Desk & Park vs desk.ly: per-user tiers vs per-space pricing

The main difference between Desk & Park and desk.ly is what you pay for. desk.ly charges per user per month in three tiers (Corporate from €1.65, Enterprise from €2.75, Enterprise Plus on request, per desk.ly in October 2026), and meeting rooms and the mobile app start at Enterprise. Desk & Park charges per bookable space with unlimited users: for a 175-person office with 100 desks, parking spots and rooms, that is 2,300 USD a year on the Pro plan versus at least €5,775 (about 6,494 USD) a year for desk.ly Enterprise.

Hybrid work in 2026 has a familiar shape: Tuesday to Thursday the office fills up, Monday and Friday it is half empty. desk.ly is a desk-sharing platform from desk.ly GmbH in Osnabrück, Germany, which says more than 1,000 companies use it; it covers desks, meeting rooms, parking, visitors and analytics, with an ISO 27001 certificate and hosting in Frankfurt. Desk & Park puts desks, parking spots (including EV chargers) and meeting rooms on one map, priced by the space rather than the person.

desk.ly Enterprise at its published from-price of €2.75 per user per month, converted at 1 EUR = 1.1245 USD; Desk & Park Pro flat at 2,300 USD a year for up to 125 spaces.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

The scenario

A typical mid-sized hybrid office: 175 employees, 75 desks, 20 parking spots (4 of them with EV chargers) and 5 meeting rooms, which is 100 bookable objects in total. Because it includes meeting rooms and parking, the comparable desk.ly plan is Enterprise: on the desk.ly pricing page, meeting room booking starts at Enterprise, and the plan cards list parking booking there too (the German FAQ also mentions parking in Corporate, so confirm the plan in writing).

desk.ly: priced per user

desk.ly's published entry price for Enterprise is "from €2.75 per user and month". Using that from-price, which is the most favourable reading for desk.ly:

• 175 users × €2.75 = €481.25 per month
• €481.25 × 12 = €5,775 per year
• converted at the NBP mid-rate of 16 October 2026 (1 EUR = 1.1245 USD): about 6,494 USD per year

The pricing page does not state whether the prices include VAT or which billing period the from-price assumes, so ask for a written quote. Even the desks-only Corporate plan (from €1.65 per user) would come to €3,465 a year for 175 people (about 3,896 USD), and it does not include meeting rooms or parking.

desk.ly also publishes optional services: a custom set-up service from €499, a floorplan design service from €39 and digital meeting room signs from €119. None of them is required — desk.ly says you can sign up in under two minutes and start using it immediately — so they are not in the total above. If you book both services, add at least €538 (about 605 USD) once.

Desk & Park: priced per bookable space

100 objects fit the Pro plan (up to 125 objects, 10 locations): 2,300 USD a year with annual billing, or 230 USD a month, net. Users are unlimited, and there is no fee for uploading floor plans or adding maps. The setup is self-serve: one administrator follows six steps that take 60–90 minutes for one office.

The difference

For the 175-person office, Desk & Park costs about 4,194 USD less per year, roughly 65 % less than desk.ly at its entry Enterprise price. When the company grows to 250 people without adding desks, desk.ly rises to €8,250 and the gap widens to about 6,977 USD, or 75 %; Desk & Park's price stays put.

The reverse holds for small teams. desk.ly is free for up to 15 users with all Enterprise features, with no time limit, and at €2.75 per user Desk & Park Pro only becomes the cheaper option from about 62 users. A 30-person company with 40 desks would sit on Desk & Park Standard (128 USD a month, 1,280 USD a year) and could pay less with desk.ly. Desk & Park's free Start plan covers up to 10 spaces with unlimited users.

