The short answer
When I Work and Calvis turn up in the same search results and overlap on almost nothing.
When I Work is employee scheduling and time-clock software. You build a schedule, publish it to your staff's phones, they clock in and out on a device, and the hours flow to payroll. It is sold to employers, and it is horizontal: restaurants, retail, healthcare, hospitality, warehouses, and yes, security agencies. The company says it serves more than a million workplaces and over ten million employees, which tells you immediately that guarding is one vertical among many rather than the product's reason for existing.
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.
So the whole comparison collapses to one question: do you employ the guards, or do you need guards?
- •If you employ officers and need to schedule them, track their hours, and get those hours into payroll, When I Work is a real answer and Calvis is not.
- •If you need two officers at a warehouse gate next Thursday night, When I Work cannot help you. It has no guards to send. Compare licensed local agencies and rates.
Everything below is the detail that makes the distinction worth the reading time.
What When I Work actually is
When I Work is a shift-work operations app built around three things: the schedule, the clock, and the message thread between them. Headquartered in Minneapolis, it markets to any business that runs on shifts, and it has a dedicated page pitching security guard companies specifically.
The core of the product, as the company describes it:
- •Scheduling. Build a schedule and publish it to the team instantly, with availability, shift swaps, and open shifts handled in the app rather than over text.
- •A time clock on any device. Turn a phone or a tablet at the post into a clock that tracks attendance, breaks, and time off.
- •GPS and geofencing on punches. The product captures GPS location for each punch and uses geofencing so employees clock in only when they are on site, with the explicit goal of preventing early clock-ins and off-site punches.
- •Photo clock-ins. Identity verification at punch, aimed at stopping one guard from clocking in for another.
- •Overtime and labor-cost visibility. Real-time alerts when someone is drifting toward overtime, plus labor distribution reporting.
- •Payroll integrations. Timesheet export and direct connections to ADP, Gusto, QuickBooks, and Rippling, with multiple pay rates calculated automatically.
- •Team messaging. One place for dispatcher-to-field communication instead of a group text.
For a guard company, that list is not decorative. Geofenced clock-in is the single most useful control a small agency can adopt, because it converts "the guard says he was at the site" into a location-stamped record. Overtime alerts matter in an industry where a single unplanned double shift can erase the margin on a post. And the payroll integrations solve the part of agency administration that owners most often describe as the worst part of the week.
What it costs
When I Work publishes its pricing, which is worth crediting in a category where most vendors hide it behind a demo request. As listed on the company's pricing page at the time of writing, there are three published tiers: Essentials at $2.50 per user per month, Pro at $5 per user per month, and Premium at $8 per user per month, with monthly or annual billing, a 14-day free trial that does not require a credit card, and no contract, so you can add or drop seats or cancel at any time. Larger organizations are directed to sales for enterprise pricing.
Per-user pricing is the important structural detail. Costs scale with headcount, not with revenue, which is friendly to a five-guard operation and less friendly at eighty officers with turnover churning seats. Feature availability also differs by tier, so if a specific capability is the reason you are buying, confirm which plan includes it with When I Work directly before you commit rather than assuming it is in the cheapest one.
Where When I Work stops short for security
Being fair here matters more than being clever. When I Work does not claim to be guard management software, and criticizing it for lacking guard features is like faulting a truck for not being a forklift. But if you are an agency owner weighing it against a security-native tool, these are the gaps that decide it.
Guard tours and checkpoints. Dedicated guard tour systems are built around a checkpoint loop: NFC tags or QR codes placed along a route, scanned in sequence, with missed checkpoints flagged and the tour record produced as a client-facing artifact. When I Work's security page does not advertise checkpoint scanning, and a geofenced punch at the start of a shift is a different evidentiary object than a scanned chain proving an officer physically reached the loading dock at 2:47 a.m. If a client contract specifies verified tours, this is the gap that ends the conversation.
Incident reporting and escalation. Security operations run on incidents: a documented event, with photos, timestamps, a severity judgment, and a routing rule that wakes somebody up when the severity is high enough. That machinery is not part of a scheduling and time-clock product.
Post orders. A site-specific instruction set, delivered to the officer assigned to that post, with confirmation that it was received and read. Agencies frequently need to prove that acknowledgment existed.
License and certification expiry. 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 records with expiry alerts. You can approximate it with a spreadsheet and calendar reminders, but you are building it rather than buying it.
