The short answer
Connecteam and Calvis show up in the same search results and solve almost nothing in common.
Connecteam is workforce management software for deskless teams. Scheduling, a GPS-stamped mobile time clock, checklists, forms, training modules, and team chat, all delivered through an app your employees carry. It sells to the employer. Security agencies are one of many industries that use it, alongside construction, cleaning, hospitality, retail, and healthcare.
Calvis is a marketplace for buying guard coverage. You describe the post you need, compare independently licensed local agencies on published flat hourly rates, and book. Calvis is not a security agency and does not employ guards. The agencies carry their own state licenses and insurance, and their guards are their employees.
So the filter is one question: are you staffing a post, or running the workforce that fills it?
- •If you need officers standing at a site next Tuesday, Connecteam cannot help you. It has no guards. Compare local agencies and rates.
- •If you already employ guards and need to schedule, track, and communicate with them, Calvis is not that tool, and you should evaluate Connecteam against the security-specific options below.
Everything past this point is the detail that makes the distinction matter.
What Connecteam actually is
Connecteam is a mobile-first operations app aimed at the roughly 80 percent of the workforce that does not sit at a desk. The product bundles what would otherwise be four or five separate subscriptions:
- •Scheduling with shift assignment, open shifts, and swap requests
- •A GPS time clock that geo-stamps every clock-in and clock-out, with geofences that stop an employee from starting a shift unless they are physically at the assigned site
- •Forms and checklists, so a shift-open walkthrough or an incident write-up can be a required, timestamped, photo-attached digital form rather than a paper page
- •Training and courses, useful for annual renewals and site-specific onboarding
- •Team chat and a company feed for dispatcher-to-field communication
Pricing is published, which is unusual in this category and worth crediting. Connecteam runs a permanently free tier for up to 10 users with real functionality (not a crippled trial), then paid tiers that start around $29 per month for the first 30 users on the Basic plan billed annually, roughly $49 for Advanced, and roughly $99 for Expert, with monthly billing priced higher. For a five-guard agency, the free tier genuinely covers scheduling, geofenced clock-in, checklists, and chat at zero cost, which is a real advantage over security-specific tools that start at a per-guard monthly fee.
Connecteam markets to security companies explicitly and publishes setup guides for the vertical. That is not a stretch on their part. Post orders pushed to a phone, geofenced clock-in that proves the officer was at the gate, a shift-close checklist, and a group chat for the dispatcher are most of the daily operating loop for a small guarding company.
Where Connecteam falls short for security specifically
Being honest about the gap matters more than being clever about it. Connecteam is a horizontal product. It was not designed around guarding workflows, and in a few places that shows.
Guard tour verification. Dedicated guard tour systems are built around a checkpoint loop: NFC tags or QR codes placed on a route, scanned in sequence, with missed checkpoints flagged in near real time and the tour record produced as a client-facing artifact. Connecteam can approximate parts of this with forms, checklists, and GPS, but a checklist someone taps through is not the same evidentiary object as a scanned checkpoint chain. If a client contract specifies verified tours, or your insurer or a litigation posture depends on proving an officer physically reached point seven at 2:47 a.m., a general checklist is a weaker record.
Incident escalation. Connecteam will capture an incident well. Custom fields, required photos, signatures, timestamps, PDF export. What it does not carry natively is the escalation machinery security operations tend to want: severity tiers that route automatically, on-call chains, and a client portal where the customer sees their own incidents without your dispatcher emailing PDFs around.
License and compliance tracking. Guard registrations, armed permits, and firearms qualifications expire on individual schedules and are enforced by state regulators. Security-specific systems track those as first-class objects with expiry alerts. In Connecteam, you can build that out of custom fields and reminders, but you are constructing it, not buying it.
The client-facing layer. This is the structural one. Connecteam is internal software. Your customer never logs into it. Whatever the customer sees, someone at your agency exports and sends.
If those gaps matter to your contracts, the security-native category is where to look. Our guard tour and patrol app roundup covers that field, and Calvis vs Silvertrac and Calvis vs Belfry walk through two of the better-known agency tools. If those gaps do not matter, and for a lot of small operations they genuinely do not, Connecteam at zero to $49 a month is hard to argue with.
