"Why not just use Connecteam?" — an honest answer

An owner said this to us almost word for word: “I looked at Connecteam. It does scheduling, it does a GPS time clock, it does forms, and it’s a fraction of what guard software costs. Talk me out of it.”

That’s a fair question and it deserves a straight answer, not a sales pitch. So here’s the arithmetic first, then the part that actually decides it.

All prices below were checked on August 18, 2026, on each vendor’s own pricing page. Prices change. Verify before you buy anything.

What the general apps genuinely do well

Let’s not pretend otherwise. Connecteam, When I Work, Deputy and Timeero are real products built by real teams for millions of shift workers. They handle the parts of your business that aren’t specific to security at all, and they handle them well:

• Building and publishing a schedule, swaps, open shifts, availability
• A GPS time clock with geofencing, and timesheets that export to payroll
• Company-wide chat and announcements that beat a group text
• Forms and checklists you can build yourself, no developer needed
• Time-off requests, documents, onboarding

If your guards are clocking in and out of a lobby desk and your biggest operational pain is the Sunday-night schedule, one of these tools will probably make your week better for very little money. That’s not a concession — it’s true.

The arithmetic, done honestly

Take a 25-guard company.

Connecteam is free for up to 10 users, then Basic is $29/month, Advanced $49/month, and Expert $99/month — each of those covering your first 30 users, with additional users at roughly $0.50–$4.20 each depending on tier and hub. Note the word hub: Connecteam is sold as Operations, Communications, and HR & Skills hubs, and the per-user overage rate varies by which one you’re on.

So at 25 guards you’re inside that first-30 bucket. Top tier, one hub: $99/month.

Watchbill is $7/guard/month, everything included, no tiers and no add-ons. At 25 guards that’s $175/month.

The gap is $76/month. About $2.50 a day. Connecteam is cheaper in raw dollars, and anyone who tells you differently is selling.

I’m comparing against their top tier on purpose. On Basic the gap is wider — about $146/month — but Basic drops the forms and advanced features that make this a real comparison in the first place, so the honest matchup is the one that costs them most.

Now the comparison nobody makes, which is guard-specific software against guard-specific software. GuardsPro publishes $5 Essential / $8 Advanced / $10 Professional per user per month — with site tours and checklists in the $10 Professional tier — and then Scheduler, Dispatcher, Vehicle Patrol, Visitor Manager, Invoicer and Payroll are each separate add-ons at $0.70–$2.00 per user per month on top. Add up a configuration that does what a patrol company actually needs and you’re around $15–17/guard/month: $375–425/month for those same 25 guards.

Most of the industry won’t even show you a number. TrackTik, Silvertrac/Trackforce Valiant, Belfry and Novagems are all quote-only. For TrackTik, third-party reviewers — not TrackTik’s own published pricing, which doesn’t exist — report roughly $78/month per site licence plus a one-time setup and training fee around $1,404 on a 12-month minimum. Per location, not per guard. If you run eight sites, do that math before you take the demo.

So the real spread for 25 guards looks something like: $0–99 for a general app, $175 for Watchbill, $375–425 for a feature-matched legacy guard platform, and “let’s schedule a call” for most of the rest.

The seven questions that actually decide it

Price only tells you what something costs, not whether it does the job. So don’t argue about software. Take whatever you’re considering — general or guard-specific, us included — and run these at it:

1. Can it prove an officer was at a specific point, not just somewhere on the property? A geofenced clock-in proves your guard arrived. It doesn’t prove anyone walked the back stairwell at 2:40 a.m. That needs a physical tag — NFC or QR — scanned at the point itself.
2. What happens to a report after it’s submitted? If a supervisor can quietly edit last Tuesday’s incident report and nothing records that it changed, you don’t have evidence. You have a document. Corrections need to land as addendums, with the original intact and the trail visible.
3. Does evidence attach at the scene? Photos, video, and voice notes taken during the incident, riding inside the report — not texted to you later and filed in someone’s camera roll.
4. Does it work with no signal? Basements, parking structures, rural sites, 3 a.m. If capture fails without bars, your guard writes it from memory in the morning and you’re back to paper with extra steps.
5. Can the client see their own proof without you assembling it? Not a PDF you email on Monday. A login, scoped to their sites, showing patrols and approved reports. This is the thing that wins bids now.
6. Does it know a licence or certification is about to expire — before you put that guard on a post? Guard credentialing is state-mandated. A spreadsheet reminder is not a control.
7. Does it understand the shapes of guard work? Tours with sequence and timing, vehicle patrols with route stops and mileage, pass-downs the incoming shift has to acknowledge, a visitor log, an SOS path for a lone officer.

A general workforce app will pass some of these. On the ones it doesn’t, it’s not a bad product — it was built for restaurants and retail and job sites, where nobody gets deposed about whether an employee walked a specific stairwell at a specific minute.

When the cheap answer is the right answer

Be honest with yourself about which business you’re in.

Under 10 guards, static posts, clients who have never once asked for proof of patrol, and your real problem is scheduling and communication? Take the free tier. Genuinely. Spend the money on payroll or insurance instead.

But if you’re bidding work where the client asks how they’ll see the patrols, or you’ve had one claim where documentation mattered, or a property manager has already asked “was anyone actually in the lot Saturday night?” — then the thing you’re buying isn’t scheduling. It’s the ability to answer that question in two minutes, six months later, to someone who is not on your side.

That’s what the $76 a month buys. Not features. A record that holds.

Your guards already do the work. The system’s only job is to make it provable.

Watchbill is $7/guard/month or $70/guard/year — GPS, QR and NFC verified patrols, offline-first incident and daily activity reports, vehicle patrols, pass-downs, cert tracking, and free unlimited client portal logins, with every feature in one plan. See pricing or start your 30-day trial — no credit card.