The client-facing layer. This is the structural one. When I Work is internal software. Your customer never logs into it. Anything the customer sees, somebody at your agency exports and emails.
If those gaps matter to the contracts you are bidding on, look at the security-native category instead. Our guard tour and patrol app roundup covers that field, Calvis vs Belfry and Calvis vs Connecteam walk through the same software-versus-marketplace question from other angles, and our scheduling software roundup compares the general and security-specific options side by side. If those gaps do not matter to your book of business, and for plenty of small operations they genuinely do not, published per-user pricing with no contract is a reasonable place to land.
What Calvis is, and who it is for
Calvis is a marketplace connecting businesses that need guards with independently licensed local security agencies. It is not the security provider and does not employ officers.
For a buyer, the sequence is short. Describe the coverage: how many officers, armed or unarmed, which address, which hours, one-time or recurring. See vetted local agencies with flat hourly rates attached before anything is committed. Book. During the shift, GPS-verified check-in and check-out, incident reports, and shift documentation land in your own dashboard rather than sitting in a vendor's back office until you ask for an export.
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 actually look like by post type, see security guard cost; for the range of post types, see services; for metro coverage, see locations.
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, and there is no conflict in running scheduling software at the same time. Most agencies in the network do exactly that. See agencies for how that side works.
Head-to-head
| Factor | When I Work | Calvis |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Employee scheduling and time-clock software | Marketplace for booking guard coverage |
| Who pays | The employer (agency or in-house security team) | The business booking guards; free to compare |
| Solves | Schedules, punches, labor cost, payroll handoff | Finding, vetting, and booking licensed agencies |
| Provides guards | No | No, it connects you to agencies that do |
| Industry focus | Horizontal; security is one vertical of many | Security only |
| Pricing model | Published per user per month, three tiers | Published flat hourly rates per agency |
| Contract commitment | None; monthly or annual, cancel anytime | None required to start |
| Guard tour checkpoints | Not advertised | Handled by the agency's own tooling |
| Incident and post orders | Not a core capability | Delivered by the agency; records in buyer dashboard |
| Customer-facing visibility | Internal only, exported by the agency | Buyer dashboard with GPS and shift records |
| Right buyer | Agency owner, ops manager, in-house security lead | Property manager, event producer, retailer, GC |
Read that as two different jobs rather than a scorecard. Nothing in the When I Work column is a weakness of Calvis, and nothing in the Calvis column is a weakness of When I Work. They answer unrelated questions that happen to share vocabulary.
If you are an agency owner
Your decision is not Calvis versus When I Work. It is two separate decisions that people collapse into one.
Decision one: which internal tool. Split it by what your contracts demand. If your clients accept GPS-stamped clock-ins and a supervisor's word as proof of service, When I Work covers your daily operating loop at a per-user price that most security-native tools do not match, and the 14-day trial costs you nothing to test on one site. If you are bidding on work that specifies verified patrol tours, checkpoint chains, incident escalation, or a client portal, buy the security-specific tool. Trying to reconstruct a compliant tour record out of punch data after you have signed the contract is the expensive version of this decision, and it usually surfaces at the worst possible moment, during a claim or a contract review.
Also weigh the seat math honestly. Per-user pricing is cheap at ten guards and becomes a real line item at a hundred, especially with turnover cycling seats. Model it at the headcount you expect in eighteen months, not today's.
Decision two: where the next contract comes from. Software does not generate demand. Scheduling your existing guards more efficiently does not put officers on more posts, and no time clock has ever won a bid. Agencies join Calvis to receive booked jobs with scope and rate already set, which is a different lever entirely. The agencies that do well generally run both: a marketplace channel for demand, and whatever tool fits their contracts for operations.
If you searched for scheduling software but actually need guards
This is worth being blunt about, because search results will keep pulling you toward products you cannot use.
When I Work will not send anyone to your building. Neither will a guard tour app or a workforce platform. They are sold to the company that employs officers. Buy one and you have purchased a scheduling system with nobody to schedule.
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 the job actually requires rather than an annual minimum, and watch check-in, GPS, and incident records land in your own dashboard.
A few common versions of this mistake, and where they should go instead. If you are staffing a one-time event, you want event security, not a scheduling subscription. If something happened last night and you need somebody on site this week, that is emergency and short-notice coverage. If you are trying to work out what a post should cost before you talk to anyone, start with security guard cost.
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 calls for 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 lanes.
Compare licensed local agencies and see rates →