there is usually a worked example to follow. If your selection is being driven by maintenance teams who want the smoothest day-to-day mobile experience and a deep bench of community knowledge, UpKeep is a credible, well-supported choice, and you would not be wrong to pick it.
Where Cohiva Control is strong
Cohiva Control starts from the same 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 so the ledger itself stays clean.
Money is held as a fixed-precision decimal, rounded half up, never as a floating point number, so a worked example on a method page matches what the product computes to the cent. Depreciation never takes book value below the residual value, a deliberate floor.
The second differentiator is the contractor-compliance gate. 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, not a soft warning, which means a busy supervisor cannot wave through an uninsured contractor under time pressure. 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 rather than sharing rows in a multi-tenant table.
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 before anyone is assigned work.
- 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 UpKeep if
- Your priority is the smoothest possible mobile experience for frontline technicians.
- You want the largest community, content library and ecosystem to lean on while you set up.
- Your finance team already depreciates assets elsewhere and you want maintenance software to stay in its lane.
Both can run a maintenance operation well. The deciding question is whether your assets should leave the maintenance system to be depreciated, or stay in it.
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.