Diligent is the market leader in board software, and it leads for a reason. It has the deepest feature set in the category, it is investing seriously in AI, and for a global plc or enterprise board it is the natural home: entity management, governance intelligence, and the scale to serve a secretariat spanning jurisdictions. Nothing in this piece disputes any of that.
This piece is for a different reader: the pension trustee board, charity board, or school governing body that evaluates Diligent, admires it, and concludes it was not built for them. Every year a steady stream of UK boards reaches exactly that conclusion. They are not wrong about the product; they are right about themselves. And then they face the harder question: what instead?
One disclosure before we answer it. We build Knowa, and Knowa is one of the six alternatives below. So read this the way you would read any vendor's comparison: as a map of the field drawn by someone standing on it. We have tried to make it an honest map. Where a rival is strong we say so plainly, because a comparison that flatters its author is useless to you and, in a market this easy to research, embarrassing to us.
Why do boards look for a Diligent alternative?
Almost never because the product failed. In our experience boards move on from Diligent for four reasons, and every one of them is a question of fit rather than fault.
The first is price. Diligent's pricing is aimed at enterprise budgets, because its product is aimed at enterprise problems. A pension scheme or a mid-sized charity funds its governance from a very different envelope than a FTSE secretariat, and the difference is felt at every renewal, usually by the person who has to justify the line to the rest of the board.
The second is breadth. Diligent's depth is genuinely impressive: entity management, risk tooling, ESG reporting, a module for nearly everything. A trustee or charity board may open a fraction of it. Paying for capability you never touch is not a scandal, but it is a decision worth re-examining annually.
The third is centre of gravity. Diligent is a US enterprise company, and it shows in the product's assumptions, its support model, and its roadmap priorities. UK boards are served; they are not the design brief, and over time a board can feel the difference between being a customer and being the customer.
The fourth is the one we consider decisive: no sector-specific workflow. There is no TPR General Code-aligned record for pension schemes, no scheme secretary meeting cycle, no CC3 framing for charity trustees, no KCSIE lens for school governors. Diligent solves governance in general, and does it brilliantly. It does not solve your governance in particular.
None of these is a flaw for Diligent's core market. A FTSE secretariat wants the breadth, absorbs the price, and sits comfortably inside the enterprise centre of gravity. But a fit question left unasked becomes a renewal signed out of habit, and governance budgets are too scarce for habit. They are fit questions, and fit questions deserve fit answers. Here are six.
The 6 alternatives
A note on fairness before the list. Every platform below is a capable product with a market it serves well, and several are excellent at the job they were designed for. The question this page answers is narrower: how well does each one fit a UK trustee, charity, or school board that has already decided Diligent is more platform than it needs? A product can be first-rate for a corporate secretariat and still leave a scheme secretary or a charity clerk doing the real governance work by hand. That is the lens for every verdict that follows, including the one on ourselves.
1. Knowa
Knowa is the alternative we can describe with the most authority and the least neutrality, so here are the facts and the caveat, clearly separated.
The facts. Knowa is built natively for UK pension trustee boards, charities, schools, and the advisers who serve them, and it is the only platform on this list that can say so. The core of the product is a governance record rather than a meeting tool: packs, discussion, decisions, actions, and conflicts held in one connected record, structured around the evidence expectations of the TPR General Code. Scheme secretary workflows are first-class citizens rather than an afterthought, so a secretary running several schemes works from one platform instead of five logins. And when a pension scheme reaches buy-out, Knowa Archive preserves the full governance record in a searchable, permanent archive that outlives the scheme itself. No other platform in this comparison offers an equivalent.
Two AI layers sit on top of that record. Knowa Q answers plain-English questions across the board's full history, with every answer cited to its source. Knowa Verse drafts the minutes at the meeting; the secretary reviews the draft and the chair signs it off, so the AI does the typing and the humans keep the judgement.
