deskbird vs Envoy Workplace

deskbird

Desks, rooms and parking all sit on interactive floor plans per floor and office, bookable in Teams, Outlook, Google Calendar and the mobile apps, with desk attributes, hot and assigned seating mixed on one plan, weekly recurring and multi-day bookings, and guest and visitor bookings — most of my checklist for a 250-person estate. The plan designer works from a blueprint or sketch with no CAD required, rooms carry catering and kiosk displays with one-tap check-in, and the product runs in nine languages including German. We found no public information on wayfinding to the booked desk, lockers or EV chargers, or the accessibility of the apps, which keeps it short of the top.

Envoy Workplace

Desks, rooms and parking are all bookable on interactive maps, with desk amenities like dual monitors and standing desks, hot and permanently assigned desks, neighbourhoods for teams, room displays with one-tap check-in, and EV-charging and accessible-space tagging in parking. Booking runs from the mobile app, desktop, Office 365, Google Calendar and the display by the door, and the maps even search for coworkers and meeting rooms, which is exactly how my people would use it. I found no public information on an Outlook add-in that books a room and desk together, guest bookings tied to the host's desk, CAD import, or stated accessibility and languages for the apps.

deskbird

Check-in by QR code, app or Teams, automatic check-in when someone arrives (including badge swipe and a silent background agent), auto-release of desks and rooms after a typically 15–45 minute window, booking lead times by team, role or site, approvals, grace periods and reminders — the hygiene side is genuinely covered. Assigned parking auto-releases from HRIS absence data, with priority groups and waitlists; we found no public information on parking allocation by lottery or rotation or on capacity limits per floor. As the person who has to defend ghost-desk policies to a works council, I would have liked the no-show logic documented as clearly as the claimed 63% no-show reduction.

Envoy Workplace

A grace period with auto-release frees desks nobody checks in to, parking spots are released automatically and allocated by team, day or seniority, rooms are checked in from the display and freed when meetings end early, and reminders nudge people before they become no-shows. Time-off data from HR systems feeds the picture, and scheduling ahead reserves a spot even at capacity. I found no public information on NFC or Wi-Fi check-in for desks, approvals for restricted areas, or permanent desks released automatically during absence.

deskbird

This is what I care about most and it delivers: hybrid planning shows who is in the office, colleagues can be followed, the colleague view lets people sit near teammates, and smart suggestions pick the right days to come in — nudges rather than a control system. Policies are configurable at individual, team or company level, the planner runs inside Microsoft Teams, HRIS absences and org structures sync live, and profiles are visible only to colleagues the employee has approved. Pre-approved works council configurations for German councils and a Betriebsvereinbarung template make this presentable to my Hamburg works council; we found no public information on delegation for assistants or an explicit anchor-day concept.

Envoy Workplace

The core loop I care about is evidenced: people set their office days in the app, teammates see each other's planned weeks and can book a desk nearby, and admins see who is coming in each day, with HRIS time-off sync feeding attendance views. But I found no public information on favourite colleagues, team or anchor days, per-user visibility settings, a planner living inside Microsoft Teams, or office-day nudges; return-to-office adherence is reported down to the individual, which reads as monitoring rather than nudging and would not survive my works council.

deskbird

Utilization breaks down by location, floor, zone and even individual desk, with no-shows, oversized-room detection and lease scenario modelling on a headcount slider — enough substance for a real-estate argument — and it can run sensorless on existing Wi-Fi, badge and docking-station signals. On the people side, reports aggregate with a minimum group size of five, managers see teams not individuals, booking data is anonymised after six months with custom windows, and role-based access plus a non-binding Betriebsvereinbarung template gives a works council material to work with. A Power BI export path exists; we found no public information on sensor accuracy or a published DPIA, so I would not yet rest a portfolio decision on it.

Envoy Workplace

Utilisation is reported per desk, room, floor, neighbourhood and location, combined with badge and Wi-Fi signals for measured occupancy, plus scheduled email reports, customisable dashboards and export of anonymised records. On the privacy side, retention is configurable per plan and even per question, responses can be discarded, and role-based administration limits who sees what. I found no public information on minimum group sizes, works council or DPIA material, explicit no-show rates, or analytics export to CSV or BI tools.

deskbird

Native Teams, Outlook, Slack and Google Calendar integration, SSO with Entra ID, Okta and Google, SCIM provisioning including groups and deprovisioning, HRIS sync with Personio, Workday, BambooHR and HiBob, a documented REST API with a developer portal and an MCP server, audit logs, role-based administration by location, floor and department, and multi-tenancy support. Salto is a named access-control integration and badge-based check-in is a documented use case, and support terms with 99.5% and 99.8% availability plus regional service hours are published. We found no public information on webhooks, OIDC specifically, or supported sensor hardware by model name.

Envoy Workplace

SAML 2.0 single sign-on with Okta, OneLogin or ADFS, HRIS sync from Workday, BambooHR, ADP and Paylocity, directory sync from Active Directory and Google Workspace, an open developer API with SDKs, webhooks free to install, access-control integration, and location-level role administration with audit logs are all documented. I found no public information on SCIM provisioning, OIDC, several companies in one account, or a published implementation plan.

deskbird

The captured pages name deskbird Aktiengesellschaft in Pfäffikon, Switzerland as the contracting entity, hosting exclusively in the EU on Google Cloud in Frankfurt with an internal policy against non-EU cloud resources, a published data processing agreement, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II, and a trust-centre subprocessor list that is entirely EU-located — while the independently collected sovereignty attributes mark entity jurisdiction and data residency as unknown, so the captured pages give different pictures. For a Hamburg deployment the employee-data chain looks European end to end. The contracting entity is Swiss rather than an EU entity or a named EU representative, and we found no public information on the scope of the certifications or on ownership.

Envoy Workplace

The contracting entity is Envoy, Inc., a Delaware corporation in San Francisco, and every listed subprocessor — AWS for hosting and database storage, Datadog and Segment for analytics, Twilio for notifications — sits in the USA; the captured pages show no EU hosting option. Credit where due: the subprocessor list with locations is public, a GDPR data protection addendum with Standard Contractual Clauses under Irish law is published, and ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 are stated. For a Hamburg company, records of who sat where on which day living entirely in US-hosted systems is a serious works council conversation regardless of the paperwork.

deskbird

The Business tier is public at € 2.75 per active user per month from 25 users, with a free starting option, net prices plus VAT, minimum terms of three months monthly or twelve months yearly, and unusually transparent packaging increments for users and rooms. But Professional and Enterprise carry "Custom pricing", and the add-ons a 250-person company would actually need — room booking, visitor management, the SSO and SCIM user management package — are described with no public prices we could find, so I cannot compute our real annual cost from public pages. We found no public information on the free tier's limits, setup fees or hardware costs.

Envoy Workplace

The public pricing page covers the Visitors product: a free Basic tier with 100 entries/month, Premium at $362 per location/month billed annually, and Enterprise at custom pricing, with VAT treatment and the SAML plan requirement stated and ID scanning at 500 scans/year included. For the desk, room and parking booking this category is judged on, I found no public prices at all, nor hardware, setup or minimum-term figures.