Xibo Hosting Cost: Cloud, Self-Hosted or Managed

The Xibo software is free, and always has been. It is open source under the AGPLv3, and nobody charges you a licence fee to download it. What costs money is running it somewhere reliable, keeping it patched, and having someone answer when a screen goes dark.

This article puts numbers against the three ways to run Xibo: the project’s own Xibo Cloud, your own server, or a managed instance. easyCMS is the third kind, so we are in an odd position to write it, and we have included the parts that do not flatter us. Figures were checked in September 2026 and quoted as printed. We do not convert currencies, and where a line is our assumption rather than a published price, it says so.

Is Xibo free? Yes, genuinely

You can download the CMS, run it on as many screens as you like, and never pay the project anything. There is no trial period, no screen count that trips a paywall, and no crippled community edition sitting next to a real one.

Two things are not free, and both catch people out. Somewhere to run it: a CMS is a web application with a database, and it needs a server that stays up, a domain, a certificate and backups. And commercial player licences: the Windows and Linux players are free software, but the Android, LG webOS Signage and Samsung Tizen players use a per-display licence, on every route in this article including self-hosting.

So the software costs nothing and a working deployment costs something. The rest of this is about how much.

What the AGPLv3 licence means if you are buying rather than coding

Most buyers can ignore a software licence. This one is worth ten minutes, because it changes what happens if your supplier disappears. In plain terms, for someone who will use Xibo rather than modify it:

• You can run it for any purpose, commercial included, on any number of screens, without paying anyone.
• You can read the source, and so can anyone you hire.
• If you modify it and let other people use your modified version over a network, you have to offer them the corresponding source. That network clause is what separates the AGPL from the ordinary GPL.
• Nobody can take the existing code away from you retrospectively.

That last point is the one that matters to a buyer. If a proprietary hosted vendor closes, your content is stranded. If a Xibo host closes, the engine still exists and someone else can stand it up. It is also why we disclose the engine rather than burying it: it is the honest answer to “what happens if you go away”.

Good to know We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. If you intend to modify Xibo and offer it to third parties, read the licence text and ask someone qualified. If you will use it as supplied, there is nothing for you to do.

The three routes, briefly

Xibo Cloud is hosting sold by the project that writes the software, from 4,40€ per display per month on the Professional plan, checked September 2026. Nobody is closer to the code: upgrades land when the project ships them, and you fund upstream development directly, which matters if you care about the engine still being maintained in five years. The model is per display per month, so cost scales with screen count and with time, and “from” is doing real work in that sentence. It is a floor, not a quote.

Self-hosting means renting a VPS or using a machine you already have, installing the CMS and running it. The software line is genuinely zero, and you get full administrator access and storage limited only by your disk. For the right organisation it is the cheapest route by a distance. For the wrong one it is the dearest, and the cost never shows up in the accounts. It shows up in someone’s evenings.

A managed instance means somebody else runs a Xibo CMS and gives you a login: the same engine and editor, without the server. easyCMS hosts in the European Union, at Hetzner in Falkenstein, Germany, on a one-time licence rather than a monthly fee, and there is more detail on managed Xibo hosting. The trade-off is control, and it is a real one.

What the zero-euro software line does not cover

“The software is free” is true and misleading at the same time. Here is the rest of the bill.

Docker upkeep. The supported way to run the CMS is a set of containers: a gift when it works and a skill when it does not. Containers need updating, volumes need to survive a rebuild, and a container that exits at 03:00 does not text you.

Database backups you have actually restored. A backup you have never tested is a folder, not a backup. Layouts, schedules, DataSets, display registrations and permissions all live in the database. Losing it means rebuilding every layout and re-authorising every screen.

TLS certificates. Player-to-CMS traffic should be encrypted, and browsers will not let your team log in comfortably otherwise. Renewal is automatable, and automation breaks quietly. An expired certificate on a signage CMS is a bad morning.

