Calvis vs Sunstates Security: the short answer
Sunstates Security is a privately held, women-owned contract security firm headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, founded in 1998. It is a legitimate national player and a genuinely well-run one, staffing corporate campuses, utilities, manufacturing and distribution sites, schools, and municipalities across the country. If you are running a long-term, embedded security program at a fixed site and want one accountable vendor with a real training organization behind it, Sunstates deserves a seat at the table.
Calvis is a fundamentally different thing. Calvis is a marketplace that connects you with independently licensed local security agencies. It does not employ guards and it is not the security provider. You describe the coverage you need, compare vetted local agencies on published flat hourly rates, and book without signing an annual contract.
The comparison is therefore not "which company is better." It is "which model matches the job." A three-year embedded post at a 400,000-square-foot distribution center is a contract-guarding problem. A six-week construction phase, a Saturday event, a sudden two-week gap after a termination, or a single lobby post you want priced before you talk to a salesperson is a marketplace problem.
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Who Sunstates Security actually is
Sunstates has grown organically since 1998 into one of the larger independent contract guarding firms in the United States. Its own materials cite over 3,800 security professionals; third-party company databases list higher headcounts, and the exact number moves with contract wins, so treat any single figure as approximate. What is consistent across sources is the shape of the business: armed and unarmed officer services, mobile and foot patrol, fire safety and engineering inspections, emergency response, access control and video surveillance support, and security program consulting.
The client mix skews toward institutional and industrial sites. Class A office buildings, corporate campuses, utilities, residential communities, schools and universities, retail environments, government agencies, and manufacturing and distribution facilities all show up in their published market list. That is a telling list. These are sites with permanent posts, defined post orders, and multi-year budgets.
Where Sunstates is genuinely strong
Being fair here matters, because the differences that actually decide a purchase are not the ones a sales deck highlights.
Officer retention is above the industry norm. Contract guarding runs on thin margins and notoriously high turnover, and Sunstates scores unusually well on employee sentiment for the sector, with a Glassdoor rating around 4.3 out of 5 across several hundred reviews and a large majority of reviewers saying they would recommend the company. In a business where the single biggest quality driver is whether the same officer keeps showing up, that is not a vanity metric. It is the metric.
Training is a real investment, not a line item. Sunstates has been recognized repeatedly by Training Magazine for its learning programs. For sites that need officers who can execute a real emergency action plan, run a fire watch correctly, or handle an access-control system rather than just sit at a desk, a company that actually invests in curriculum is worth something.
WBE certification is a hard differentiator. Sunstates is a nationally certified Women's Business Enterprise. If your organization has supplier-diversity spend targets, this is a concrete, auditable qualification that most competitors cannot offer, and it can be the deciding factor entirely independent of price or service quality.
Program design, not just bodies. For a large fixed site, the value of a national firm is that someone writes the post orders, designs the coverage plan, integrates with your existing systems, and owns the result. Sunstates does that work.
Where buyers hit friction
Pricing is quoted, never published. Like every enterprise contract guarding firm, Sunstates prices per contract after a sales process. There is no rate card. Two buyers in the same metro can pay materially different bill rates for comparable unarmed coverage depending on contract size, term length, and how well they negotiated. If you want to know the number before you invest hours in a sales cycle, that model does not accommodate you.
Contracts are the product. National contract guarding runs on annual or multi-year agreements, frequently with auto-renewal clauses and notice windows that are easy to miss. That is appropriate for a permanent post and badly mismatched to a seasonal, project-based, or uncertain need. Buyers usually discover this the first time they try to scale coverage down mid-term.
Account-management turnover shows up in reviews. The most consistent complaint theme across public employee reviews is churn and communication gaps at the account-manager layer, along with pay stagnation and occasional understaffing on specific accounts. This is an industry-wide pattern rather than a Sunstates-specific failing, but it is the layer between you and the officer standing at your site, so it is worth pressure-testing in a reference check.
Small and short engagements are not the target. A firm optimized for multi-year institutional programs is structurally not optimized for a one-weekend event or a single overnight post. You can often get it done, but you are paying for an apparatus you will not use.
What Calvis is, and what it is not
Calvis is a marketplace, not a security agency. It does not employ officers. It connects buyers with independently licensed local security agencies that have been vetted before they can appear, then lets you compare them side by side on rate and credentials.
Concretely, what changes:
You see the rate before the sales call. Each agency's flat hourly rate is visible up front, priced by post type, so unarmed, armed, mobile patrol, and specialized coverage each carry their own published number. There is no discovery call standing between you and the price.
You compare several qualified agencies at once. Instead of running a serial vendor process, you see multiple vetted local options for the same post together. That is ordinary comparison shopping, which the enterprise model structurally does not offer.
There is no annual minimum to begin. Book a single shift, a weekend, an event, a construction phase, or ongoing recurring coverage. Contract length matches the actual job rather than a vendor's default term.
Vetting happens before the guard arrives. Agency licenses and individual guard registrations are verified against state databases as a condition of appearing on the marketplace, and every guard placed through Calvis holds a current state license issued to them and their employing agency. You can review credentials and GPS-verified patrol records in your dashboard. Licensing is always attributed to the agency and the officer, never to Calvis.
