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Today - Competitors analysis

Updated yesterday

To help you understand all the values brought by Today to your leads, it is important to be able to compare our solution to existing tools. Thus, you can see what feature we share with them and what our edge-cutting advantages are. 🏆

Comparative table of in-tools solutions:

Google Sheets

Appsheet

Microsoft Excel

Comeen

Plan in-office days

✅

✅

✅

✅

Receive notifications

✅

Manage your teammates

✅

See teammates planning

✅

✅

✅

✅

Check-in / Check out

✅

Cancel a presence

✅

✅

✅

✅

Book a desk

✅

✅

Select desks' equipments

✅

Book a desk next to someone

✅

Book a desk for someone else

✅

Brief explanations and comparisons for:

Google Sheets:

image__1_.png

An attendance template or attendance tracker in Google Sheets, consists of a grid where details about attendance of a group of people are recorded. Here the group of people may consist of employees in a department, students in a class, or guests at an event.

Attendance sheets are used in a number of industries and organizations to keep a record of the turnout, and for effective attendance management. Attendance sheets are used in companies to track employee attendance and consolidate information for ACRs, salary payment, etc.

With modern spreadsheet software keeping track of attendance can be automated, so once you have an attendance template ready with all the required formulae, you can re-use it every month, without having to re-do calculations each time.

CleanShot_2022-01-09_at_21.56.49_2x.png

But there are many limits to Google sheets for this use:

  • Every team in the company is creating their own Google Sheet file. It's hard for employees to know if someone outside their team is coming to the office.

  • It's complicated to have a big picture of how many people are coming to a specific location (building, floor, area) and being sure that everyone will have a place.

  • In some countries, companies have to apply building gauge. Moreover, most companies have different hybrid work setup such as minimum or maximum days at the office. It's becoming harder to implement everything in a Google Sheet file.

  • Finally, the user experience isn't great since employees need to fill a Google Sheet every day. You won't have automatic reminder, so the file will probably be corrupted if someone changes his mind and decide to come to the office without filling the document.

The great news is that if your prospects has already implemented Google Sheet files to manage office attendance, they probably know every limits of that. It'll be easier to convince them to try Today.

AppSheet:

image__2_.png

With Google AppSheet, you can build solutions that facilitate work. No coding required, you just need to connect your data to the software. Therefore, you can create an attendance application by automating simple manual tasks.

Thus, you can directly create an attendance App from scratch or use a pre-made template.

Screenshot_2022-06-14_11.28.48_AM.png

In this template, people can take attendance by clicking on thumbs up and thumbs down icons. As written above, this app has two actions that will trigger a group of other actions: change status to Present or Absent, set Last Record to Today, and update Building and Room.

Thus, the administrator of the app will get a daily report of people's presence declarations. This is a good way to keep track of workers' venues to the office and for employees to see their colleagues' schedule.

But there are many limits to Appsheet for this use:

  • This model only works for a daily use, people will still have to declare manually their presence everyday.

  • It's complicated to have a big picture of how many people are coming to a specific location (building, floor, area) and being sure that everyone will have a place.

  • Users won't have automatic reminders, so the app will only be relevant if people remember to use it.

  • In some countries, companies have to apply building gauge. Moreover, most companies have different hybrid work setup such as minimum or maximum days at the office. You can't create and custom presence rules with Appsheet

  • Appsheet's pricing is very expensive given the features it offers

Microsoft Excel:

kindpng_1335617.png

Just like with Google Sheets, to answer this need, companies all around the world have been creating Excel files to manage office attendance.

  • employee_attendance_sheet_excel.png

But, there are many limits to this solution:

  • Every team in the company is creating their own Excel file. It's hard for employees to know if someone outside their team is coming to the office,

  • It's complicated to have a big picture of how many people are coming to a specific location (building, floor, area) and being sure that everyone will have a place,

  • In some countries, companies have to apply building gauge. Moreover, most companies have different hybrid work setup such as minimum or maximum days at the office. It's becoming harder to implement everything in an Excel file,

  • Finally, the user experience isn't great since employees need to fill a document every day. You won't have automatic reminder, so the file will probably be corrupted if someone changes his mind and decide to come to the office without filling the document.

The great news in that, is the fact that if your lead has already implemented Excel files to manage office attendance, they probably know every limits of that. It'll be easier to convince them to try Today.