Architecture and security

Desk & Park

• One PostgreSQL database per customer organisation. Your users, bookings, maps and audit log are not rows in tables shared with other customers; backups and erasure work per organisation, and an incident in one database does not touch another (why that matters).
• EU hosting: databases in Frankfurt, application in the Netherlands. Encrypted nightly backups and an audit log of who did what.
• Sign-in: one-time e-mail codes, two-factor authentication (TOTP) and passkeys (WebAuthn) for every user.
• SSO via OpenID Connect (Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace, Okta and other OIDC providers) and SCIM provisioning for Entra ID and Okta, on every plan including the free one.
• The honest gaps: there is no SAML (OIDC only), and ISO 27001 and SOC 2 are planned, not certified. GDPR is covered by EU hosting, data export and deletion requests in the settings, and a data processing agreement.

desk.ly (per desk.ly's data protection page, October 2026)

• ISO 27001: desk.ly states it is independently certified; the pricing table lists it on every plan.
• Hosting: Amazon Web Services in Frankfurt am Main, in ISO/IEC 27001-certified data centres.
• Encryption in transit (TLS 1.2 or higher) and at rest; backups are kept for 30 days.
• GDPR: a data processing agreement on request, an external data protection officer, anonymous booking options and no movement profiles, which desk.ly presents as helpful for works council approval.
• SSO: Microsoft and Google sign-in on all plans; "custom single sign-on" from Enterprise; SCIM and Entra ID user sync only in Enterprise Plus (price on request).
• Tenancy model: not published. If per-customer data isolation matters to your review, ask for it in writing.

In short: desk.ly has the certificate today, which can decide a procurement checklist; Desk & Park has database-per-tenant isolation and SCIM on every plan, where desk.ly reserves it for its top tier.

Features 07–10 of the Desk & Park Top 10: room tablet, reports, integrations, security and EU data, plus what every plan includes.

Employee experience and team coordination

Apps. Desk & Park runs in any browser and installs as a PWA, so nothing comes from an app store; an Android app adds a native QR scanner, fingerprint or face unlock and push notifications. An iOS app is planned for 2027. desk.ly offers native iOS and Android apps from the Enterprise plan, plus a Microsoft Teams app on every plan — a real advantage for companies that live in Teams.

QR codes. In Desk & Park every desk, parking spot and room has a QR sticker; scanning a free desk books it and checks you in with one tap (feature 02 of the Top 10). desk.ly lists "express booking via QR code" from Enterprise.

Who's in the office. Desk & Park shows each booked person's photo or initials on the map, ringed in their team colour, with a green dot after check-in and today's roster grouped by team. The company can switch it off and anyone can hide themselves, enforced on the server. desk.ly offers "find your colleagues" and weekly overviews on all plans, with anonymous booking set per person or globally.

Parking and EV. In Desk & Park, parking has its own maps (several areas per location, such as a garage and a lot), EV charger spots are marked ⚡, and a desk plus a parking spot booked together arrive as one calendar invitation (the parking guide). desk.ly lets admins add features to parking spaces such as number plates, EV charging stations, guest parking or access restrictions, and can pass stored licence plates to a barrier system through its REST API, which is an Enterprise Plus feature.

Assigned spaces. Board members (and managers on Enterprise) can keep a permanent desk or parking spot in Desk & Park; "I'm away today" releases it to colleagues for the day and "Take back" reverses it. Permanent spaces are not released automatically after a missed scan. desk.ly publishes permanent bookings and preferred spaces.

Breadth. desk.ly has features Desk & Park does not: catering with room bookings, zones, 15-minute hot-desking slots, waiting lists, white labelling, user tags for first aiders, HRIS sync with 80+ systems and a public REST API (the last two in Enterprise Plus). Desk & Park's interface and e-mails come in 10 languages; desk.ly's help centre lists five (German, English, French, Spanish and Italian).

Space optimisation and AI

The costly problem in a hybrid office is the ghost booking: a desk reserved on Tuesday that nobody uses.