What Calvis is, and who it is for
Calvis is a marketplace that connects businesses that need guards with independently licensed local security agencies. It is not the security provider and does not employ officers.
The buyer's experience looks like this. You describe the coverage: how many officers, armed or unarmed, which address, which hours, recurring or one-time. You see vetted local agencies with their flat hourly rates attached before anything is committed. You book. During the shift you get GPS-verified check-in and check-out, incident reports, and shift documentation in your own dashboard, without asking a vendor to export anything for you.
Licensing is attributed where it belongs: each agency holds its own state license through its regulator (BSIS in California, DPS in Texas, and so on), and individual guard registrations are verified against state databases as a condition of appearing on the marketplace. You can review credentials before the officer shows up. For what those rates actually look like by post type, see security guard cost; for the range of post types, see services; and for metro coverage, see locations.
The agency side is the mirror image. Agencies on Calvis are not buying software to run their business. They are receiving booked demand: real jobs from real buyers, with rate and scope already defined. That is a revenue channel, not an operations tool. Plenty of agencies in the network run Connecteam or a guard tour system internally at the same time, and there is no conflict in doing both. See agencies for how that side works.
Head-to-head
| Factor | Connecteam | Calvis |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Workforce management software | Marketplace for booking guard coverage |
| Who pays | The employer (agency or in-house team) | The business booking guards; free to compare |
| Solves | Scheduling, time tracking, comms, training | Finding, vetting, and booking licensed agencies |
| Provides guards | No | No, it connects you to agencies that do |
| Industry focus | Horizontal, security is one of many | Security only |
| Pricing | Published: free up to 10 users, then tiered | Published flat hourly rates per agency |
| Guard tour checkpoints | Approximated with forms and GPS | Handled by the agency's own tooling |
| Customer-facing visibility | Internal only, exported by the agency | Buyer dashboard with GPS and shift records |
| Contract commitment | Monthly or annual subscription | None required to start |
| Right buyer | Agency owner, ops manager, in-house security lead | Property manager, event producer, retailer, GC |
Read the table as two different jobs rather than a scorecard. Nothing in the Connecteam column is a weakness of Calvis, and nothing in the Calvis column is a weakness of Connecteam. They are answers to unrelated questions that happen to share vocabulary.
If you are an agency owner
Your decision is not Calvis versus Connecteam. It is which internal tool to run, and separately, where your next contract comes from.
On tooling, the honest split is by contract requirements. If your clients accept GPS-stamped clock-ins and photo-attached incident forms as proof of service, Connecteam covers your daily operations at a price security-native tools rarely match, and the free tier means a small operation can run for nothing. If you are bidding on work that specifies verified patrol tours, checkpoint chains, or a client portal, buy the security-specific tool. Trying to reconstruct a compliant tour record out of checklists after you have already signed the contract is the expensive version of this decision.
On demand, software does not generate contracts. Scheduling your guards more efficiently does not put more guards on more posts. Agencies join Calvis to receive booked jobs with the scope and rate already set, which is a different lever entirely from operations software. Most agencies that do well run both: a marketplace channel for demand, and whatever tool fits their contracts for operations.
If you just need guards
You are not in the software market at all, and it is worth being blunt about that because search results will keep pulling you toward tools you cannot use.
Connecteam will not send anyone to your building. Neither will a guard tour app. Those are products sold to the company that employs officers. If you buy one, you have bought a scheduling system with nobody to schedule.
What you need is coverage from a licensed agency, at a rate you can see before you commit. That is the job Calvis does: compare vetted local agencies side by side, see the flat hourly rate up front, book the window you actually need rather than an annual minimum, and watch check-in, GPS, and incident records land in your own dashboard.
If you want to run the vetting yourself instead, that is a legitimate path and our guide on how to vet a security guard company covers the checks that matter: current state license, individual guard registrations, real coverage limits, and armed permits where applicable. For a wider view of how the categories fit together, the security platform landscape guide sorts marketplaces, agency software, and national firms into their respective lanes.
Compare licensed local agencies and see rates →