The short answer
Andy Frain Services is one of the oldest names in American crowd management. It was founded in 1924 by Andrew T. Frain, who put a small crew of uniformed ushers on the gates at Chicago Stadium to stop gate crashing, then took the same idea to Wrigley Field, where William Wrigley Jr. backed the company's now-familiar blue and gold uniforms. A century later it runs dozens of branch offices across the country and staffs stadiums, arenas, convention centers, airports, and corporate sites.
If you operate a venue and need several hundred people in uniform for eighty home dates a year, Andy Frain is a serious and appropriate choice. That is the business it was built for and it has a hundred years of institutional memory doing it.
Calvis is a different instrument entirely. Calvis is a marketplace, not a security agency. It matches you with independently licensed local security agencies, shows you their flat hourly rates before you book, and lets you staff a single event without signing a season-long contract. If your need is one concert, one festival weekend, one corporate gala, one grand opening, or a run of private events across a few months, the venue-contract model carries overhead you will pay for and not use.
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What Andy Frain Services actually is
It is worth being precise, because "event security company" covers several very different businesses and Andy Frain sits in a specific corner of it.
A guest-services company as much as a security company
Andy Frain's sports and entertainment division supplies ushers, ticket takers, guest relations staff, concierge personnel, and parking attendants alongside licensed security officers. Coat check, valet, and housekeeping show up in its service list too. That blend is the point. A large public assembly venue does not want one vendor for uniformed officers, another for the people scanning tickets, and a third for the parking decks. It wants one badge, one uniform standard, one supervisor structure, and one invoice covering the whole guest journey from the parking lot to the seat.
That is a genuine differentiator, and it is not something a security-only provider replicates easily.
Broader than events
The company also runs corporate and industrial security, retail security, aviation and transportation work including cargo screening, and crossing-guard contracts for school districts. It owns a technology subsidiary, Prism eSolutions, which builds incident management, audit, compliance, and reporting software. So the pitch to a large institutional buyer is a single vendor covering several service categories with its own reporting layer on top.
Sold through bids and negotiated contracts
Andy Frain does not publish rate cards. Like every large contract-services firm, it prices through proposals, RFP responses, and negotiated master agreements, competing on public bids for school districts, municipalities, and venues. Two buyers in the same city can pay materially different bill rates for the same post depending on volume and negotiation. We are not going to invent a number here. If you want Andy Frain pricing, you get it by running a procurement process and receiving a proposal.
That matters for how you should read the rest of this comparison. The real difference is not "who is cheaper," which nobody can honestly answer without both quotes in hand. The difference is what you have to do to find out, and what you have to commit to afterward.
Where Andy Frain Services is the better choice
A comparison that never concedes anything is not useful. Here is where we would tell you to go with Andy Frain or a firm like it.
You operate a venue with a season. An arena, ballpark, amphitheater, or convention center running a repeating calendar needs a standing workforce that knows the building: which gates back up, where the medical suites are, how the egress plan changes when the stage is in the round. A venue contract builds that institutional knowledge. Booking fresh crews per event does not.
You need guest services bundled with security. If the same vendor must supply ushers, ticket takers, and parking attendants under one supervisory chain, that is squarely Andy Frain's model.
You are staffing hundreds of positions on one date. Large-scale deployments require a bench, a check-in and briefing process, radio discipline, and layered command. Firms that do this weekly are good at it.
You are running a formal procurement. Public agencies and large institutions that must award through competitive RFP with bonding, insurance certificates, and prevailing-wage compliance need a bidder built to answer that paperwork. Andy Frain competes in that arena routinely.
You need aviation or cargo screening. That is a specialized, heavily regulated category and a general marketplace is not the right tool for it.
If two or more of those describe you, stop reading comparisons and start a procurement process.
Where the venue-contract model works against you
The same structure that serves an eighty-date season poorly serves a single Saturday.
The commitment does not scale down
Contract security is built on annual or multi-year agreements with minimums, notice periods, and auto-renewal. If you host four events a year, or one, you are being asked to enter a relationship sized for a client with an ongoing calendar.
Pricing discovery costs you weeks
A quote requires a sales conversation, a site assessment, and a proposal cycle. For an event eleven days out, the procurement timeline is longer than the lead time. Buyers running short-notice events routinely discover the rate only after the window to compare options has closed.
