The short answer
Deputy and Calvis surface for the same searches and solve almost nothing in common.
Deputy is employee scheduling and time-and-attendance software. It sells a subscription to employers who already have staff on payroll: build the roster, publish it to phones, let people clock in against a GPS time clock, approve the timesheets, push them to payroll. The company launched in 2008, is headquartered in Sydney with offices in San Francisco and London, and says it serves more than 320,000 workplaces. Security is one of roughly a dozen industries it markets to, listed alongside retail, hospitality, healthcare, construction, cleaning services, education, and supermarkets.
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 officers. The agencies carry their own state licenses and insurance, and the guards are their employees.
One question separates the two: are you rostering people you already employ, or trying to get officers to a site?
- •If you need two unarmed officers at a warehouse next Thursday, Deputy cannot help. It is a roster with nobody in it until you have hired somebody. Compare local agencies and rates.
- •If you already employ guards and the scheduling is the mess, Calvis is not that tool, and the rest of this guide covers how Deputy compares to the security-specific options.
Everything past this point is the detail that makes the distinction matter.
What Deputy actually is
Deputy is a horizontal workforce product. It was built for the general problem of putting the right number of hourly workers in the right place at the right time, and it has been refined against that problem for well over a decade across a lot of industries at once.
On its security page, Deputy advertises a specific set of capabilities:
- •Multi-location scheduling, so one roster can span several sites rather than one building
- •Auto-fill for open shifts based on availability, training, and what Deputy calls a stress profile, meaning it will avoid stacking someone into a punishing run of shifts
- •A GPS-enabled time clock so an officer clocks in from the phone in their pocket, with the location stamped
- •Shift swapping handled in the app with manager approval, instead of a text-message chain
- •Real-time attendance tracking with late and no-show alerts, which is the single most useful thing a dispatcher can have at shift change
- •Micro-scheduling, dividing a long shift into segments so you can staff a high-risk window more heavily than the quiet hours around it
- •Timesheet export to payroll, which is where most of the administrative savings actually land
Pricing is published, which deserves credit in a category where most vendors hide behind a demo request. As of this writing Deputy lists three plans: Lite at $5 per user per month, Core at $6.50, and Pro at $9, all in USD excluding tax and billed either upfront or in monthly installments. Add-ons are priced separately, including HR at $2 per user per month, Messaging+ at $1.95, and Analytics+ at $1.50, with the latter two bundled into Pro. A payroll add-on runs $8 per user per month plus a $49 monthly base fee. There is a minimum spend of $30 per month per invoice. Confirm current figures with Deputy directly, since software pricing moves.
For a small guarding operation, that math is genuinely attractive. Ten officers on Core lands near the minimum spend, and what you get for it is a real roster, a geo-stamped time clock, and an audit trail that survives a payroll dispute. Plenty of agencies run their whole week on exactly that.
Where Deputy stops short for security specifically
Being straight about the gap is more useful than being clever about it. Deputy is a scheduling and attendance product first. Its own security page is honest by omission: it markets scheduling, the time clock, attendance alerts, and payroll export, and it does not market guard tours, checkpoint scanning, incident reporting, license tracking, or a client-facing portal. Those absences are not an oversight. They are the boundary of the product.
Patrol verification. Dedicated guard tour systems are built around a checkpoint loop: NFC tags or QR codes placed along a route, scanned in order, with a missed checkpoint flagged automatically and the completed tour produced as a client-facing record. GPS on a clock-in tells you the officer arrived. It does not tell you they walked the loading dock at 2:47 a.m. If a contract, an insurer, or a litigation posture depends on proving that specific thing, a time clock is the wrong instrument.
Incident documentation and escalation. A security incident is a structured object: severity, narrative, photos, witnesses, a signature, and a routing rule that wakes somebody up when it crosses a threshold. Deputy is not built to carry that. You can bolt on a separate forms tool, but then your incident record lives somewhere your schedule does not, and reconciling the two at contract-renewal time is a manual job.
License and certification expiry. Guard registrations, armed permits, and firearms qualifications expire on individual schedules and are enforced by state regulators. Deputy can factor training into who is eligible for a shift, which is useful, but tracking a registration to its expiry date and blocking assignments as it lapses is a first-class feature in security-native systems and a workaround in a general one. The cost of getting this wrong is not an awkward schedule. It is an unlicensed officer on a post.
