SteadyState vs. OnBoard

OnBoard's Voting & Approvals is built around parliamentary procedure. Their page describes "motions, seconds, roll-call votes, and recorded outcomes" and mobile voting between meetings tied to the board book. It says every vote is "automatically recorded in meeting minutes with the motion text, vote count, and outcome," and that administrators can "lock outcomes, apply holds, and export clean packages."

Their plan table lists Microsoft 365 Integration and a Minutes Builder alongside Voting & Approvals, with Microsoft 365 described as collaborating directly within Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. On security, OnBoard states compliance with SOC 2 and ISO 27001, among others, and says the platform runs on Microsoft Azure.

If your board runs roll-call votes with a named tally, or needs minutes drafted from the vote record, OnBoard does that work and SteadyState does not. That is the honest starting point for this comparison.

Both products use the word lock, and they mean different mechanisms. In OnBoard, locking an outcome is a control an administrator applies inside OnBoard's platform, which their security page says runs on Microsoft Azure. The records sit in the vendor's environment, and the rules about who may change them are software settings there.

SteadyState installs into your organization's own Microsoft 365 tenant and stores records in your own Dataverse. A plugin that runs before the database transaction opens refuses every update and delete on an approved record, so a refused edit never reaches the database. The refusal is the same whatever tool makes the attempt, including administrator tools and spreadsheet connections. You can trigger that refusal yourself in the demo.

The practical difference shows up in who you have to trust. With a vendor-hosted lock, the answer to "can this record still be changed" depends on that vendor's configuration and staff. With SteadyState there is no vendor copy, because we operate no service that holds your records.

Boards revise what they approved. A figure was wrong, a condition needs adding, a policy is superseded a year later. In SteadyState an approved decision is never edited. Amend creates a new decision, linked to the original, and routes it through the same approval. The original stays in the register marked superseded, so the history reads as a sequence of votes rather than a single record that changed shape.

We did not find an equivalent described on OnBoard's public pages, so the row for it in the table below says that rather than guessing.

SteadyState publishes its price. OnBoard does not — their pricing page asks you to request a demo — so we will not put a number in their column, and we do not repeat the third-party estimates that circulate.

For our side, run your own board through the pricing calculator. It covers the seat minimum, the one-month free trial, and the separate Power Apps licensing from Microsoft, so the total you compare is complete. One thing worth checking on any quote: their plan table lists several capabilities as add-ons at the entry tier, so ask which plan includes the features you are buying. Every SteadyState tier is the same product – voting, the lock, amendments, actions, and single sign-on are never gated behind a higher plan. If you are evaluating for a specific kind of board, the community college and pension board pages map SteadyState to those structures.

The interactive demo runs the full lifecycle, including the moment the database refuses an edit to an approved record. It takes a few minutes and does not require an install.

• Try the demo at /explore
• Or contact us and we will walk your board through it