Many digital signage companies develop enterprise-grade software, and because of staff costs, operating expenses and overhead, this development can be expensive. From an end-user perspective, the cost of such software can sometimes be too high, which pushes users toward open-source alternatives. However, open-source projects (in the digital signage sector) are typically difficult to get support for and often require in-house expertise to maintain.
Many digital signage companies produce enterprise-class software, and developing this software is expensive due to personnel costs, operating expenses, overheads and other factors. From the end user's perspective, the cost of this software can sometimes be high. Because of these high costs, users often turn to open-source projects. However, open-source projects (in the digital signage sector) are generally difficult to support, take a long time to develop, may contain bugs and can quickly fall out of date.
While open-source applications are solid in many categories in terms of usability, performance and stability, the situation is different in the digital signage sector. Although digital signage software is often thought of as simple, it actually consists of many details and developing it is a team effort.
Free software that seems affordable initially can lead to support and application issues over time, causing users to look for alternatives — and in most cases they end up switching to paid software.
At Temas Teknoloji, we develop several different digital signage software alternatives and offer them to our customers as licensed products. However, customers who purchase only hardware from us may, in some cases, install open-source software on the hardware they buy.
Among open-source digital signage software, the most popular options are generally backed by companies that also sell paid modules to some degree. The best examples are Xibo and Rise Vision. Xibo is particularly well known in Turkey and in many other countries as an open-source digital signage platform, and Rise Vision, which has been in the industry since 1992, operates in a similar space. Some time ago, Rise Vision changed its business model, making the CMS free and instead charging a per-screen fee. Some open-source projects are now even offering paid editions for SoC-powered commercial-grade displays while remaining free at the core.
Free Digital Signage Software
In summary, open-source digital signage software offers a price advantage to users. It can be used in simpler projects with a small number of displays, but in larger-scale deployments certain shortcomings may begin to show over time.
