DeckVakt vs ISF Watchkeeper

They are not substitutes. ISF Watchkeeper is the commercial standard for logging work and rest against STCW, MLC and related rules, with shore-side visibility. DeckVakt is a sailing watch app that builds a yacht watch rota and runs it at sea. If you came here looking for an alternative, you probably need to know which job you actually have.

Two different jobs

One job is compliance: prove, after the fact and during the month, that each seafarer had the rest the conventions require, with signatures, vessel joining and leaving, and a manager in an office who can see non-conformities. That is Watchkeeper, workrest, and a handful of yacht-crew HR apps.

The other job is the night: who is on deck at 03:10, does their phone wake them, what are the standing orders, what goes in the log, and can any of that happen with no signal. That is a sailing watch app. DeckVakt is built for that job, and then writes rest-hours paper from it.

What Watchkeeper is for

ISF Watchkeeper is developed with the International Chamber of Shipping. It is accepted by port state control as a work/rest platform for the merchant world and for commercial yachts that live in that world. Mobile logging, predictive non-conformity, electronic signing, cloud sync to a web app, fleet dashboards.

If you run a programme of charter weeks, a large yacht with a rotating professional crew, or a company that must show STCW/MLC compliance to an office, that is the product category. It is not trying to pick a Swedish watch system or escalate a silent-mode alarm in mid-Atlantic.

What DeckVakt is for

A skipper with three to twelve people, a passage measured in days, a need for a fair watch rota, and no interest in giving a shore server the crew list. Offline board, alarms, standing orders, deck log, fatigue projection, MLC-style export from what happened. Crew join by QR and never pay. The whole system is usable on the phones. The desk app is extra: a wide screen plus fairness, rest hours and the other statistics if you want them laid out.

It will not give you a fleet dashboard. It will not replace a DPA’s compliance stack. It will get a crossing from the marina to the other side with the watches stood and the paper written.

Where they overlap

Both care about 10 hours in 24 and 77 in 7. Both will tell you four on four off is a problem. Both can, in principle, produce a rest record. The difference is the source: Watchkeeper is a timesheet that can be planned ahead; DeckVakt is a rota engine that happens to emit a timesheet.

If you need both jobs — a coded yacht that also does real offshore passages — you may end up with both, used for different weeks. That is not a failure of either product.

Which one you need

Need port-state-ready work/rest across a professional crew and a shore office? Watchkeeper or equivalent. Need to leave on Saturday with a fair rota, alarms and a log, and maybe an hours-of-rest PDF at the other end? DeckVakt. Need a leave calendar for a racing crew that sleeps at home? Neither. Delivery and coded yachts sit in the middle: the rota, the rest record, and the handover pack.

Questions skippers ask