Hardware
Biometric attendance machines, specified for your site — not for a brochure
- Supply only or supply & install
- All 7 emirates
- Enrolment tested at survey
Choose by technology
Four hardware families, four different sets of trade-offs
Face Recognition Terminals
The default choice for UAE industrial, construction and healthcare sites, and increasingly for offices where staff resist touch readers.
Typically used for: Main entrances, site and accommodation gates, production floor entrances, and any environment where fingerprint enrolment fails on a meaningful share of staff.
View 3 device types & specs →Where it wins
- Fully contactless — no hygiene objection, no shared touch surface
- Unaffected by gloves, dust, oil, cuts or worn fingerprints
- Fast enough for shift-change surges (typically under a second per person)
- Works with safety helmets and standard face masks on current terminals
Where it struggles
- Higher unit cost than fingerprint or card readers
- Needs sensible placement — direct sun or strong backlight on the lens degrades accuracy
- Full-face protection such as welding shields or respirators will not verify
- Requires a mounting height appropriate to your workforce; a single fixed height suits a narrower range of people than you would expect
Fingerprint & Palm Readers
The lowest-cost biometric option and entirely adequate for office environments. Genuinely unsuitable for some industrial workforces.
Typically used for: Offices, clinics, retail back offices, schools and any environment where hands are clean and ungloved. Test enrolment on your actual workforce before committing to it at scale.
View 3 device types & specs →Where it wins
- Lowest cost per device of any biometric technology
- Well understood by staff, minimal training needed
- Compact and discreet; suits reception and office door placement
- Palm vein variants read beneath the skin surface and avoid most fingerprint problems
Where it struggles
- Worn fingerprints from manual labour cause genuine enrolment failures — commonly a noticeable share of a construction or factory workforce
- Defeated by gloves, dust, oil, moisture and cuts
- Touch surface raises hygiene objections in clinical and food environments
- Slower throughput than contactless at shift change
Card & RFID Readers
Not a biometric, and shareable by design — but essential as a fallback credential and for people you cannot enrol.
Typically used for: Visitor and contractor passes, a fallback credential for staff who cannot enrol biometrically, and door access in low-risk areas. Not appropriate as the sole method for payroll-critical attendance.
View 2 device types & specs →Where it wins
- Lowest cost per device and per credential
- Instant issue and revocation — no enrolment appointment needed
- Ideal for visitors, contractors and temporary staff
- Works for anyone, with no enrolment failure possible
Where it struggles
- Cards are shareable — buddy punching is trivial without supervision
- Cards are lost, forgotten and cloned; low-frequency 125kHz cards are particularly easy to clone
- Ongoing consumable cost as cards are replaced
- Provides no proof that the cardholder was actually present
Turnstiles, Speed Gates & Barriers
Tripod turnstiles, full-height gates, office speed gates and vehicle barriers — integrated with the same credential as attendance.
Typically used for: Sites where an accurate live headcount is a requirement rather than a preference — large construction projects, factories, ports, and corporate lobbies where tailgating must be controlled.
View 4 device types & specs →Where it wins
- Physically enforces one-person-one-entry; a reader alone does not
- Enables accurate real-time on-site headcount for evacuation and audit
- Deters tailgating, which is the main weakness of an unenforced reader
- Speed gates suit corporate lobbies without looking industrial
Where it struggles
- Significant civil works — floor fixing, power and cable routing
- Longest lead time of any element, and the main driver of project duration
- Needs a compliant adjacent emergency escape route, which affects the layout
- Throughput per lane is finite; peak flow determines lane count
Brands
Hardware platforms we supply and support
ZKTeco
Widest range and the best price-to-capability ratio in the UAE market
Attendance terminals across every technology and price point, with strong local availability and spare parts. The default choice for most UAE attendance projects.
Suprema
Best-in-class biometric accuracy and enterprise access control
High-accuracy fingerprint and face algorithms, robust access control architecture, and enterprise-grade software. Favoured where security is the primary driver.
Hikvision
Strong where attendance sits alongside CCTV on one platform
Face terminals and access control that integrate cleanly with an existing Hikvision camera estate, which many UAE buildings already have.
Not sure which technology suits your workforce?
This is the decision that determines whether the system still works in year three. Our machine finder asks five questions about your hands, your environment and your shift pattern, and returns a specification you can put out to quotation — including to other suppliers.
Open the machine finderGet a hardware quotation
Tell us your entrances, headcount and site conditions. We quote hardware alone, or hardware with installation, software and training as one fixed figure.
Same-day response, on-site survey within 48 hours