The short answer
Timeero and Calvis both turn up when someone searches for security guard tracking, and they answer completely different questions.
Timeero is GPS time tracking and mileage tracking software for mobile workforces. It sells to the employer. Its own homepage describes it as a "GPS Time Tracking And Mileage Tracking App" and names six industries it serves: construction, cleaning, contractor and field services, property management, home health, and nonprofit. Security is not one of them, though Timeero does publish content aimed at security firms and plenty of small guarding companies use it.
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 hold their own state licenses and insurance, and the officers are their employees.
The filter is one question: are you paying guards, or paying for guards?
- •If you need officers at a gate on Thursday night, Timeero cannot help. It has no guards to send. Compare local agencies and rates.
- •If you already employ officers, especially ones who drive between sites, Timeero is a real candidate and the rest of this guide explains where it fits and where it does not.
What Timeero actually is
Timeero's center of gravity is the pairing of a GPS time clock with automatic mileage capture, which is a narrower and more specific product than the all-in-one workforce suites it gets shelved alongside.
The GPS time clock. Employees clock in from a phone, and the app records location while they are on the clock. Timeero states that it captures a new GPS point when a user travels more than 150 feet from their last location, or every 5 to 30 minutes depending on the phone's operating system. It also states plainly that it does not capture or save any location after an employee clocks out, which is a meaningful privacy line and one worth knowing before you roll a tracking app out to a crew.
Geofencing and auto clock-in. You can restrict clock-in and clock-out by location, and get notified when someone enters or leaves a geofenced area. Auto clock-in triggers on arrival rather than relying on the employee to remember.
Mileage. This is the differentiator. Timeero tracks driving automatically once movement crosses a speed threshold, attaches the mileage to the employee's timecard, and keeps the two records together. Higher tiers add commute mileage handling and suggested mileage, which compares the route driven against the efficient route.
Scheduling, job tracking, and payroll. Recurring shifts, job assignment, photo attachments, and integrations into payroll and accounting systems.
Pricing is published on Timeero's own pricing page, which is more than most vendors in this category will do. As listed there: Basic is $5 per user per month billed annually or $6 monthly and caps at 10 users; Pro is $7.50 annually or $9 monthly with unlimited users; Premium is $10 annually or $12 monthly; Enterprise is quoted. There is a 14-day free trial with no credit card required, and the page notes no base fees, just a flat per-user rate regardless of role.
Read the tier boundaries carefully, because the features a guarding company actually cares about are not all in the cheapest plan. Basic covers time, GPS, mileage, and breaks. Geofencing, scheduling, job tracking, and payroll integrations sit in Pro. Commute mileage, suggested mileage, signatures, custom fields, and kiosk facial recognition sit in Premium. A five-guard agency that wants geofenced clock-in is buying Pro, not Basic.
The mileage angle, and why it matters for patrol
Most comparisons of guard software treat mileage as a footnote. For one specific kind of security operation it is the whole argument.
If your officers stand at a fixed post, mileage is irrelevant. Nobody drives anywhere. A time clock with a geofence is the entire requirement, and dozens of products do that.
If you run mobile patrol rather than static posts, the economics invert. A patrol vehicle covering fifteen accounts overnight generates real mileage, and that mileage is simultaneously a reimbursement liability, a deduction, a billing input on some client contracts, and the only evidence that the vehicle actually reached each address. Agencies that handle this on a paper log or a spreadsheet estimate are guessing in both directions: overpaying drivers who round up, and unable to prove a drive-by ever happened when a client disputes it.
Timeero is built precisely for that shape of problem. The mileage is captured automatically, attached to the timecard rather than filed separately, and the trail of GPS points is the audit record. Suggested mileage, on the Premium tier, exists to catch the driver who logged 40 miles on a 22-mile route.
So the honest version of this comparison is not "Timeero is a generic tool that vaguely fits security." For a mobile patrol operator with vehicles, it is one of the better-aimed products available, and it is aimed at a problem the security-native platforms often treat as secondary. Credit where it is due.
Where Timeero falls short for security
Timeero is a time and mileage product. It is not trying to be a guard operations system, and it shows in four places that matter if your contracts are demanding.