The externals. The infrastructure is ISO 27001 certified with UK data hosting. More than 1,000 boards governing over £300bn in assets use the platform. Knowa has been named UK Pensions Tech Provider of the Year three times, has been appointed by PASA as its board management software provider, and is rated 4.9 out of 5 across 103 verified reviews on Capterra and Software Advice. A US arm, in partnership with PSCA, serves 401(k) committees, which suggests the model travels.
Who it is not for: a global plc main board with heavy entity-management needs. That board should stay with Diligent and will be well served. Knowa's case is the inverse: a trustee, charity, or school board should not have to bend an enterprise product around its governance when a platform exists that was built for it.
2. Board Intelligence
Board Intelligence is the UK-based premium option and, for a corporate or public-sector board, the most natural Diligent alternative on this list. Its reputation rests on genuinely good thinking about board-pack quality: what a board should read, how it should be written, and how to stop a pack becoming a doorstop. It offers an AI minute writer, and data is hosted in the UK. The trade-off is emphasis. Board Intelligence is strong on the pack and lighter on the connected post-meeting record of decisions, actions, and evidence, and there is no sector specialisation for pensions or charities. A trustee board gets first-class pack thinking without the scheme-shaped scaffolding around it, and the regulator's evidence question remains the board's to answer.
3. Convene (Azeus)
Convene has a strong UK presence, particularly among charities, and has earned it. Pack distribution and meeting tooling are solid, the platform is ISO 27001 certified, and the UK support operation is well localised, which matters more in practice than vendors usually admit. For a charity board that wants dependable meeting software with responsive local support at a saner price point than Diligent, it is a sensible shortlist entry. The limitation is architectural rather than cosmetic: Convene was built as a meeting-centric board portal rather than a governance record, so it moves the pack and runs the meeting well, but it does not connect pack, discussion, decision, and action into one evidence trail the board can later stand behind.
4. OnBoard (Passageways)
OnBoard is a highly rated general-purpose portal, strongest in the US across nonprofits, credit unions, and associations. Its meeting workflow is clean, the interface is well liked, and its review scores are genuinely good; on usability alone it competes with anything on this list, and for its home market it is an easy recommendation. The gap for a UK board is one of geography and focus. OnBoard is US-centric and its verticals are generic, with no General Code, CC3, or KCSIE framing, so a UK trustee or charity board choosing it gets a pleasant meeting tool and takes on the job of mapping every sector-specific need onto it themselves.
5. iBabs
iBabs is a European meeting-management platform popular with mid-market organisations, and its appeal is straightforward: a well-priced, uncomplicated meeting workflow and a large free template library that helps a board standardise its paperwork quickly. For an organisation whose requirement is orderly meetings at a sensible cost, that is a perfectly rational choice, and for boards moving off email and shared drives it is a real step up. The constraint is depth. iBabs is meeting-centric, with lighter governance capability beneath the meeting layer, so the record, the evidence trail, and the sector-specific workload remain the board's problem to manage elsewhere.
6. BoardPacks (eShare)
BoardPacks is a UK board portal with a heritage in the public sector and housing associations, and it does the core job without fuss: straightforward pack distribution at the lighter-weight end of the market. For a board whose entire requirement is getting papers out securely to the right people before the meeting, that simplicity is a feature rather than a criticism. The constraints are the flip side of it. AI capability is limited, there is no sector-specific workflow, and the product is not attempting a connected governance record. It is the minimum viable portal, chosen best by boards that know that is exactly what they are choosing and have planned for the rest.
Choose for the board you have, not the enterprise you are not. Feature count flatters the brochure; fit decides the next five years.
