The short answer
Calvis and Novagems are not competitors. They sit on opposite sides of the same transaction.
Novagems is guard management software. A security agency buys it to schedule shifts, track guards by GPS, verify patrol checkpoints with QR and NFC scans, collect incident reports, and turn all of that into timesheets and client-facing proof of service. The agency is the customer. The agency's clients never log in.
Calvis is a marketplace. A business that needs officers on site describes the coverage, compares licensed local agencies on published hourly rates, and books. The agencies do the guarding and hold the licenses. Calvis is not a security agency and does not employ guards.
So the decision is not "which product is better." It is "which side of the table am I on?"
- •You run or manage a security agency. Novagems belongs on your shortlist, alongside the other tools in our guard tour and patrol app roundup and scheduling software comparison. Calvis is not scheduling software and will not replace it.
- •You need guards at a site, an event, or a construction yard. No amount of Novagems will get an officer to your gate, because you cannot buy it and it does not supply labor. Compare licensed agencies on Calvis instead →
Everything below is the detail behind that split, and the case where both are true at once.
What Novagems actually does
Novagems is an all-in-one workforce management product built around field and shift-based teams, with security by far its dominant vertical. On third-party review sites, the overwhelming majority of its reviewers identify as security and investigations businesses, and the company markets to security operators across the U.S. and Canada.
The feature set clusters into four jobs an agency owner recognizes immediately:
Scheduling and coverage. Building shifts across many sites, tracking guard availability, sending shift reminders, and firing overtime alerts before a payroll surprise becomes a payroll problem. For an agency juggling forty posts and eighty officers with different certifications, this is the core purchase.
Proof that the guard was actually there. GPS location tracking, geofencing, and checkpoint scanning via QR codes or NFC tags. When a client asks whether the overnight patrol really walked the perimeter at 3 a.m., this is the answer.
Incident capture and panic alerts. Digital incident reports filed from the officer's phone, plus a panic button that escalates to a supervisor. This matters both for real emergencies and for the paper trail that follows one.
Exception alerts and timesheets. Notifications when a guard fails to clock in, misses a checkpoint, or crosses an overtime threshold, with patrol summaries and timesheet data compiled for billing and payroll.
Pricing is per active user per month rather than per seat purchased, which is a genuinely sensible model for an industry with high turnover and guards who cycle in and out of active status. Third-party listings show entry pricing around 10 dollars per user per month, with a free trial available and larger deployments quoted rather than published. Novagems does not publish a full rate card, so treat any specific number you see as a starting point to confirm with them directly.
Reviewers consistently praise the scheduling workflow, the mobile app, and the responsiveness of support. The recurring criticisms are worth knowing before a demo: the interface can feel dense at first, some users report occasional app instability or GPS lag, and batch scheduling gets awkward at larger team sizes. Those are ordinary complaints for this software category, not disqualifying ones.
The honest summary: Novagems is a real product doing a real job, and it is a job Calvis does not do at all.
What Calvis actually does
Calvis is a marketplace that connects businesses with licensed security agencies. The distinction matters legally and practically: the guards are employed and licensed by the agencies, each agency's license is held with and verifiable through its state regulator, and Calvis verifies those credentials before an agency can take work through the marketplace.
What a buyer experiences:
Multiple agencies, one comparison. Instead of calling five companies and waiting on five quotes, you see vetted local options for the same post side by side.
Rates before the sales call. Hourly rates are visible up front, priced by post type, so unarmed, armed, and mobile patrol coverage each carry their own number. Our security guard cost guide breaks down what moves those rates.
No annual contract required to start. A single overnight, a weekend event, a three-month construction phase, or ongoing recurring coverage are all bookable without committing to a twelve-month minimum.
Visibility during the shift. Check-in and check-out verification, GPS-confirmed presence, and incident documentation land in your dashboard rather than in an agency's back office that you have to request a report from.
That last point is where the two products superficially resemble each other, and it is the most common source of confusion. Both involve GPS. Both involve incident reports. But the audience for the data is different. Novagems shows the agency what its own workforce is doing. Calvis shows the buyer what the agency it hired is doing.
