The short answer
GuardsPro and Calvis get compared constantly, and almost nobody who runs the comparison actually needs both. They sit on opposite sides of the same transaction.
GuardsPro is guard-management software sold to security companies. It handles check-in and check-out, GPS-verified site tours, incident and daily activity reports, post orders, scheduling, and a client portal. The customer is the agency owner or operations manager. The product is a subscription.
Calvis is a marketplace where a business books guards. You describe the coverage you need, compare independently licensed local agencies on published flat rates, and book without a long-term contract. Calvis is not a security agency and does not employ guards. The agencies do, and each one carries its own state license.
So the filter is one question: are you managing guards, or hiring them? If you are managing them, evaluate GuardsPro against other guard-management tools. If you are hiring them, no amount of guard-management software will get an officer to your site, because you cannot buy it as a buyer in the first place.
See what guard coverage actually costs →
What GuardsPro actually is
GuardsPro is a guard tour and guard-management system built for small and mid-sized private security companies. It is a real product solving a real problem, and it is worth being specific about what that problem is.
Running a guard company is a coordination job. You have officers with different licenses and certifications, availability windows, and site preferences. You have clients whose needs shift week to week. You have overnight posts that need filling on four hours' notice, and you have to prove after the fact that the patrol rounds actually happened.
GuardsPro addresses that directly. Its feature set covers a mobile guard app for iOS and Android with in-app check-in and check-out, GPS-enabled site tours, incident and daily activity reporting, post orders visible to whoever is checked in, task assignment, and passdowns between shifts. On the back office side there is a scheduling module for building shifts and handling day-off requests, a live guard tracker, a time clock, a dispatcher view, vehicle patrol tracking, and a visitor manager.
What it does well
Across public review sites, the recurring praise from agency owners is consistent: it is inexpensive relative to the category, it is straightforward enough that guards actually use it, and the reporting removes paper from the process. Owners repeatedly mention that they stopped chasing handwritten activity logs and that clients responded well to having a portal instead of an email attachment.
That last point matters more than it sounds. For a small agency competing against national firms, being able to hand a client GPS-verified patrol documentation is a credibility argument. Software is how a 40-guard company looks like a 400-guard company on a report.
What it costs
GuardsPro publishes its pricing, which is unusual in this category and worth crediting. At the time of writing, plans are tiered per user per month, starting around five dollars per user on the entry tier and rising to roughly ten dollars per user on the top tier, with a three-user minimum, monthly billing, and a 30-day trial. Confirm current numbers on their site before budgeting, but the shape is clear: it is a low-cost per-seat subscription, not an enterprise contract.
The honest criticisms
Reviews from owners also flag limits. The most common complaints are around administrator functionality on mobile, specifically that owners and admins have less access from the phone app than from the web dashboard, some rigidity in how breaks are handled, and support responsiveness. None of these are disqualifying for a small agency, but they are the sort of thing to test during the trial rather than discover in month three.
If you are shopping this category seriously, our guard scheduling software roundup compares GuardsPro against the other tools agencies evaluate.
Why buyers end up on this comparison by mistake
Here is the specific trap. GuardsPro markets a client web portal and a client mobile app, where the end client can view reports, live GPS tracking, schedules, post orders, and visitor data, and request shifts.
Read that quickly and it sounds like a place to hire security. It is not. That portal is a window your agency opens for you after you are already their client. You cannot sign up for it on your own. You cannot use it to find an agency, compare rates, or get an officer to a site you own. If your agency does not use GuardsPro, the portal does not exist for you at all.
So a business that searches for guard software, lands on a client-portal page, and thinks it has found a booking tool has actually found the reporting layer of a vendor relationship it does not yet have. That is the single most common reason this comparison gets run, and it is the reason the answer is usually "you want the other thing."
