Remote monitoring or a security guard?
We sell monitoring, so treat this accordingly — but the answer is genuinely "it depends", and the deciding question is not cost.
- The dividing line is intervention. A guard can walk towards a problem; we cannot, and never will.
- A guard covers one place at a time. Cameras cover every corner at once, but nobody arrives.
- An overnight guard runs roughly $7,900 to $12,600 a month. A 32-camera overnight watch with us is $1,495.
- If your site needs someone physically present — access control, escorting staff, a visible deterrent at the gate — monitoring does not replace that.
- Many sites end up with both: a guard where presence matters, cameras over everything else.
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What each one actually does
One of them can walk outside and deal with it. The other cannot, at any price, on any plan.
A security guard is a person on your site. They can walk a perimeter, challenge someone, unlock a door for a late delivery, stand at a gate where being visible is the whole point, and physically place themselves between a problem and your property.
Remote monitoring is a person watching your cameras from somewhere else. They can see more of your site at once than any guard can, confirm whether something is a person or a fox, and get a phone call to you in minutes with a clip attached. What they cannot do is go outside and deal with it.
Everything else in this comparison follows from that one difference. It is not a detail to be worked around; it is the product boundary, and any monitoring company that blurs it is selling you something it cannot deliver at 3 am.
One guard is in one place at a time
This is the part that gets underestimated. A single guard patrolling a yard is, at any given moment, looking at one part of it. Everything else is unwatched until the patrol comes back round — and a patrol route is a schedule that anyone watching for a week can learn.
An operator with your cameras on screen sees the north fence, the loading dock and the compound gate at the same time, and keeps seeing them while walking somewhere is not an option. On a large or awkwardly shaped site, that difference in simultaneous coverage often matters more than the ability to intervene.
The honest version of the trade: cameras see everywhere and reach nowhere; a guard reaches one place and sees one place.
What each costs, a month
Unarmed guards in the United States bill somewhere around $22 to $35 an hour depending on the market, with coastal metros at the top of that and southern markets below it. That is the billed rate, not the wage — it carries the guarding company's insurance, supervision and margin.
Set against a twelve-hour overnight shift, every night, for a thirty-day month:
Twelve hours a night for thirty nights. Guard rates are billed rates, which carry the guarding company's insurance, supervision and margin. Ours is a flat monthly price for the site, whatever is on the wall.
Where a guard is the right answer
These are jobs monitoring does not do, and we would rather say so than take an order we cannot serve properly.
- Anywhere presence itself is the deterrent — a manned gate, a reception desk, a site where people need to see someone in uniform.
- Access control that needs a human: signing in contractors, checking vehicles, opening up for a delivery outside hours.
- Escorting staff to their cars at night, or any duty of care that requires someone to be there with them.
- Sites where the response time from any third party is too long to matter, and the only useful intervention is immediate.
- Anywhere a licence, an insurer or a contract specifically requires a manned guarding presence. Check this before you switch anything.
Where monitoring is the better buy
- Large or multi-corner sites where a patrol route leaves long blind periods.
- Overnight and weekend cover on a site that is empty — nothing to escort, nobody to admit, just a need to know quickly.
- Sites that already have decent camera coverage doing nothing but recording for after the fact.
- Anywhere the budget does not stretch to a guard every night. A month of monitoring costs less than a week of guarding.
- Multiple sites at once: cameras scale by adding cameras, guards scale by hiring people.
The answer is often both
The pairing that works is a guard where presence is doing real work — the gate, the entrance, the hours when people are moving around — and cameras watching everything else, including the hours when the guard has gone home.
Done that way the monitoring is not replacing the guard; it is covering the eleven hours and the nine corners the guard was never going to reach. Several of our clients started by cutting a second overnight guard rather than the first one.
How to decide, in one question
Ask what you want to happen ninety seconds after something starts.
If the answer is "somebody should be standing there", you need a guard, and no amount of camera coverage substitutes. If the answer is "I want to know, with proof, and I will decide what to do", monitoring does that for a fraction of the money and sees far more of your site while doing it.
If the answer is "both, depending on where", that is not indecision. That is usually the correct specification.
Questions we get asked
Can monitoring replace my guard entirely?
Only if nothing on your site needs a person physically present. If the guard is also doing access control, escorting staff or standing somewhere visible, monitoring covers the watching part and leaves the rest undone.
Do you call the police when you see something?
No. We alert the contacts you name and send the clip; you decide whether to call police, send someone down, or leave it until morning. That decision stays with you.
How fast do you actually alert?
Five to ten minutes from the operator confirming an event is real. It is a target rather than a guarantee, and we report against it every week.
Is it cheaper to have a guard watch the cameras on site?
Usually not. You are paying a guard rate for screen-watching, and a guard watching monitors cannot patrol at the same time — so you get the cost of presence without the benefit of it.
What if my insurer requires manned guarding?
Then keep the guard. Check the policy wording before you change anything; some cover is written around a specified guarding arrangement and monitoring will not satisfy it.
Can we start with the hours a guard is not there?
That is the most common way in. Put monitoring on the overnight window first, keep whatever daytime presence you need, and judge it against a month of logs.
Not sure which you need?
Tell us what the site is and what happens there after dark. If the answer is a guard, we will say so.