Search for free digital signage software and you get hundreds of results. Almost none of them are free in the way you probably mean. Some are free for one screen. Some are free for 14 days. Some are genuinely free forever, but only if you are prepared to run a server yourself.
This page sorts them out. We sell signage software, so we have an obvious interest here. We have tried to write it so that you could use it to decide against buying from us, because that is the only version worth publishing.
What “free” usually means in this market
There are four different things vendors mean when they say free, and they are not interchangeable.
A free tier with a screen limit. You get a permanent account at no cost, capped at one to three screens, often with the vendor’s logo on your display. This is real, and for a single screen in a small shop it can be all you ever need. The catch arrives at screen two.
A free trial. Full product, 14 or 30 days, then a card. Useful for evaluating. Not a plan.
Genuinely open source. The software is licensed so you can download, run and modify it forever, at no cost, for any number of screens. Nobody can take it away or change the price. The cost moves from the licence to your infrastructure and your time.
Ad-supported or watermarked. Less common than it used to be, but some free tiers put a logo in the corner of your content. On a menu board in a restaurant, that is somebody else’s branding on your wall.
The open-source options, honestly
These are the ones you can actually download today.
Xibo
Xibo is the most complete open-source signage CMS available. The server is published under the AGPLv3, on GitHub, and you can run it on your own hardware for nothing, for as many screens as you like. It has proper scheduling, multi-zone layouts, playlists, campaigns, display groups, user permissions and a wide widget library. It is not a toy.
Two things to know. First, Docker is the supported way to install it, the project states that non-Docker installs are community-supported only. Second, not every player is free: the Windows player is free of charge under the AGPLv3, while the Android, webOS, Tizen and ChromeOS players are commercial products that need a licence per device. So “free CMS” and “free everything” are not the same sentence.
We should be upfront: easyCMS is built on the Xibo engine. More on what that means below.
Anthias (formerly Screenly OSE)
Anthias is the open-source project maintained by Screenly. It runs on Raspberry Pi 2 through Pi 5, on x86 PCs and on 64-bit ARM boards like Rock Pi and Orange Pi. It shows images, videos and web pages, and you manage it through a simple web interface.
It is deliberately simpler than Xibo, and that is both the appeal and the limit. Its own documentation is honest about video: decoding is done in software, which it describes as fine for casual 720p, stutter-prone at 1080p on slower boards, and not suitable for 4K. If your content is a rotating set of images and light web pages on one or two screens, Anthias is excellent and costs nothing. If you need heavy video, multi-zone layouts or scheduling across dozens of sites, it is the wrong tool.
piSignage server
The piSignage server is on GitHub under the MIT licence. Self-hosting it means installing MongoDB, Node.js, FFmpeg, ImageMagick and Git, and the project recommends a Linux VM with at least 2GB of memory and 30GB of disk. That requirement list is a fair illustration of what “free software” tends to involve in practice.
Everything else
Be sceptical of lists that name twenty open-source signage projects. Many are abandoned, and an unmaintained CMS on a public IP address is a liability, not a saving. Before adopting any of them, check the date of the last commit and whether security issues are still being fixed.
The hidden costs of self-hosting
Self-hosting is legitimate and plenty of organisations do it well. It is not free. Here is the actual bill, using Xibo as the example because its documentation is specific.
A server. A small cloud VM is roughly €10–25 a month depending on the provider and specification. That is €120–300 a year before anything else, and video libraries push you up the storage tiers quickly.
A database. The stack includes MySQL. In a Docker install it runs in a container, which is fine until it isn’t. Somebody has to know how to recover it.
TLS certificates and a reverse proxy. This is the part people miss. The Xibo Docker containers do not provide SSL; the documentation is explicit that SSL termination must be handled by an external web server in front of the CMS. So you are also running and maintaining nginx or similar, plus certificate renewal.
Firewall and ports. Push messaging in Xibo uses XMR, which needs inbound TCP port 9505 open and reachable, alongside ports 80 and 443. Without it, players fall back to polling and changes stop being instant. Getting that through a corporate firewall can take longer than the install did.
Backups. The Docker install takes a daily database dump, but the documentation is clear that maintaining regular backups is your job, and the media library and configuration files are not covered by that database dump. A backup you have never restored is not a backup.
Upgrades. Two to four releases a year is normal. Each one is a maintenance window, a backup, a migration and a rollback plan.
Your time. This is the real cost. Two hours a month of a competent sysadmin, at any realistic internal rate, is worth more than most commercial signage licences. If those two hours are your own evenings, price them anyway.
None of that is an argument against self-hosting. If you already run servers, adding one more is genuinely cheap and you keep full control of your data. If you do not, you are about to become a part-time systems administrator.
