Desk & Park vs Envoy: desk booking without a platform fee

Envoy and Desk & Park both price desk, room and parking booking per bookable resource, so the difference is the rate and what sits on top of it. Envoy Reservations lists 5 USD per bookable resource per month, billed annually, plus a platform fee whose amount is not published (envoy.com/pricing, October 2026): for 100 desks, parking spots and rooms that is at least 6,000 USD a year. Desk & Park Pro covers up to 125 spaces for 2,300 USD a year, with SSO and SCIM on every plan and data hosted in the EU. Envoy is the stronger product for visitor management; Desk & Park is built for desks, the car park and EV chargers.

Hybrid work in 2026 has a familiar shape: from Tuesday to Thursday the office is full and the car park runs out by nine, on Monday and Friday it is half empty. The pattern is commonly observed rather than universal, but it is why companies stop managing desks in a spreadsheet and start asking which platform, at what total cost, with the data where.

Envoy (envoy.com) is a workplace platform best known for visitor management: iPad sign-in at reception, badge printing, legal documents signed on arrival, ID scanning and blocklist checks. Around it, Envoy sells modules on a shared platform: Reservations (desks, rooms, parking), Deliveries (mailroom), Screens (digital signage) and Response (emergency notifications). Its pricing page shows G2 badges for visitor and space management. Desk & Park is narrower: desks, parking spots, EV charger spots and meeting rooms on one map, with QR check-in and automatic release of what nobody uses.

Annual cost for 100 bookable spaces (75 desks, 20 parking spots, 5 rooms) as headcount grows from 50 to 400. Envoy's line excludes its unpublished platform fee. Envoy prices from envoy.com, October 2026.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

Both vendors count objects, not people, so headcount can grow without the booking bill following it. The difference lies in the rate and the extras.

Envoy, per envoy.com/pricing (October 2026):

• Reservations: 5 USD per bookable resource per month, billed annually. A desk, a room or a parking spot each count as one resource.
• Platform fee: every plan "starts with the platform", which is "priced as a flat annual fee" and must be bought with at least one module. The amount is not published; module prices are marked "Price excludes platform fee".
• Visitors: free Basic plan (100 visitor entries a month, up to 50 employees, one location); Premium 362 USD per location per month, billed annually; Enterprise on quote.
• Other modules: Deliveries 250 USD per location, Screens 12 USD per device, Response 2 USD per user, each per month, billed annually, excluding the platform fee.
• Hardware: Envoy's FAQ says Visitors and room displays need an iPad; accessories are sold in the Envoy Store.

Desk & Park is priced per bookable object with unlimited users. Start is free for up to 10 objects at one location; Standard is 128 USD a month or 1,280 USD a year for up to 75 objects and 3 locations; Pro is 230 USD a month or 2,300 USD a year for up to 125 objects and 10 locations; Enterprise is a custom contract above 125. No floor-plan fees, no implementation project.

The scenario. 175 employees, 75 desks, 20 parking spots (4 with EV chargers) and 5 meeting rooms: 100 bookable objects in one office.

Both vendors publish in US dollars, so this version needs no currency conversion; Desk & Park prices are net, and Envoy's page does not state its tax treatment. With Envoy's platform fee counted as zero, the reading most favourable to Envoy, Desk & Park Pro costs 3,700 USD less per year, or 61.7 % less. Any platform fee widens the gap.

Growth. If headcount rises from 175 to 250 and the office keeps its 100 objects, neither bill changes. If the company adds 25 parking spots, Envoy adds 25 × 60 USD = 1,500 USD a year (7,500 USD before the platform fee), while Desk & Park stays at 2,300 USD, because 125 objects still fit the Pro plan. Above 125 objects Desk & Park moves to an Enterprise contract.

Visitors on top. Envoy Visitors Premium adds 362 USD × 12 = 4,344 USD per location per year. Desk & Park has a visitors page for registering expected guests, plus guest bookings for desks and parking, but it is not a reception system with badges or ID checks.

Architecture, security and where the data lives

Desk & Park runs 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 it matters). Databases are hosted in Frankfurt, the application in the Netherlands. Backups are encrypted nightly, admin actions land in an audit log, and every user can sign in with TOTP two-factor authentication or a passkey. Single sign-on via OpenID Connect (Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace, Okta, other OIDC providers) and SCIM provisioning are on every plan, including the free one.

The honest gaps: OIDC only, no SAML, and ISO 27001 and SOC 2 are planned, not certified. A data-processing agreement is published at /dpa; data export and deletion requests are in settings.

Envoy publishes, as of October 2026:

• Certifications: its security page states "ISO 27001 Certified by Schellman", and its aerospace page describes Envoy as ISO/IEC 27001 certified and SOC 2 compliant. For a procurement checklist, that is a real advantage.
• SSO: the Visitors plan table lists SAML single sign-on on Premium and Enterprise; the Premium platform lists "SCIM/SSO integrations", and the Enterprise platform adds SCIM admin provisioning, custom admin roles and an event log.
• Hosting: a post of 29 October 2024 announced EU data centres for Envoy Visitors. The pages we checked do not say whether Reservations data can stay in the EU; ask in writing.
• Tenancy model: not published.

Features 07–10 of the Top 10 Desk & Park features: room tablet, Board Reports, integrations, security and EU data.

Employee experience and team coordination

Envoy offers a native mobile app for iOS and Android, booking from Google Calendar and Outlook, maps with labelled team "neighborhoods", desks for a day or longer, hourly and multi-day bookings, and parking with accessibility and EV spots. iPad room displays allow walk-up booking and check-in at the door. Where Envoy already runs reception, employees get one app for visitors, packages and desks.

