deskbird vs Envoy Workplace

deskbird

Desks, rooms and parking all sit on interactive floor plans per floor and office, with filters for equipment, quiet zones and standing desks, hot and assigned desks on one plan, recurring and multi-day bookings, guests and visitors bookable alongside the host, catering with the room, room bookings syncing both ways with Outlook, Teams and Google Calendar, and kiosk displays at the room door — in nine languages including German, with floor plans generated from blueprints or sketches without CAD. We found no public information on wayfinding to the booked desk, EV chargers or lockers, or documented accessibility of the apps, which keeps this a notch below the top.

Envoy Workplace

Desks, rooms and parking all sit on interactive maps with live availability: employees filter desks by amenities like dual monitors and standing desks, mark desks hot, permanent or unavailable, book from mobile, desktop, Google Calendar, Office 365, room displays, Slack or Microsoft Teams, and neighbourhoods give teams their own areas. Room displays support one-tap check-in, maps are searchable for coworkers and rooms, and parking spots carry EV-charging and accessibility designations. What holds it below the top band for an estate like mine: I found no public information on importing floor plans from CAD, booking desks for colleagues or guests, catering with rooms, or app accessibility and available languages.

deskbird

Check-in runs by app, QR code, Teams, one tap on the room kiosk, a badge swipe at the entrance or automatically via the background agent, and unclaimed desks and rooms go back into the pool after a configurable window the vendor describes as typically 15 to 45 minutes; assigned parking even releases itself from HRIS absence data, and rules cover lead times by team, role and site, approvals, waiting lists and priority groups for people with special needs. We found no public information on capacity limits per floor or lottery- or rotation-based parking allocation.

Envoy Workplace

Desks auto-release after a configurable no-show grace period, parking spots release automatically when nobody checks in by a set time, check-in works from the app, the room display, a badge scan or Wi-Fi, and built-in rules govern who books which spot and when, with rotation by team, day or seniority. Before I trusted this across Cologne, Munich and Vienna I would miss what I could not find: the pages give no public information on approvals for restricted areas, capacity limits per floor, or permanent desks released automatically when the owner is away.

deskbird

There is a weekly picture of who is in, colleagues you follow and where your team sits so people book nearby, plus office events, hybrid policies at individual, team or company level with smart suggestions for the right office days, planning inside Teams, and absences flowing in live from the HR system; profiles and activity are visible only to colleagues the employee has explicitly approved. We found no public information on anchor days as such, delegation for assistants, or notifications when colleagues plan to come in.

Envoy Workplace

Employees set their office schedule days or weeks ahead, see teammates' scheduled weeks, book a desk next to a colleague who is in, and admins get a daily view of who is coming, with time-off data flowing in from Workday, ADP, BambooHR and Rippling. The captured pages stop short of team or anchor days, favourite colleagues, notifications when colleagues plan to come in, a planner inside Microsoft Teams, and per-user visibility settings — the last of which my works council would ask about first.

deskbird

Utilisation breaks down by location, floor, zone and individual desk, built on check-ins and auto-release rather than raw bookings, with no-shows, ghost rooms and oversized rooms surfaced, lease scenarios modelled on a headcount slider — exactly what I need for the Munich decision — and data exportable to Power BI. On the people side, reports are aggregated with a minimum group size of five, managers see teams not individuals, transaction data is anonymised after six months by default, and a works agreement template is published for German and Austrian councils; the method behind measured-versus-booked reconciliation and sensor accuracy, however, is not documented.

Envoy Workplace

Utilisation is reported per desk, room, floor, neighbourhood and location, built on door access scans and Wi-Fi connections with automatic badge sign-in rather than bookings alone, alongside scheduled email reports, arrivals against expected, wasted-space and room-capacity metrics, and retention configurable down to the individual question with responses discarded. It falls short of what I would take to the board: I found no public information on minimum group sizes in anonymised reports, a works council agreement or DPIA template, or scenario modelling for a consolidation decision like my Munich lease.

deskbird

Nearly everything I run is covered: native Teams, Outlook, Google Calendar and Slack, SSO by SAML with Entra ID, Okta and Google, SCIM provisioning with groups and automatic deprovisioning, native HR sync to Personio, Workday, BambooHR and HiBob with SAP named as well, a Salto integration that checks people in at their pre-assigned desk and parking, unlimited users, admins and locations with role-based admin down to floor and department, audit logs, a documented REST API, and published availability commitments with four-hour reaction to total failure. We found no public information on webhooks or OIDC, and displays run on any commercial tablet rather than named hardware models.

Envoy Workplace

Over a hundred integrations sit on a documented developer platform with SDKs and webhooks, SAML 2.0 single sign-on deprovisions through Okta, OneLogin or ADFS, HR directory and time-off sync runs from Workday, BambooHR, ADP, Paylocity or Rippling, access-control and badge systems integrate, administration is role-based per location, and audit logging records who changed what on the workplace map. I found no public information on SCIM provisioning, OIDC, running several companies or tenants in one account, or a published implementation plan and support SLA.

deskbird

The contracting entity is deskbird AG of Pfäffikon in Switzerland — not an EU company or a stated EU representative — but all customer data is hosted on Google Cloud in Frankfurt with an internal policy against cloud resources outside the EU, the subprocessor list names each provider with EU locations, a data processing agreement is published, and ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II are stated. That is European end to end in practice, with the Swiss entity being the one thing that keeps it off the top of the scale.

Envoy Workplace

The contracting entity is Envoy, Inc., a Delaware corporation in San Francisco under California law, and the published subprocessor list places hosting and database storage with Amazon Web Services in the USA, alongside Datadog, Segment, Databricks and Twilio, all located in the USA. A GDPR data processing addendum with the EU Standard Contractual Clauses under Irish law and thirty-day deletion exists, but every link in the chain sits in the USA and I found no public information on EU hosting or an EU contracting entity or representative.

deskbird

The Business tier is published at €2.75 per active user per month from 25 users with net prices plus VAT, minimum terms of three months monthly or twelve yearly, and the terms even publish the user and room package increments and the price-increase cap. But Professional and Enterprise are "Custom pricing", and the add-ons a company like ours would need — room bookings, visitors, user and data management with SSO, SCIM and HRIS, plus anything for parking — carry no public figures, so the real annual cost across three sites is not computable from public pages alone.

Envoy Workplace

The public pricing page prices only the visitor product — a free tier limited to 100 entries a month, Premium at $362 per location/month billed annually, and Enterprise at custom pricing — while I found no public price for the desk, room and parking products I would actually buy. Taxes including VAT are excluded and late-fee and renewal-at-list-price terms are stated, but I found no public information on setup fees, minimum terms, minimum users or hardware licence costs, so I cannot compute an annual cost for 900 people.