Free tiers of commercial products
Several commercial vendors run a permanent free tier. These are the current ones we could verify on their own pricing pages.
| Product | Free tier | Paid entry price |
|---|---|---|
| Yodeck | Free forever, 1 screen, all Basic features, unlimited storage and users | Basic $8 per screen / month |
| OptiSigns | Free, up to 3 screens, 1GB storage, 25 basic apps, OptiSigns logo shown on screen | Standard $10 per screen / month, $9 billed annually |
| info-beamer hosted | Free account, first device free permanently, first 1GB storage free | €0.25 per device per day (about €7.75 a month) |
| Xibo in the Cloud | 14-day trial, 2 players, no card required, trial, not a free tier | Published on request |
| ScreenCloud | None | Core $20 per screen / month, billed annually |
| Rise Vision | None listed | Basic $11 per display / month |
Checked August 2026. Prices and limits change often, always confirm on the vendor’s own pricing page before deciding.
The pattern is clear. Free tiers exist to get you to screen two. That is not sinister, it is just how the model works, and if you genuinely only ever need one screen, a good free tier is the cheapest correct answer. Run the numbers for the network you will have in three years, not the one you have today. Ten screens at $10 a month is $1,200 a year, every year.
So is easyCMS free?
No. easyCMS is not free, and we should stop calling it that.
An easyCMS account is €49, paid once. That includes one display licence, 300MB of cloud storage, the hosted CMS, software updates and expert support. Extra display licences are €99 each, also one-time. There is no monthly fee, ever, on those plans. Our older version of this article called easyCMS “free” because the underlying software is free. That was a stretch, and we have corrected it.
What the €49 buys is the part that is not free anywhere: somebody else runs the server, terminates the TLS, keeps XMR reachable, takes the backups, applies the upgrades and answers the phone when a screen goes black on a Friday afternoon. That is the whole product. The full breakdown is on our pricing page and we have worked through the maths per screen in our cost per screen guide.
And to be completely explicit: if you are willing to host Xibo yourself, that route is free and entirely legitimate. Xibo is AGPLv3 software. You do not need our permission, our account or our licences to use it. Download it, run it, and you have most of what our customers have, minus the hosting and the support. We are open about being built on Xibo, it is a mature, actively developed engine, and building on it is why we can charge once instead of monthly. If you have the skills and the appetite, self-hosting will cost you less money and more time. That trade is yours to make. You can read more about who we are on our about page, or start with what digital signage is if the whole idea is new to you.
Which route should you choose?
Choose free open source if you have IT capability in-house, you want full control of your infrastructure, you are running a lot of screens on a small budget, or your organisation has a policy about self-hosting. Xibo for a full-featured deployment, Anthias if your content is simple and Raspberry Pi hardware suits you.
Choose a commercial free tier if you have one screen, no plans for a second, and you do not mind a vendor logo on your display. It is a real answer and you should take it.
Choose a paid one-time licence if you want somebody else to run the server, you have somewhere between two and twenty-five screens, you would rather not learn Docker, and you dislike subscriptions. That is the case easyCMS is built for. Our features page lists exactly what is included.
Choose a subscription product if you need something we do not offer, or you specifically want ongoing paid support commitments at enterprise scale.
There is no shame in any of the four. The mistake is picking free without pricing the hours.
Frequently asked questions
Is digital signage software really free? Some of it genuinely is. Xibo, Anthias and piSignage are open source and cost nothing to license, for any number of screens. What you pay instead is server hosting, setup and ongoing maintenance. Free tiers from commercial vendors are also real, but capped at one to three screens.
What is the best free digital signage software? For a full-featured deployment you self-host, Xibo. For simple image and web-page playback on a Raspberry Pi, Anthias. For a single screen with no server at all, a commercial free tier such as Yodeck’s is easier than either.
Can I use free software commercially? Yes. The AGPLv3 and MIT licences on these projects permit commercial use. The AGPLv3 has obligations if you modify the software and offer it to others over a network, so read it if you plan to build a product on top.
Is free software less secure? Not inherently, open code is widely reviewed. The risk is operational: a self-hosted CMS you forget to patch is far more exposed than a hosted one somebody else updates. Choose based on whether you will actually maintain it.
Do I need to pay for player software? Sometimes. With Xibo, the Windows player is free under the AGPLv3, while the Android, webOS and Tizen players are commercial and licensed per device. With easyCMS, each display needs one licence and the player software for Windows, Android and LG webOS is covered by it.
What is the cheapest way to run ten screens? Self-hosted Xibo on a €15-a-month VM, if you can maintain it: around €180 a year plus your time and any commercial player licences. With easyCMS: €49 for the account plus nine licences at €99, so €940 once, with nothing after that. A $10 per screen subscription would be $1,200 every year. Which is cheapest depends entirely on how long you keep the screens and what your time is worth.
Still not sure? Email info@myeasycms.com or call +48 509 937 137. We will tell you if self-hosting is the better answer for your situation, we would rather do that than sell you something you did not need.