The comparison is not about modernity. It comes down to four concrete points: total cost, lead time, managing non-employee populations, and revocation. And to what the physical badge still does better.
The price of the blank card is the visible part, and the least significant. The full cost includes the printer and its maintenance, consumables, the administrative time to issue and hand over, buffer stock, handling losses, and replacing cards never returned by leavers.
Across several thousand employees with turnover, temporary staff and contractors, those are the lines that weigh — not the plastic. The calculation deserves to be run on your real figures rather than market averages: the spread between organizations is considerable.
A physical badge requires people to be present: someone prints it, someone hands it over. For a new joiner that usually means waiting until their first day, and sometimes longer if the office is closed or the printer is down.
A mobile credential is issued remotely and activates immediately. Someone can have their access the day before they arrive. For a multi-site organization, that is the difference between a central process that works and a local one that depends on whoever happens to be on site.
This is where the gap is widest, and it is the most underestimated point. These populations are numerous, constantly changing, and their access is temporary by nature.
With physical badges, every assignment opens a small logistics chain: issue, hand over, track, recover. Recovery regularly fails, and the pool of active cards drifts quietly away from who is actually on site. With a mobile credential, access is dated at issue and expires on its own.
A lost physical badge stays active until someone reports it, and remains physically in circulation even once deactivated. A digital badge is revoked remotely, immediately, and vanishes from the phone.
Then there is cloning: older-technology cards, still widespread across installed estates, can be duplicated with equipment anyone can buy. A credential held in a smartphone’s secure element cannot be copied.
It would be dishonest to present this one-sidedly. The physical badge keeps two genuine advantages:
That is why serious deployments do not abolish the card: they return it to what it does well, reserving it for the cases where it is still the right tool. The question is not “one or the other”, but “what proportion of my estate can move to mobile, and by when”.
Thirty minutes, starting from your situation: your readers, your headcount, your security constraints. No generic deck.