XMR, the push channel. Xibo has a messaging component that lets the CMS tell a player to collect now instead of waiting for its next poll. It is what makes “pull that promotion now” work rather than “pull it within the hour”. It is a separate service with its own port and its own failure mode, and when people say push updates do not work on their instance, this is usually why. Our network requirements guide covers the traffic from the player side.

Major version upgrades. A minor patch is a package update. A major version is a project: release notes, widget checks, a snapshot, a window, then testing the players. CMS and players want to move together, which is why updating players is part of the same job.

Your own troubleshooting, at your own hours. Nobody is on the other end of a ticket. If the person who built it is away when the CMS falls over, the screens keep playing their cache but nothing you publish reaches them. That buys days, not weeks, as we covered in digital signage without internet.

None of this argues against self-hosting. It argues for pricing self-hosting honestly, which means pricing the hours.

Five years, three routes, 1, 5 and 25 displays

CMS and hosting only. The display, the mount, the electrician and the content time are identical whichever route you pick, and they dwarf all of this. We priced those in our cost per screen breakdown.

Assumptions, stated plainly. Sixty months. Xibo Cloud at the Professional entry rate of 4,40€ per display per month, which is a floor. easyCMS priced the way somebody buying their screens now actually pays: the account and the licences in one order, which makes each extra licence a flat 66€ instead of 99€. The self-hosted server line is our assumption, not a quoted price: a small VPS at 10€ a month, or 25€ for 25 displays because storage and players grow. Put your own host’s number in that row.

The easyCMS arithmetic, so you can check it: one display is the 49€ account with its licence included. Five displays is 49€ plus four extra licences at 66€, so 313€. Twenty-five displays is the PRO account at 299€, which already includes one licence, plus 24 more at 66€, so 1,883€. All of it paid once. The 66€ is a third off the 99€ list price, applied automatically at checkout when the account and the licences go through together, with no code to enter.

Added later they are 99€ each, so the same networks are 445€ for five displays and 2,675€ for twenty-five. That is the ceiling, and it is still one payment rather than a monthly one. Above 25 displays you are into Enterprise at 1,290€ per year, which is a subscription and we say so plainly. On Enterprise, licences drop from 99€ to 49€ each. Measured against the 99€ list licence, the annual fee covers itself on licence savings alone at 26 Android displays.

Now the row missing from the cash table.

These are estimates, not measured figures, and they vary enormously with how much Linux your team already does. Multiply the total by your own internal hourly rate and add it to the cash line. At 120 hours and a modest 40€ an hour, that is 4,800€ of time sitting on top of a 600€ server bill.

That is the actual finding of this article. On cash alone, self-hosting one display for five years costs about the same as twelve easyCMS accounts. On cash plus time, it is usually the dearest of the three unless the hours were free anyway.

Watch out We will not divide a euro price by a sterling price and call it a break-even, because we do not convert currencies. Convert the Xibo Cloud figure at your rate on the day, then divide the easyCMS total by the monthly cloud cost for your screen count.

Against the mainstream per-screen subscription platforms, which is the comparison most people are really making, the break-even on a one-time licence lands at roughly six months for a first screen, eight to nine months for each additional licence bought in the same order, and nine to ten months for a 25-screen PRO build. Buy the extra screens later at 99€ and those stretch to twelve or thirteen months per screen and thirteen to fourteen months for the 25-screen build. Those numbers, and the vendors behind them, are in digital signage with no monthly fee, compared.

The player licence applies whichever route you take

Choosing where the CMS lives does not change what the player costs. The Windows and Linux players are free software. Android, LG webOS Signage and Samsung Tizen use a commercial per-display player licence, and self-hosting the CMS on a cheap VPS does not make an Android licence free. easyCMS supports Windows, Android, LG webOS Signage and Samsung Tizen, and supplies the licence as part of the per-display price. There is a fuller platform comparison in Tizen vs webOS vs Android and on our players page, and the mechanics are in display licences and authorisation.