The client-facing layer. This is the structural one and it applies to every general workforce tool. Deputy is internal software. Your customer never logs into it. Whatever the customer sees, somebody at your agency exports and emails.
If those gaps hit your contracts, look at the security-native category. Our guard tour and patrol app roundup covers that field, and Calvis vs Belfry and Calvis vs Connecteam walk through the same software-versus-marketplace question from two other angles. If those gaps do not matter, and for a lot of small operations they genuinely do not, Deputy at $5 to $9 per user is hard to argue with.
What Calvis is, and who it is for
Calvis is a marketplace that connects businesses needing guards with independently licensed local security agencies. It is not the security provider and does not employ officers.
For a buyer, it works like this. You describe the coverage: how many officers, armed or unarmed, which address, which hours, one-time or recurring. You see vetted local agencies with their flat hourly rates attached before anything is committed. You book. During the shift, GPS-verified check-in and check-out, incident reports, and shift documentation land in your own dashboard rather than in a vendor's back office you have to ask for exports from.
Licensing sits where it belongs. Each agency holds its own license through its state regulator, and individual guard registrations are verified against state databases as a condition of appearing on the marketplace. You can review credentials before the officer arrives. For what rates actually look like by post type, see security guard cost. For the range of post types, see services.
The agency side is the mirror image. Agencies on Calvis are not buying a tool to run their business. They are receiving booked demand: real jobs from real buyers with scope and rate already defined. That is a revenue channel, not an operations system. Many agencies in the network run Deputy or a guard tour platform internally at the same time, and nothing about that conflicts. See agencies for how that side works.
Head-to-head
| Factor | Deputy | Calvis |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Employee scheduling and time-and-attendance software | Marketplace for booking guard coverage |
| Who pays | The employer, whether an agency or an in-house team | The business booking guards; free to compare |
| Solves | Rostering, clock-in, attendance, payroll export | Finding, vetting, and booking licensed agencies |
| Provides guards | No | No, it connects you to agencies that do |
| Industry focus | Horizontal, security is one of about a dozen | Security only |
| Pricing | Published per user per month, three tiers plus add-ons | Published flat hourly rates per agency |
| Checkpoint tours | Not offered | Handled by the agency's own tooling |
| Incident reporting | Not a marketed feature | In the buyer's dashboard |
| License expiry tracking | Workaround, not a native object | Verified against state databases before booking |
| Customer-facing visibility | Internal only, exported by the agency | Buyer dashboard with GPS and shift records |
| Contract commitment | Subscription with a monthly minimum spend | None required to start |
| Right buyer | Agency owner, ops manager, in-house security lead | Property manager, event producer, retailer, general contractor |
Read that as two different jobs rather than a scorecard. Nothing in the Deputy column is a weakness of Calvis, and nothing in the Calvis column is a weakness of Deputy. They are answers to unrelated questions that happen to share vocabulary.
There is also a budget point buried in the table. Deputy is priced per employee per month and shows up as a software line item, usually a few hundred dollars a year for a small agency. Guard coverage is priced per hour and shows up as an operating cost, often tens of thousands a year for a single continuous post. Confusing one for the other is how a buyer ends up on a software pricing page wondering why the numbers look nothing like the quotes they have been getting.
If you are an agency owner
Your decision is not Calvis versus Deputy. It is which internal tool to run, and separately, where the next contract comes from.
On tooling, the split is by contract requirements. If your clients accept a GPS-stamped clock-in as proof of service and your incident volume is low enough to handle outside the scheduling system, Deputy covers the daily operating loop at a price security-native tools rarely match, and the auto-fill and attendance alerting are legitimately good at the thing they do. If you are bidding work that specifies verified patrol tours, checkpoint chains, structured incident escalation, or a client portal, buy the security-specific tool. Reconstructing a compliant tour record out of clock-in pings after you have signed the contract is the expensive version of this decision.
On demand, software does not generate contracts. Rostering your existing guards more efficiently does not put more guards on more posts. Agencies join Calvis to receive booked jobs with the scope and hourly rate already set, which is a completely different lever 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 saying plainly because search results will keep pulling you toward products you cannot use.
Deputy will not send anyone to your building. Neither will a guard tour app or a workforce management suite. Those are sold to the company that employs officers. Buy one and you have bought a roster with nobody in it.
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 would rather run the vetting yourself, that is a legitimate path, and our guide on how to vet a security guard company covers the checks that matter: a current state license, valid individual guard registrations, real coverage limits, and armed permits where the post requires them. 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 →