Azeus Convene alternative: is Cohiva Quorum right for you?

If you are searching for an alternative to Azeus Convene, it helps to be clear about why. Convene is a capable, established board portal, so an alternative usually makes sense when your needs are specifically Australian, when you want a statutory entity register in the same place as your meetings, or when you oversee a group of related companies. Cohiva Quorum is built around exactly those needs. This page is an honest look at where Quorum fits and where Convene is still the better option.

There are a few common reasons boards start looking. One is cost and fit: a portal built for global enterprises can be more than a mid-sized Australian board needs, both in features and in price. Another is the gap between the meeting tool and the statutory record, where the board papers live in one system and the company register lives in a spreadsheet or with an external provider. A third is the burden of managing several related entities separately. If any of those describes you, Quorum is worth a look. If none of them does, you may already have the right tool, and this page will say so plainly.

At a glance

| Area | Convene | Cohiva Quorum | | --- | --- | --- | | Primary market | Global enterprises, banks, government | Australian boards and groups of companies | | Board meeting management | Mature, broad feature set | Yes, focused on the meeting and resolution lifecycle | | Statutory entity register | Not the core focus | Built in, a core part of the product | | Multi-entity group oversight | Available for larger deployments | Built in, central to the design | | Australian statute framing | General governance | Corporations Act 2001 and ACNC framing, with citations on resolutions | | Conflicted-voting rules | Manual process | s194 and s195 applied from the entity type | | Minute book | Meeting records | s251A immutable minute book |

Where Convene is strong

It is worth being fair about Convene before suggesting you move away from it. Convene has a long history and a large global customer base, and its security credentials are a common reason regulated organisations choose it. A board that has to pass a demanding security review, or that answers to a regulator with strict expectations, will find Convene set up for that scrutiny. The meeting feature set is broad and mature, covering board pack creation, annotation, and live meeting workflows across devices, which matters for directors who read papers wherever they happen to be.

It supports many languages and serves customers in many countries, so a multinational group with boards in several jurisdictions is well served by a single consistent portal. Azeus is an established vendor with the support and procurement footprint that large enterprises expect, including the contracting and account management that big organisations need. If those are the qualities that matter most to you, Convene is a strong product and there may be no good reason to switch. An alternative is only worth pursuing when your needs have genuinely diverged from what Convene is built to do.

Where Cohiva Quorum is strong

Quorum is the alternative for boards whose centre of gravity is Australian governance. It puts the board portal and the statutory entity register in one product, so officer and member records sit beside the decisions the board makes, and the two do not drift apart between meetings. Resolutions carry citations to the relevant Corporations Act 2001 section or ACNC guidance, so the basis for each decision is captured with it rather than reconstructed later. The handling of conflicted voting follows the entity type, applying the difference between s194 and s195 for you, which takes a fiddly judgement off the table at the moment a director declares an interest.

The minute book is built around s251A and is immutable once recorded, so the record cannot be quietly changed after the fact. For groups of companies, Quorum gives oversight across several entities in one view, which suits Australian organisations with subsidiaries or related boards and removes the chore of logging into each one separately. Quorum helps you comply and is designed to meet Australian governance obligations, while the entity and its officers remain responsible for compliance. If your reason for seeking an alternative is Australian statutory fit and group oversight, this is where Quorum earns its place.

Choose Quorum if / Choose Convene if

Choose Cohiva Quorum if you are an Australian board or group of Australian companies and you want statutory governance, the entity register, and group oversight built into the board portal, with decisions framed around the Corporations Act 2001 and the ACNC. That is the gap Quorum is designed to fill for boards leaving a general-purpose portal behind.

Choose Convene if you are a large global enterprise, a bank, or a government body that values a proven, security-led portal with broad meeting features and multilingual reach. If your statutory registers are managed elsewhere and your priority is an established international portal, staying with Convene is the sound decision, and moving for its own sake would cost you more than it returns.

Part of the Cohiva platform

Cohiva Quorum is part of the Cohiva platform. You can learn more at [www.cohiva.com](https://www.cohiva.com). When a board resolution or circular resolution needs signing, Quorum works with [Cohiva Sign](https://www.cohiva.com), so the signed document flows back into the minute book.