Compare · Honest comparison
Boardroom vs. OnBoard.
Same governance core — board packs, resolutions, minutes, registers. Different tradeoffs on price transparency, SSO inclusion, and where OnBoard has genuinely earned its reputation. Built from public sources, not sales talking points.
The price, both ways
OnBoard doesn't publish a price either — its pricing page names three tiers (Essentials, Premium, Ultimate) but no dollar figures, and sells SSO as a paid add-on below its top tier. The one real number we could find anywhere in public sources is a single third-party quote — a competing vendor's blog, not OnBoard's own materials — citing $25,385/yr list for a 15-seat nonprofit, discounted to $10,985/yr, plus a separate $3,500/yr AI add-on.
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. An 8–10 person board costs $14,320–$21,480/yr depending on seat count and billing cadence, SSO included at every tier — see /pricing for the live numbers.
| Boardroom | OnBoard | |
|---|---|---|
| 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, across three tiers (Essentials / Premium / Ultimate), priced per user per year, with AI Suite, SSO, Skills Tracking, Board Assessments, and D&O Questionnaires sold as separate paid add-ons gated by tier. onboardmeetings.com/board-portal/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. | The only dollar figure we could find in public sources is a single reported quote — not from OnBoard itself, but from a competing vendor's blog — citing a ~15-seat nonprofit at $25,385/yr list, discounted 57% to $10,985/yr, plus a separate $3,500/yr AI add-on. aprioboardportal.com pricing-comparison blog (third-party, competitor-sourced, unverified). |
| SSO cost | SAML SSO is included from the Starter tier at no upcharge — most vendors reserve it for a top tier. | SSO (Okta, OneLogin, Azure AD) is included free only on the top "Ultimate" tier; on Essentials and Premium it's a separate paid add-on, not something included at any price point below Ultimate. onboardmeetings.com/board-portal/pricing/ and /board-portal/security/. |
| 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 OnBoard'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 customer-facing activity/audit log (your own team's actions) — no published log or approval flow covering OnBoard's own staff access to your data. onboardmeetings.com/board-portal/security/ — absence not proven, just not found. |
| Permission system | The exact default access matrix enforced in code, published row by row at /trust#permissions. | OnBoard's own permission system (Organization Admin / Resource Admin / Reader, with meeting-, group-, and document-level inheritance) is genuinely granular — more structured than most peers we checked — but it isn't published as a customer-facing reference matrix. help.passageways.com Understanding OnBoard Permissions article. |
| Published rate limits | Per-tier requests/sec, AI calls/month, and WhatsApp/day, published at /trust#rate-limits. | No public rate-limit documentation found. |
| AI, self-hosting & residency | ||
| AI no-training guarantee | The default provider (Anthropic) commits contractually not to train on your prompts or outputs; bring-your-own-key (BYOK) routes both spend and data entirely under your control. | OnBoard publishes an explicit guarantee: board and meeting data processed by its AI Suite is never used to train OnBoard's own models or any third-party model, and stays within Microsoft Azure infrastructure it controls. onboardmeetings.com/ai-info/ — a genuine parity point, not a gap either way. |
| 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 OnBoard'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. | Runs on Microsoft Azure with GDPR-aligned processing and EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework certification; we found no page naming a specific region or data-center commitment beyond that. |
Where OnBoard has the edge.
None of this is invented. OnBoard has real, verifiable strengths worth naming plainly:
- Independently audited certifications. SOC 2 Type II (audited by A-LIGN), ISO 27001, and ISO 27701, plus HIPAA and GDPR compliance and EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework certification. 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.
- Native mobile apps. Live iOS and Android apps with offline access and biometric (Face ID / Touch ID) login. Boardroom is an installable web app (PWA) with offline caching, not a native app.
- A genuinely granular permission system. Organization Admin / Resource Admin / Reader roles with meeting-, group-, and document-level inheritance — more structured than most peers we checked, even though it isn't published as a customer-facing reference matrix the way Boardroom's is.
- A published AI no-training guarantee. Explicit and public, covering its whole AI Suite. Boardroom makes the same commitment via Anthropic's API terms plus a BYOK option — a real parity point, not a Boardroom advantage.
OnBoard comparison FAQ
Is this comparison fair?
We built it from OnBoard's own pricing, security, and AI-info pages, plus one competitor blog (Aprio) carrying a single third-party pricing quote — 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 OnBoard has?
No. OnBoard has native iOS/Android apps with biometric login, completed SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / ISO 27701 certifications, and a genuinely granular permission system — real strengths, listed above. What we publish that we could not find published anywhere in OnBoard's own materials: a customer-visible log of vendor-staff access and public rate limits.
Why is SSO free on Boardroom's Starter tier?
Because charging extra for single sign-on nudges smaller boards to skip it and keep weaker authentication instead. OnBoard sells SSO as a paid add-on on its two lower tiers and includes it free only on its top "Ultimate" plan; we'd rather have every paid tier on real SSO at no extra cost than upsell around it — see /pricing.
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. OnBoard's SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and ISO 27701 certifications are already complete and independently verifiable.
Where can I check these figures myself?
Boardroom's pricing is live at /pricing. OnBoard's cited figures are sourced inline above and listed again below — onboardmeetings.com and aprioboardportal.com.
Sources
- onboardmeetings.com/board-portal/pricing/
- onboardmeetings.com/board-portal/compliance-certifications/
- onboardmeetings.com/board-portal/security/
- onboardmeetings.com/ai-info/
- onboardmeetings.com/board-portal/apps-ios-android/
- help.passageways.com — Understanding OnBoard Permissions
- aprioboardportal.com pricing-comparison blog (third-party)
Fetched directly in July 2026. OnBoard is a product of Passageways, Inc. Trademarks belong to their respective owners; Boardroom is not affiliated with OnBoard. Spot something outdated or wrong? Tell us.