Desk & Park releases a desk or parking booking that is not checked in by the organisation's deadline (for example "check in by 10:00") back to the pool automatically (how auto-release works). Meeting rooms are released only if the organisation turns that on (off by default, after 5 to 120 minutes without a check-in); scanning the QR of a free room books the next half hour.

desk.ly has a check-in feature on every plan: with "automatic cancellation of bookings without check-in" switched on, unconfirmed bookings are cancelled after a window of 30, 60, 90 or 120 minutes. Its desk.ly Connect add-on (price on request) goes further: software-based occupancy detection that books and checks in a desk automatically when a laptop is connected at the workstation, with no extra hardware. Heatmap analytics sit in Enterprise Plus.

Desk & Park Board Reports (feature 08) measure occupancy against the seats that could actually be booked, the no-show rate per floor and resource, usage by department and team, EV charging demand and the peak day, for any range from 7 days to a year, with CSV export. On top of that, an admin can click "Generate report": a large language model receives aggregates only, never employee names, and returns 3–6 recommendations in categories such as space consolidation, ghost booking alerts, EV optimisation or capacity planning, each with a model-written impact estimate. The board marks them done or dismisses them, and that is audited. To be precise: this is not predictive machine learning or forecasting, and Desk & Park does not calculate savings or costs; the impact estimate is a hypothesis for you to verify.

Features 01–06 of the Desk & Park Top 10: the everyday tools employees use, from the map to the assigned space you can hand back.

Side by side

Competitor facts from desk.ly, checked October 2026; prices and features change — check the current page.

Verdict

desk.ly is the better fit if you have up to 15 users and want everything free, if an ISO 27001 certificate is a hard requirement today, if your employees expect a native iOS app or book from Microsoft Teams, or if you need HRIS sync, a public API, catering or sensorless occupancy detection. It is also a natural choice for German companies that want a German vendor with a ready-made works council fact sheet.

Desk & Park is the better fit if your headcount is larger than your office or keeps changing, because the price follows the 100 spaces, not the 175 or 250 people. It suits teams that want parking and EV chargers next to desks on every plan, SSO and SCIM without a custom tier, a database per organisation, and a one-afternoon setup. Compare the plans, read the onboarding guide, and see how the per-user model compares in Desk & Park vs deskbird.

FAQ

Is Desk & Park cheaper than desk.ly?

For most offices with more people than spaces, yes. For 175 employees and 100 desks, parking spots and rooms, desk.ly Enterprise costs at least €5,775 a year (175 × €2.75 × 12, about 6,494 USD) while Desk & Park Pro costs 2,300 USD a year. Below about 62 users, or up to 15 users on desk.ly's free plan, desk.ly can be cheaper.

Does desk.ly charge setup or floor plan fees?

Only if you want the service. desk.ly publishes an optional set-up service from €499, a floorplan design service from €39 and digital room signs from €119, and says you can sign up in under two minutes and start yourself. Desk & Park has no setup or map fees; one admin sets up an office in 60–90 minutes.

Which one is ISO 27001 certified?

desk.ly states that it is independently certified to ISO 27001 and hosts on AWS in Frankfurt. Desk & Park is not certified yet; ISO 27001 and SOC 2 are planned. Desk & Park instead gives every customer organisation its own PostgreSQL database, hosted in the EU.

Can I use SSO and SCIM without an enterprise contract?

In Desk & Park, yes: OpenID Connect SSO and SCIM provisioning for Entra ID and Okta are on every plan, including the free Start plan; SAML is not supported. In desk.ly, Microsoft and Google sign-in are on all plans, while SCIM user sync is listed in Enterprise Plus, which is priced on request.

Does desk.ly include parking and a mobile app?

Yes, from the Enterprise plan (from €2.75 per user per month): the plan cards list parking booking, meeting rooms and native iOS and Android apps there, not in Corporate. Desk & Park includes parking and EV charger spots on every plan; it runs in the browser as a PWA with an Android app, and an iOS app is planned for 2027.