Guard tour checkpoints. Dedicated patrol systems are built around a checkpoint loop: NFC tags or QR codes placed along a route, scanned in sequence, with a missed checkpoint flagged automatically and the tour record produced as a client-facing artifact. GPS breadcrumbs get you close but not all the way. A breadcrumb proves the phone was near the building. A scanned tag on the loading dock door proves the officer walked to the loading dock. If a contract, an insurer, or a plaintiff's attorney is going to test that distinction, breadcrumbs are the weaker record. Our guard tour and patrol app roundup covers that category.
Incident reporting and daily activity reports. The DAR is the core deliverable of a guarding contract, and incident write-ups are what get read after something goes wrong. Timeero supports photo attachments and, on Premium, signatures and custom fields, so you can approximate a report. What is not there is the escalation machinery security operations expect: severity tiers that route automatically, on-call chains, and a structured incident record that survives being handed to a client or a claims adjuster.
License and compliance tracking. Guard registrations, armed permits, and firearms qualifications expire on individual schedules and are enforced by state regulators. Security-specific systems treat those as first-class objects with expiry alerts. In Timeero you would build that out of custom fields and reminders, which means you are constructing it rather than buying it, and a construction like that is only as reliable as the person maintaining it.
The client-facing layer. This is the structural one. Timeero is internal software. Your customer never logs in. Anything the customer sees, somebody at your agency exports and emails.
None of that makes Timeero a bad product. It makes it a time and mileage product, which is what it says it is. If your clients accept GPS-stamped clock-ins and photo-attached notes as proof of service, and your drivers put real miles on real vehicles, the fit is good. If you are bidding work that specifies verified checkpoint tours and a client portal, look at the security-native category instead. Calvis vs Belfry and Calvis vs Connecteam walk through two adjacent decisions.
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 the 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 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 request exports from.
Licensing sits where it belongs. Each agency holds its own license through its state 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 arrives. For what rates 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 with rate and scope already defined. That is a revenue channel, not an operations system. Plenty of agencies in the network run Timeero or a patrol platform internally at the same time, and nothing about that conflicts. See agencies for how that side works.
Head-to-head
| Factor | Timeero | Calvis |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | GPS time and mileage tracking software | Marketplace for booking guard coverage |
| Who pays | The employer (agency or in-house team) | The business booking guards; free to compare |
| Solves | Hours, location, mileage, scheduling, payroll | Finding, vetting, and booking licensed agencies |
| Provides guards | No | No, it connects you to agencies that do |
| Industry focus | Horizontal field workforces; security is adjacent | Security only |
| Standout strength | Automatic mileage tied to the timecard | Published rates across multiple vetted agencies |
| Pricing | Published per-user tiers, 14-day trial | Published flat hourly rates per agency |
| Guard tour checkpoints | Not a checkpoint system; GPS breadcrumbs only | 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 with drivers, ops manager | Property manager, event producer, retailer, GC |
Read that as two unrelated jobs rather than a scorecard. Nothing in the Timeero column is a Calvis weakness, and nothing in the Calvis column is a Timeero weakness. They share vocabulary and almost nothing else.
If you run a security agency
Your real decision is not Calvis versus Timeero. It is two separate decisions that got tangled by a search box.
On tooling, split it by whether your officers drive. If you run mobile patrol with vehicles, mileage is a live cost you are probably mismeasuring, and Timeero's per-user pricing against an unlimited-user Pro tier is inexpensive relative to what sloppy mileage reimbursement leaks in a year. If you run static posts only, mileage is worth nothing to you and you should evaluate on the time-clock and reporting features alone, where security-native tools compete harder.
On demand, no software generates contracts. A better time clock does not put more officers on more posts. It makes the posts you already have cheaper to run, which is worth doing and is a different lever entirely. Agencies join Calvis to receive booked jobs with scope and rate already set. The agencies that do well generally 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, and it is worth saying bluntly because search results will keep steering you toward products you cannot use.
Timeero will not send anyone to your building. Neither will a patrol app or a scheduling suite. Those are sold to the company that employs officers. Buy one and you have purchased a time clock with nobody to clock in.
What you need is coverage from a licensed agency at a rate you can see before committing. 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 instead of an annual minimum, and get check-in, GPS, and incident records in your own dashboard.
If you would rather vet agencies yourself, that is a legitimate path, and 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 the wider map of how these categories relate, the security platform landscape guide sorts marketplaces, agency software, and national firms into their lanes.
Compare licensed local agencies and see rates →