Desk & Park starts from the browser: the web app runs on any phone or desktop and installs as a PWA, with nothing to distribute through an app store. An Android app adds a native QR scanner, fingerprint or face unlock and push notifications; the iOS app is planned for 2027. Interface and e-mails come in 10 languages.

• The map is the booking screen (feature 01 of the Top 10): the admin uploads a floor-plan image and places desks and rooms; employees pick a spot colour-coded by availability for the chosen day.
• Desks, parking and rooms in one place (feature 03): parking has its own maps, several areas per location, with EV charger spots marked ⚡. A desk and a parking spot booked together arrive as one calendar invitation.
• Who's in the office (feature 04): booked colleagues' photos or initials in their team colour, a green dot once checked in, and today's roster by team. The company can switch it off and anyone can hide themselves.
• Assigned spaces you can hand back (feature 06): board members keep a permanent desk or spot; "I'm away today" releases it for the day and "Take back" reverses that until someone claims it.
• Guests: an executive assistant books desks, spots and rooms for visitors without creating accounts (guest bookings).
• Room tablet (feature 07): a web page in the tablet's browser showing one room's day, refreshed every 10 seconds, taking the organiser's check-in. No extra licence; it does not take bookings.

Integrations are lighter than Envoy's: calendar invitations, Slack or Microsoft Teams notifications, and two-way room-calendar sync with Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace on Pro and Enterprise. Envoy's catalogue reaches into access control (Brivo, LenelS2, Genetec), ServiceNow and DocuSign.

Space optimisation and AI recommendations

The costly problem in a hybrid office is the ghost booking: a desk or parking spot reserved and never used, which blocks a colleague on a peak day and inflates occupancy data. Both products answer with check-in and auto-release; Envoy lists auto-release for desks, rooms and parking, with reminders.

In Desk & Park every desk, parking spot and room carries a QR sticker (feature 02). Scanning a free desk books it and checks you in with one tap. A desk or parking booking not checked in by your organisation's deadline, for example 10:00, returns to the pool automatically. Meeting rooms are released only if the organisation turns that on (off by default, after 5 to 120 minutes without a check-in); scanning a free room's QR books the next half hour. A sticker needs no device on the wall, which matters in a car park (how auto-release frees space).

Board Reports (feature 08) measure occupancy against seats that could actually be booked and show the no-show rate per floor and resource, usage by department and team, EV charging demand and the peak day, for 7 days to a year, with CSV export.

AI recommendations are deliberately modest. An admin clicks "Generate report"; a large language model receives aggregates only, no employee names, and returns 3–6 recommendations (cost saving, space consolidation, EV optimisation, ghost-booking alerts, ESG, capacity planning), each with a model-written impact estimate that the board dismisses or marks done. It is not predictive forecasting, and Desk & Park does not calculate savings: the estimate is a hypothesis to verify.

Envoy's analytics are tiered: the Premium platform lists "basic product analytics (no custom dashboard, no scheduled reports)", and Enterprise adds advanced analytics and presence signals from HRIS, Wi-Fi and access control. To correlate badge swipes with bookings, that layer goes further than Desk & Park.

Features 01–06 of the Top 10: what employees use every day.

Side by side

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

Verdict

Envoy is the better fit when reception is the centre of the problem. Its visitor management is mature: badges, legal documents signed before arrival, ID scanning, blocklists, access-control and guest Wi-Fi integrations, a virtual front desk. If you also want a mailroom log, signage and emergency notifications from one vendor, and procurement requires ISO 27001 or SAML today, Envoy covers that in one contract.

Desk & Park is the better fit when the daily friction is desks and the car park rather than the lobby. For 100 objects you pay 2,300 USD a year with no platform fee and no per-user charge, one admin sets it up in an afternoon, parking and EV chargers are first-class objects on the same map, and SSO plus SCIM come even on the free plan, with data in the EU in a database of your own. A company already on Envoy Visitors can run Desk & Park for desks and parking alone.

See pricing, the onboarding guide, the Top 10 Desk & Park features and the parking management guide.

FAQ

Is Desk & Park cheaper than Envoy for desk and parking booking?

For 100 desks, parking spots and rooms, Envoy Reservations costs 100 × 5 USD × 12 = 6,000 USD a year plus an unpublished platform fee (envoy.com, October 2026). Desk & Park Pro costs 2,300 USD a year for up to 125 objects. Even with Envoy's platform fee at zero, Desk & Park is about 62 % cheaper here.

Does Desk & Park replace Envoy Visitors?

Not fully. Desk & Park registers expected guests and lets an assistant book desks, parking spots and rooms for them without accounts, but it does not print badges, scan IDs or collect signed documents. Envoy Visitors does, from a free Basic plan to Premium at 362 USD per location per month.

Is Envoy priced per user or per location?

It depends on the module: Reservations per bookable resource (5 USD a month, billed annually), Visitors and Deliveries per location, Screens per device, Response per user, all on a platform with a flat annual fee. Desk & Park is priced only per bookable object, with unlimited users.

Does Desk & Park support SAML and hold ISO 27001?

Not today. Desk & Park offers OpenID Connect single sign-on and SCIM on every plan, including the free one, and one PostgreSQL database per customer in the EU. ISO 27001 and SOC 2 are planned; Envoy states ISO 27001 certification by Schellman.

How long does it take to set up Desk & Park?

The onboarding guide quotes 60–90 minutes for one office in six steps: company account, plan image, placing spaces, printing QR stickers, inviting users from a CSV and the first booking. One administrator does it without an implementation project.