Event staffing quality varies by market and by night
Andy Frain runs a very large hourly event workforce across dozens of markets, and public employee reviews are mixed in the way large event-staffing operations usually are: complaints about scheduling and hours in some branches alongside genuinely positive reviews elsewhere. That is a fair description of the whole category, not a knock unique to one company. The practical implication is that your experience depends heavily on which local branch and which supervisor you draw, and a national brand name does not by itself guarantee the crew that shows up.
One vendor means one answer
In a contract relationship, if the assigned crew is not working out, your remedy is a conversation with an account manager. You do not have a second qualified agency already vetted and ready to staff the next date.
Where the Calvis marketplace fits
Calvis is a marketplace that connects customers with licensed security agencies. It does not employ guards and it is not the security provider. What it does is remove the two things that make one-off event staffing painful: finding qualified local agencies, and finding out what they charge.
You see the rate before you book
Each agency's flat hourly rate is visible up front, priced by post type, so unarmed event coverage, armed officers, and specialized posts each carry their own number. No proposal cycle, no sales call to learn the price. Our event security cost guide walks through what actually moves that number.
You compare several vetted agencies, not one vendor
Instead of negotiating with a single firm, you see multiple qualified local options for the same date side by side and choose on rate, credentials, and availability.
Licensing is verified before the officer arrives
We only partner with licensed agencies. Agency licenses and individual guard registrations are verified against state regulator databases as a condition of appearing on the marketplace, and every guard placed through Calvis holds a current license issued by the state where the event happens. Credentials and GPS-verified patrol records are visible in your dashboard. Licensing always belongs to the agency, never to Calvis.
No long-term contract to start
Book a single shift, one event, a festival weekend, or recurring coverage. There is no annual minimum required to begin, which is the practical inverse of the venue-contract model. Short-notice dates are normal rather than exceptional.
Local agencies, local labor pools
Regional agencies know their own market's guard supply and often carry less corporate overhead than a national firm. The usual risk with independents is quality variance, and that is exactly the risk the vetting step is there to absorb. If you would rather do that vetting yourself, our guide on how to vet a security guard company covers the checks that matter.
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Head-to-head
| Factor | Andy Frain Services | Calvis marketplace |
|---|---|---|
| Business model | National contract services firm, employs its own workforce | Marketplace matching you with independently licensed local agencies |
| Founded / scale | 1924, dozens of branch offices nationwide | Marketplace network of vetted local agencies |
| Pricing | Quote-based, negotiated per contract or RFP; not published | Flat hourly rates shown before you book |
| Time to a number | Sales cycle and proposal | Immediate |
| Contract minimum | Typically annual or season-length agreements | None required to start |
| Best fit | Stadiums, arenas, convention centers, full seasons, formal RFPs | One-off events, festivals, corporate and private events, short notice |
| Guest services (ushers, valet, coat check) | Yes, bundled | Security posts only |
| Aviation and cargo screening | Yes | Not offered |
| Choice of provider | One vendor | Multiple vetted agencies compared side by side |
| Credential visibility | On request | Guard licenses and GPS patrol records in your dashboard |
| Scaling down | Constrained by contract terms | Book only the hours you need |
The honest read: these two are not really competing for the same job most of the time. One is built for a venue with a calendar. The other is built for a buyer with a date.
How to choose for your specific event
A single concert, festival, or private event. You want rate transparency and speed, not a procurement cycle. Compare vetted local agencies and book the hours you need. Start with how many security guards you need for an event to size the post count before you price anything.
A corporate function, gala, or grand opening. Usually a small, professional-presentation post count over a few hours. A season-scale vendor is heavy machinery for this. Marketplace booking is faster and you will see the rate immediately.
A recurring venue with a real season. Run a formal procurement and put Andy Frain in the bid set alongside other national and regional event-staffing firms. Pressure-test supervisor ratios, radio and command structure, guard-replacement response times, and how the local branch is staffed, not just the national resume.
A multi-day festival on a site with no permanent security infrastructure. This can go either way. Weigh whether you need bundled guest services and parking staff, in which case a single bundled vendor wins, or whether you need licensed security posts only and want to compare rates, in which case the marketplace is faster and cheaper.
Short-notice or emergency coverage. The procurement path is structurally too slow. Marketplace booking exists for this case.
Whichever way you go, three checks apply universally: confirm the agency license through the state regulator rather than a brochure, confirm each officer's individual registration for the specific post type, and match the contract length to the actual job instead of a vendor's default term. For a broader view of the field, see our roundup of the best event security companies, and published guard pricing for what coverage typically costs by post type.