What Calvis is
Calvis is a marketplace that connects businesses with independently licensed local security agencies. You describe the post: how many officers, armed or unarmed, which hours, which address. You see vetted agencies that cover that area with their flat hourly rates shown before you commit. You book the coverage window you actually need, from a single shift to ongoing recurring posts, with no annual minimum required to start.
Three things follow from that model:
Rates are visible before a sales call. Contract security is normally quoted, not published, which means two buyers in the same city routinely pay different rates for comparable unarmed coverage. On Calvis the number comes first.
Vetting happens before you book, not after. Agency licenses and individual guard registrations are verified against state databases as a condition of being on the marketplace. Licensing belongs to the agency, verified through its state regulator. If you are sourcing agencies on your own instead, how to vet a security guard company covers the checks that actually matter.
Tracking is part of the customer experience, not a favor from your vendor. GPS check-in and check-out, patrol verification, and incident reports appear in your own dashboard during the shift. This is the same category of data GuardsPro produces, but you get it because you booked through the marketplace rather than because your agency chose to share it.
Side by side
| Factor | GuardsPro | Calvis |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Guard-management software | Marketplace for booking guards |
| Who buys it | Security agency owners and ops managers | Businesses that need guard coverage |
| What you get | Scheduling, GPS tours, reports, post orders, client portal | Vetted local agencies, published rates, booked shifts |
| Pricing model | Per user, per month subscription | No fee to compare; you pay the agency's hourly rate |
| Can you hire a guard with it | No | Yes |
| Can you run a guard company with it | Yes | No |
| Contract | Monthly subscription, cancel anytime | No long-term contract required to start |
| Who holds the license | Your agency, using the software | The agency you book, verified before booking |
Read across one row and the comparison collapses. These products do not compete. They sit at different points in the same supply chain, and an agency that uses GuardsPro internally could perfectly well take bookings through a marketplace at the same time.
If you own or run a security agency
GuardsPro is a legitimate candidate, especially at the small-to-mid size where its pricing is most attractive. Evaluate it on the things that break at scale: how the scheduler handles last-minute callouts, whether admin access from mobile is enough for how you actually work, how post orders propagate to guards mid-shift, and whether the client portal is presentable enough to put in front of your accounts. Use the trial for exactly that.
But be clear about what software does not solve. Guard-management tools make you better at delivering work you already won. They do not bring you work. Agencies that buy scheduling software expecting revenue to follow are solving the wrong constraint, because the bottleneck in most small agencies is not the dispatch board, it is the pipeline.
That is the other half of the marketplace. Agencies join Calvis to receive demand from businesses actively looking for coverage in their service area, and keep running whatever back-office software they already prefer. If demand is your constraint rather than dispatch, see Calvis for agencies. If dispatch is your constraint, buy the software.
If you just need guards at your site
Then guard-management software is not your category at all, and you can stop evaluating it. What you need is coverage: a licensed officer, at a known rate, on a specific date.
The traditional path is to call agencies one at a time, wait for quotes, negotiate, sign, and hope. The marketplace path is to compare vetted local agencies on published rates in one place and book the window you need. For a fuller map of the three product categories that show up in these searches, our security guard platform landscape guide breaks down which is which.
One thing worth carrying over from the software world: whatever you book, insist on GPS-verified check-ins and written incident reports. That accountability layer is standard now, and any agency that cannot produce it is behind.
Compare licensed local agencies →
Choosing in about thirty seconds
Answer these in order and stop at the first yes.
- •Do you employ security guards? If yes, you are shopping guard-management software. GuardsPro belongs on your list.
- •Do you need a guard at a location you control? If yes, you are shopping coverage. Software cannot help you; a marketplace can.
- •Both? Then you run an agency that also wants more work. Keep the software, and add the demand side separately.
Almost everyone who runs this comparison lands on 1 or 2, which is why the honest verdict is not "Calvis wins" or "GuardsPro wins." They are different products doing different jobs, and the only real mistake is buying the one that answers the other person's question.