Compared to ScreenCloud
A self-hosted alternative to ScreenCloud
ScreenCloud is a polished hosted signage platform and it is genuinely easy to start with. The two questions that bring people here are where the content lives and what the bill looks like at fifty screens.
What ScreenCloud is good at
The case for staying put, first
A comparison where the other product has no advantages is marketing, and everybody can tell. These are real, and most of them are things we have deliberately chosen not to be.
- Signing up and having something on a screen the same afternoon, with nothing to install and no server to own.
- A large library of ready-made apps and integrations, which is a real amount of work you do not have to do.
- Somebody else patching the platform, watching the uptime and answering at four in the morning.
What changes if you move
Where it runs
Your server, your database. No outbound connection is required at all, which is the part that decides whether an estate with a procurement process can use it. The content, the schedule and the audit trail stay on hardware you control, and they survive us going away.
What it costs as you grow
You buy a band for the size of your estate and the screens inside it are free. The hundredth screen costs what the twenty-sixth did. Per-screen billing is perfectly reasonable at three screens and becomes a budget line somebody defends every year at a hundred - and the first thing that happens then is that people stop adding screens they need.
Reaching a screen that is busy
An emergency notice covers whatever is on the screen in two to five seconds, including a screen running somebody else's application. On Android that needs the overlay permission and it is the thing most often missing when a building already has screens showing a news channel nobody can change.
When the network drops
Playback runs from a local cache, so a dropped connection is not a dark screen. Eight hours offline is a supported state rather than a failure, and the player catches up by itself when the link returns.
How each one is billed
ScreenCloud
Hosted, billed per screen per month. Check their page for the current figure.
Their pricing pageSignvero
Self-hosted, licensed per estate. You buy a band for the number of screens you have and the screens inside it are free.
Our pricingWe do not print their price here. Any vendor can change one this afternoon, and a comparison carrying last year’s figure is worse than one carrying none.
Straight answer
When you should stay with ScreenCloud
- Nobody in your organisation is willing to own a server. Self-hosting is cheaper and more private precisely because you are doing the part they charge for, and a system nobody patches is worse than a subscription nobody enjoys paying.
- You have a handful of screens in one building. Per-screen pricing does not hurt yet, and it may never.
- You depend on one of their integrations, and rebuilding it is worth more than the difference in the invoice.
If you recognised yourself in any of those, buy the other thing. You will be happier, and we would rather say so on this page than six weeks into a pilot.
Also compared
The rest of the field
Yodeck
For estates that outgrew per-screen billing, or cannot send content off site.
OptiSigns
The same estate, licensed per site rather than per screen, on infrastructure you own.
Xibo
Also self-hosted. The difference is how much of your week it asks for.
Rise Vision
Strong in schools. The question is where the data sits and what the alert path is.
NoviSign
Same capability, on your own infrastructure, priced by estate rather than by screen.
See it beside ScreenCloud
We will set up a live system with your own login so you can put the two next to each other, rather than taking a comparison page's word for it.
No open demo, no sign-up wall, a person reads every request.