Comparative tables of other solutions for:

Employee App

Appspace

Envoy

Robin

Skykit

Comeen

Plan in-office days

✅

✅

✅

✅

Receive notifications

✅

✅

✅

✅

✅

Manage your teammates

✅

✅

✅

See teammates planning

✅

✅

✅

✅

Check-in / Check out

✅

✅

✅

✅

Cancel a presence

✅

✅

✅

✅

Hot desk booking (flex desk)

✅

✅

✅

Desk hoteling (book a precise desk)

✅

✅

✅

Select desks' equipments

✅

✅

✅

Book a desk next to someone

✅

✅

✅

Book a desk for someone else

✅

✅

Book extra options

✅

Fully integrated with Google Workspace

✅

Administration dashboard

Appspace

Envoy

Robin

Skykit

Comeen

Create buildings manually

✅

✅

✅

✅

Import buildings from Google Admin console

✅

Manage building capacity

✅

✅

✅

✅

Manage building gauge

✅

✅

✅

✅

Define hybrid work rules (max/min days at the office and more)

✅

✅

✅

✅

Define hybrid work rules (recommended and blocked locations)

✅

✅

KPI that presents building usages

✅

✅

✅

✅

✅

Create floors

✅

✅

✅

✅

✅

Create areas (part of a floor)

✅

✅

✅

✅

Import floors plan

✅

✅

✅

✅

Draw areas on a floor plan

✅

✅

✅

Create desks manually

✅

✅

✅

✅

✅

Synchronise desk list from Google Sheet

✅

✅

✅

Place desks on floor plan

✅

✅

✅

✅

Create desk equipments

✅

✅

✅

Create users manually

✅

✅

✅

✅

✅

Importing user list from a CSV file

✅

✅

✅

✅

✅

Synchronize users from Google Groups

✅

✅

✅

Synchronise meeting rooms from Google Admin

✅

✅

✅

✅

✅

Synchronize users from Azure AD groups

✅

✅

✅

Brief explanations and comparisons :

Envoy

Envoy proposes to manage users, visitors, workplaces, and technology work together. They help companies to implement hot desk booking, schedule sharing, health checks and deliveries notifications.

Their offer is quite close to Today since they look to answer the same needs as us, but their features are less advanced and they divided it into two different products: Protect and Desks.

⟶ Main difference:Envoy has been thought following the covid crisis and their product named Protect underlines it.

In fact this can be felt in their quotation "Keep your team healthy and your workplace safe with Protect. Ensure only healthy employees can enter your workplace and reserve a desk, prevent too many people from coming on-site, and respond quickly if a situation arises."

Even if the idea was good at that time, nowadays companies need a tool that fits to any situation and to anyone which is why our offer was made to be wider and to meet more needs.

Besides, concerning the presence rules, at the opposite of Today that offers to customise them, Envoy only proposes to set a daily capacity limit.

Finally, Envoy's integration with Google Workspace is way less advanced than Today's one. They are able to synchronise users, NDAs and Gsuite Calendars for Rooms features, whereas Comeen Today synchronises those and also buildings which highly simplifies the software set up and deployment.

Robin:

Robin's proposition looks similar to Today since they share with us basic options, but their tool isn't integrated with existing tools.

Using Robin means learning to use a new tool and having to teach all the future users, at the opposite of Today which implementation and use are easy and intuitive since it integrates with existing tools.

More, the only integration that Robin shares with Google Workspace is the Gsuite Calendars for Rooms features (which is not even part of this offer).

Therefore, implementing, deploying and using Robin is more complicated and time costing than using Today that is already integrated into companies' existing tools.

Appspace:

Appspace proposes The Employee App which is the central place for employees to view corporate content and make reservations whether they are at home, in the office, or on the go. It is accessible via a computer, tablet, or phone.

https://www.appspace.com/resources/appspace-videos/appspace-space-reservation

Their idea is to offer a space reservation solutions for room booking, desk hoteling, floor plan mapping, resource management, and analytics. They also provide occupancy rules and restrictions.

At the opposite of Today that offers a tool thought for flex workers (hot desk booking), Appspace proposes to select a precise desk to seat at (desk hoteling).

Once again, they are only integrated with Gsuite and Microsoft Calendars for Rooms features.

Using Appspace means learning to use a new tool and having to teach all the future users, at the opposite of Today which implementation and use are easy and intuitive since it integrates with existing tools.

Finally, can access the Appspace Employee App only the employees with

  • a premium user account

  • an active Appspace public/private cloud user account

  • a supported web browser or device mobile

Skykit:

Skykit proposes two workplace management products:

  • Turf Check-In is an employee and visitor management system that allows to control the flow of people entering a business

  • Turf Space Booking is a meeting and desk booking tool that lets employees book an office space using a touch display or their existing calendar app

No need to say that we are not offering the same kind of services:

⟶ You need to associate each of your desks as a resource in Google or Microsoft Calendar to be able to book it (as if it was a meeting room).

⟶ You can only check-in, which means you can't declare in advance your venues to the office or the days you work remotely.

Finally, it is obvious when looking at the comparative boards that the employees and admins will not get the same options and experience when using Today or Skykit Turf.

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