Compare · Honest comparison
Boardroom vs. Diligent Boards.
Same governance core — board packs, resolutions, minutes, registers. Different tradeoffs on price transparency, access transparency, and where Diligent has genuinely earned its reputation. Built from public sources, not sales talking points.
The price, both ways
Diligent doesn't publish a price. Its /pricing page is a lead-capture form, not a rate card. Third-party deal-data aggregator Vendr, working from real buyer contracts, reports a median annual spend of about $23,800 (up to about $45,800). Boardroom's Board tier is $179 per seat, per month — $2,148/seat/yr on monthly billing, $1,790/seat/yr if you pay annually.
That per-seat figure isn't the cost of running your whole board — an 8–10 person board on Board tier costs $14,320–$21,480/yr depending on seat count and billing cadence. Still comfortably under Diligent's reported median — and every dollar of it is on a page you can read before anyone gets on a call with you. See /pricing for the live numbers.
| Boardroom | Diligent Boards | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing & transparency | ||
| Published price list | Every tier's price is on /pricing — Free, $79 Starter, $179 Board, per seat per month, Enterprise by quote. | Quote-only. diligent.com/pricing is a contact-sales form (“get a package tailored to your organization’s size”) — no tier or per-seat number appears anywhere on the site. diligent.com/pricing, fetched directly, July 2026. |
| Typical annual cost, ~10-seat board | $14,320–$21,480/yr on the Board tier (8–10 seats, annual or monthly billing) — the same math you can run yourself on /pricing. | Reported median ~$23,800/yr, ranging up to ~$45,800/yr, per Vendr's aggregated buyer-contract data — not a figure Diligent itself publishes. vendr.com/marketplace/diligent (third-party deal data, not vendor-confirmed). |
| Free non-voting seats | Observers, auditors, and outside counsel are free and unlimited on every plan — they never count toward your seat total. | Not stated either way in Diligent's public pricing materials; pricing is opaque enough that we can't confirm or rule this out. |
| Access & audit transparency | ||
| Vendor-side access log | Boardroom Lockbox: every platform-admin touch to your tenant lands in a customer-visible, hash-chained log with a mandatory reason. See /trust#lockbox. | We found a standard end-user activity log (your own team's actions, System-Admin-only export) — no public documentation of a log covering Diligent's own staff or support access to your data. help.diligentoneplatform.com audit-log docs; trust.diligent.com — absence not proven, just not found. |
| Published permission matrix | The exact default access matrix enforced in code, published row by row at /trust#permissions. | Diligent documents role-based access (committee-level and application-level roles) in its help center — conventional RBAC documentation, not a matrix published as a customer-facing reference. help.diligentoneplatform.com roles-and-permissions article. |
| Published rate limits | Per-tier requests/sec, AI calls/month, and WhatsApp/day, published at /trust#rate-limits. | Rate limits are documented for Diligent's separate Third-Party Manager API (a different, GRC product); we found none published for Diligent Boards itself. |
| Encryption, self-hosting & residency | ||
| Encryption keys | Purpose-scoped keys derived from a single master via HMAC-SHA256 (AES-256-GCM) — a stolen ciphertext for one purpose can't decrypt another. Per-tenant key management is on our roadmap, not shipped today. | Per-customer keys held in a FIPS 140-2 Level 3 HSM: AES-256, two-key/document-level encryption, per Diligent's own security materials. UK G-Cloud filing (applytosupply.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk). |
| Self-hosting / dedicated deployment | Available on Enterprise — the identical stack, deployed as a dedicated instance in your chosen jurisdiction. | No self-hosting option found in Diligent's public materials as far as we could confirm. |
| Data residency | EU (Hetzner) on shared plans today; GCC, UK, or other jurisdictions available as a dedicated Enterprise deployment. | A UK government filing confirms UK/EEA storage with customer control over location; we found no single page listing Diligent's complete set of available regions. UK G-Cloud filing, as above. |
Where Diligent has the edge.
None of this is invented. Diligent is one of the longest-established board-portal vendors and is widely used at large-cap, enterprise scale — a track record Boardroom, launched far more recently, doesn't have yet. Specifically:
- Native mobile apps. Live iOS and Android apps on the App Store and Google Play, with offline board-book sync, annotation, and e-signature voting. Boardroom is an installable web app (PWA) with offline caching, not a native app.
- Independently audited certifications. SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type II, audited annually, plus ISO 27001, 27017, and 27018. Boardroom is architected against the same control families but hasn't completed its own SOC 2 / ISO 27001 audit — see /trust#certifications for the exact status.
- Per-customer HSM-backed encryption keys. A customer-specific key held in a FIPS 140-2 Level 3 hardware security module. Boardroom derives purpose-scoped keys from a single master key today; per-tenant key management is on our roadmap, not shipped.
- SSO with turnkey connectors. SAML 2.0 with documented Okta and Microsoft Entra integrations, plus SCIM auto-provisioning. Boardroom includes SAML SSO too (from the Starter tier, not gated to Enterprise), but custom connectors and SCIM are Enterprise-only.
Diligent comparison FAQ
Is this comparison fair?
We built it from Diligent's own pricing page, trust center, and help documentation, plus one UK government procurement filing and one third-party pricing aggregator (Vendr) — all fetched directly in July 2026. Where we couldn't confirm something publicly, we say so instead of guessing. If anything here is outdated or wrong, tell us at balayogesh@gmail.com.
Does Boardroom have everything Diligent has?
No. Diligent has native iOS/Android apps, a longer track record at enterprise scale, per-customer HSM-backed encryption keys, and completed SOC 1 / SOC 2 / ISO 27001 audits — real strengths, listed above. What we publish that we could not find published anywhere in Diligent's own materials: a customer-visible log of vendor-staff access, a public permission matrix, and public rate limits.
Why does Boardroom list its own gaps on this page?
A comparison page that only lists advantages isn't a comparison — it's an ad. The same honesty is applied to Boardroom's own security posture at /trust, including what's certified today versus planned.
Is Boardroom SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certified?
Not yet. Boardroom is architected against the SOC 2 and ISO 27001 control families, with the audit scheduled after our first enterprise cohort — see /trust#certifications for the exact status. Diligent's SOC 1/SOC 2/ISO 27001 certifications are already complete and independently verifiable.
Where can I check these figures myself?
Boardroom's pricing is live at /pricing. Diligent's cited figures are sourced inline above and listed again below — diligent.com/pricing, trust.diligent.com, and vendr.com/marketplace/diligent.
Sources
- diligent.com/pricing
- trust.diligent.com
- diligent.com/legal/tech-specs
- help.diligentoneplatform.com — roles & permissions
- help.diligentoneplatform.com — audit activity log
- UK G-Cloud / Digital Marketplace filing (security & residency detail)
- vendr.com/marketplace/diligent (third-party pricing data)
- Diligent Boards on the Apple App Store
- Diligent Boards on Google Play
Fetched directly in July 2026. Diligent Boards is a product of Diligent Corporation. Trademarks belong to their respective owners; Boardroom is not affiliated with Diligent. Spot something outdated or wrong? Tell us.