Comparison at a glance
The six alternatives against the capabilities that decide the outcome for a UK trustee or charity board. A tick means the capability exists and works as described; "limited" means something adjacent exists but does not fully answer the board-shaped version of the question; a dash means we could not find the capability at all. As with any vendor-drawn table, treat it as a starting grid for your own diligence rather than the finish line.
| Capability | Knowa | Board Intelligence | Convene | OnBoard | iBabs | BoardPacks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built for UK trustee/charity boards | ✓ | — | — | — | — | — |
| Whole-cycle governance record | ✓ | limited | — | — | — | — |
| AI minutes with human sign-off | ✓ | ✓ | — | limited | — | — |
| Plain-English search of board history | ✓ | — | — | — | — | — |
| UK data hosting | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — | limited | ✓ |
| ISO 27001 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Wind-up archive | ✓ | — | — | — | — | — |
Based on publicly available information at July 2026. Where we could not confirm a capability or certification, we have marked it conservatively; verify directly with each vendor before shortlisting.
Two of the rows deserve a word of explanation, because they are the ones a features page will not surface. "Whole-cycle governance record" asks whether pack, discussion, decision, and action live in one connected trail, or whether the platform stops when the PDF lands. "Wind-up archive" asks what happens to that trail when a pension scheme buys out and the organisation around the record disappears. Neither question occurs to a vendor whose customers never wind up.
Read the dashes as verdicts on fit, not on quality. OnBoard's dash on UK hosting coexists with excellent review scores; BoardPacks' dashes coexist with a perfectly respectable job at pack distribution. The rows that separate the field are the first and the last: a record built for the board's actual obligations, and an archive built for the day the organisation's record must outlive its meetings. Every platform in the table will run your next meeting competently. Only the first column was designed for the question that arrives three years later, when someone asks what the board decided, why, and where the evidence is.
When Diligent is still the right answer
Credit where it is due, and specifically. If your organisation runs a group structure across multiple jurisdictions, Diligent's entity management is the best in the category and nothing on this list replaces it. If you govern a listed company with committees, subsidiaries, and disclosure obligations spanning markets, Diligent's breadth is the point rather than the problem. And if your secretariat needs enterprise integrations into risk, audit, and compliance systems, Diligent is built around exactly that spine. The boards that should look elsewhere are the ones that were never its design brief. The boards that fit that brief should stay, and will be well served.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best Diligent alternative for pension trustee boards?
Knowa. It is the only platform in this comparison built natively for UK trustee boards, with a governance record aligned to the TPR General Code, scheme secretary workflows, AI-drafted minutes with human sign-off, and wind-up archiving when a scheme buys out. The generalist alternatives distribute packs perfectly well, but they treat pensions as one vertical among many, so the scheme-specific workload, from conflicts to valuation-year evidence, stays manual.
Why do UK boards move away from Diligent?
Usually fit rather than fault. The recurring reasons are enterprise pricing aimed at enterprise budgets, breadth and complexity the board never uses, and the absence of sector-specific workflow for pensions, charities, or schools. Diligent is built for global enterprise boards and serves them superbly; a trustee or charity board choosing it pays for depth it does not need and goes without the record it does.
Do trustee boards need everything Diligent offers?
Rarely. A trustee board needs packs, minutes, decisions, actions, conflicts, and evidence for the regulator held in one connected record. It rarely needs global entity management or multi-jurisdiction plc tooling, however impressive both are. Paying for the latter to get the former is how boards end up over-platformed and under-evidenced, which is the worst of both outcomes: a large invoice and a governance record that still lives in email.
What does switching board portals involve?
Less than boards fear, and considerably less than staying on the wrong platform costs. With Knowa, onboarding, data migration, and training are handled as part of the subscription, with no IT project required. Historic packs and minutes can be brought into the record so the board's memory moves with it, and a new trustee can be brought fully up to speed in an afternoon rather than over months.
Where to go from here
If your board is pensions-specific, read our ranking of the best board portals for pension trustees, which puts Diligent itself through the same test. For the category-level view of how governance platforms differ from portals, see the full comparison. And if the fastest way to judge an alternative is to see one, book a demo: thirty minutes, tailored to your board's structure, no slideware. Bring your hardest governance question and ask it live.
Diligent is excellent at being Diligent. The only question is whether your board needs it to be.