The honest limit: Calvis is not built to replace a national MSA covering hundreds of sites under one invoice with a dedicated corporate program manager. That is what firms like Sunstates exist to do, and a marketplace is not pretending otherwise.
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Head-to-head: how the two models compare
| Factor | Sunstates Security | Calvis marketplace |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | National contract security agency (employs its own officers) | Marketplace connecting you to independently licensed local agencies |
| Pricing visibility | Quote-based, negotiated per contract, not published | Flat hourly rates published up front, by post type |
| Contract minimum | Typically annual or multi-year with auto-renewal | None required to start |
| Vendor choice | One vendor, one proposal | Multiple vetted agencies compared side by side |
| Best fit | Permanent posts, multi-site programs, institutional campuses | Single sites, events, projects, seasonal and short-notice coverage |
| Speed to first shift | Sales cycle, contracting, then mobilization | Fast; agencies with local bench respond directly |
| Officer retention | Above industry average; strong published employee sentiment | Varies by agency; agency-level track record is visible before you book |
| Supplier diversity | Nationally certified WBE | Depends on the individual agency you select |
| Credential visibility | On request during onboarding | Guard licenses and patrol records visible in dashboard before arrival |
| Program consulting | Yes, formal security program design | No; the agencies you hire handle post-level execution |
The pattern is clear once you lay it out. Sunstates optimizes for depth on a fixed, long-horizon site. Calvis optimizes for choice, price transparency, and speed on coverage that is short, sudden, or simply does not justify an annual agreement.
Pricing: the real difference
We will not publish an invented number for Sunstates rates, because they are not published and any figure you find quoted online is somebody's guess. What can be said accurately is how the two pricing models behave.
Contract guarding bills at a negotiated rate covering officer wages, payroll burden, insurance, supervision, and corporate overhead, and that rate is set once for the term. Your leverage is at negotiation time and essentially nowhere else. Larger contracts get better rates, which means a single-site buyer subsidizes nothing and gains nothing from the vendor's national scale.
Marketplace pricing inverts that. Because agencies compete for the same posted job, and because rates are visible before booking, price discovery happens up front rather than behind a sales process. For a single-site buyer specifically, this usually removes the national-overhead premium entirely, since you are contracting with a local agency that carries far less corporate structure.
For a fuller breakdown of what actually drives an hourly guard rate, see our security guard cost guide and the direct national versus on-demand cost comparison.
Speed to coverage
This is where the models diverge most sharply, and it is often the deciding factor.
Standing up a Sunstates post involves a sales cycle, a proposal, contract negotiation, then mobilization: recruiting or reassigning officers, writing post orders, and onboarding. For a permanent post that timeline is entirely reasonable, and the front-loaded work is exactly what makes the program good.
If your need is measured in days, that same process is a mismatch. Marketplace coverage moves faster because local agencies with existing bench respond to a posted job directly, without a contracting phase in between. Same-week and last-minute coverage is where the gap is widest, because there is no contracting phase to compress in the first place.
Licensing and compliance
Every state licenses security agencies and individual officers, through regulators such as BSIS in California, DPS in Texas, and equivalent boards elsewhere. That license always sits with the agency and the individual officer, never with a broker or marketplace.
With a national firm you are trusting one corporate compliance department, and with a firm of Sunstates' size and track record that trust is generally well placed. On the Calvis marketplace, agency licenses and individual guard registrations are verified against state databases before an agency can appear, and you can review each officer's credentials in the dashboard before the shift begins. Calvis only partners with licensed agencies; it does not hold or claim a guarding license itself.
If you are evaluating any agency outside a marketplace, our guide on how to vet a security guard company covers the checks that actually matter, including confirming the agency license through the state regulator rather than taking a certificate at face value.
Which one should you choose
Choose Sunstates Security if:
You are staffing a permanent post at a fixed site with a multi-year budget. You need formal security program consulting, post-order design, and integration with existing access control or surveillance systems. You have supplier-diversity spend targets that a WBE-certified vendor helps you meet. You are running multiple sites across states and want one accountable vendor with one agreement. Officer continuity over years matters more to you than pricing flexibility, and Sunstates' retention record is a real argument in its favor here.
Choose Calvis if:
Your need is a single site, an event, a construction phase, a seasonal window, or short-notice coverage. You want to see the hourly rate before entering a sales process. You do not want an annual contract with auto-renewal for coverage you may not need in six months. You want to compare several vetted local agencies rather than evaluate one proposal in isolation. You want guard credentials and patrol records visible in a dashboard rather than requested by email.
If you are genuinely between the two
Run both. Get a Sunstates proposal for the long-horizon portion of your coverage and price the variable portion through the marketplace. Many buyers with a permanent core post plus fluctuating overflow needs end up doing exactly this, and it is often cheaper than forcing all coverage into a single contract sized for the peak. For a broader field of options, see our best security companies roundup, and if you are weighing hiring in-house instead, in-house versus contract security covers that math.
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