Head to head
| Factor | Novagems | Calvis |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Guard management software | Marketplace connecting buyers with licensed agencies |
| Who pays for it | Security agency or in-house security department | Buyer pays for guard hours; comparing agencies is free |
| Who can sign up | Agencies and employers of guards | Businesses that need guards on site |
| Does it supply guards? | No, it manages guards you already employ | No, it connects you to agencies that employ them |
| Core value | Scheduling, patrol verification, timesheets, compliance records | Comparing vetted agencies, published rates, fast booking |
| Pricing model | Per active user per month, quoted above small sizes | Hourly rate per guard, visible before you book |
| Commitment | Software subscription with a trial | No annual minimum required to start |
| Where the data goes | Agency's operations team, exported to clients | Buyer's dashboard directly |
| Wrong fit if | You have no guards to manage | You are an agency looking for scheduling software |
Read the table as a routing decision, not a scoreboard. There is no column where one product wins a category the other is competing in.
If you run a security agency
Novagems is a legitimate candidate. Evaluate it the way you would any operations purchase: run the trial on one real site with real officers for two full weeks, not a sandbox. Specifically pressure-test the things reviewers flag.
- •Build a week of shifts at your actual scale, not a demo scale. Batch scheduling behavior at eighty guards is different from eight.
- •Walk a real patrol route and confirm checkpoint scans register cleanly on the phones and carriers your officers actually use, including in stairwells and basements where GPS degrades.
- •Export a timesheet and reconcile it against your payroll by hand once. Software that gets 95 percent of hours right is not a time saver.
- •Ask what happens to your historical patrol and incident data if you leave. Exportability is the question people forget until they need it.
Then compare it against the rest of the category rather than against Calvis, since Calvis is not in that category. Our roundups of guard tour and patrol apps and guard scheduling software cover the comparable options, and the same software-versus-marketplace distinction shows up in Calvis vs Belfry and Calvis vs Silvertrac if you want it framed against a different vendor.
There is one thing software in this category cannot solve, though, and it is usually the bigger constraint: better scheduling does not create demand. Tighter patrol verification does not fill an empty bench. If your problem is that you have capacity and not enough contracts, that is a sales problem wearing an operations costume. Agencies in that position can join the Calvis network to receive booking requests from buyers in their coverage area, and run Novagems or any other tool internally at the same time. The two are complementary, not exclusive.
If you actually just need guards
A meaningful share of people who search for guard management software are not agency owners. They are facility managers, property managers, event producers, and small business owners who typed the closest words they knew for "the thing that gets a security guard to my building."
If that is you, the fastest correction is this: Novagems is not sold to you, and buying it would leave you exactly where you started, with software and no officers.
What you need instead is a licensed agency with available guards in your area at a rate you can plan around. Practical steps:
Define the post before you shop. Hours, days, armed or unarmed, static post or mobile patrol, and whether the officer needs a specific certification. Rates vary widely by post type, and a vague request produces a vague quote.
Get the rate in writing before the sales process. Traditional contract security quotes case by case, which is why identical posts in the same city can price very differently. Published rates remove that asymmetry.
Verify the license against the state, not the brochure. Every state licenses security agencies and individual officers, and the state regulator is the authoritative source. Our guide on how to vet a security guard company walks through the checks that actually catch problems, and it is worth reading even if you never book through a marketplace.
Match the commitment to the job. A three-week construction phase does not need an annual agreement. If a vendor's only option is a twelve-month term for a one-month need, that is a mismatch, not a market rate.
You can browse what coverage types are available or start with your city, and compare licensed agencies directly here.
Where the two overlap
There is exactly one honest overlap, and it is on the reporting side.
An agency running Novagems can produce polished patrol summaries, GPS coverage proof, and incident logs, and share them with clients through a portal. A buyer working through Calvis gets check-in verification, GPS-confirmed presence, and incident documentation in their own dashboard without asking anyone to export anything.
Same underlying evidence, different default owner. If your current agency already runs a tool like Novagems and reliably sends you the reports, you are getting most of that value today. If you have to chase them for it, or you have no idea whether the overnight patrol happened, the reporting is nominally there and practically absent.
That distinction is the one worth acting on. Everything else in this comparison is a routing question, and the routing is simple: managing guards is software, hiring guards is a marketplace.
Compare licensed agencies and published rates →