The planning point: if your hardware is Windows mini-PCs, the upstream player licence costs nothing on any route, so the CMS decision is the only one that matters financially. That is not quite the same as free on easyCMS. On the account and on PRO the display licence is the same price whatever the platform, because it is buying the hosted CMS as much as the player. On Enterprise, licences drop from 99€ to 49€ each. If your hardware is Android boxes or Signage-model panels, somebody pays per display on every route, and the only question is who you pay.

Why easyCMS charges 99€ per display

Fair question. Start with what happens after you pay, because that is the part a monthly price never gives you: the line goes flat. A five-screen network bought in one order is 313€ and then nothing, against 1,320€ over the same five years on Xibo Cloud Professional, and it has paid for itself somewhere around month fourteen. A 25-screen PRO build is 1,883€ against 6,600€, square by about month seventeen. By year three you are 479€ ahead on five screens and 2,077€ ahead on twenty-five, and by year five those gaps are 1,007€ and 4,717€. Add the screens later at 99€ each and the totals are 445€ and 2,675€, breaking even at about twenty months and twenty-four months instead. Either way the bill stops.

Now the uncomfortable part, because the question deserves it. Buy a commercial player licence direct from the upstream project and you will pay less than 99€ for it. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and we will not reprint their price here, because it is theirs to publish and it moves. Look it up before you decide.

What the 99€ buys is not just the licence:

• The hosted CMS, maintained in the EU, patched and upgraded by us, with no separate hosting bill.
• Free updates for the life of the account, so you are not buying a snapshot of version 4.5.
• Free guides and an AI assistant, open to everyone with no account, plus an Expert Support Hour at 25€ when you want an engineer on your own setup. The AI assistant, the 25 written guides at /support/ and the FAQ are free to everyone.
• A pre-tested player configuration, so the screen works rather than becoming your project.
• One payment. Not 99€ a year, and not 99€ plus hosting. In the same order as the account it is 66€.

The alternative is genuinely cheaper in licences and genuinely dearer in time. If your hours are cheap or free, take the cheaper licence and run your own CMS, and we mean that. If a day of a competent person’s time costs you more than 300€, the arithmetic changes fast.

If a problem needs someone hands-on rather than a support thread, an expert support hour is 25€, with a written diagnosis and a fixed quote you approve before anything further happens, refunded if the root cause is a bug in easyCMS. There is no gold tier that unlocks a human.

Where the other routes genuinely win

Four places, and we would rather you heard them from us.

Full administrator access. The big one. On a self-hosted instance you reach Administration, Settings, Configuration and the CMS log. On easyCMS you do not: our customers are users of a maintained CMS, not administrators of it. That is what keeps it maintainable for us and a real limit for you. If you need to change CMS-wide settings or read the server log, do not buy a managed instance. Self-host.

Storage. Our tiers are 1GB on the account, 5GB on PRO and 20GB on Enterprise. Self-hosted, your storage is your disk. If you run heavy 4K video across a big estate, that is a genuine advantage and you should take it. Storage requirements has the sizing arithmetic.

Existing infrastructure. If you already run a server, already back it up, and already have someone who patches it on a Tuesday, the marginal cost of one more container is close to nothing. Nothing we sell beats nothing.

Funding the engine directly. Buying Xibo Cloud puts money into the project that maintains the software we all depend on. That is a legitimate reason to choose it over any reseller, us included.

And we do not offer a 24/7 SLA as standard. Check what any other route publishes before you rely on one. Our phone is answered 09:00 to 17:00 CET, Monday to Friday. If your 2am problem is the CMS, self-hosting means you fix it at 2am and managed hosting means it gets fixed in the morning. Neither is “someone is awake for you”. Price accordingly.

You should self-host if

Say yes to most of these and self-hosting is right. Say no and it is an expensive hobby.

• Someone on your team runs Linux and Docker in production already, as part of their job rather than as a favour, and they are not the only one who knows how it works.
• You have a backup routine that has been restored at least once.
• You need administrator access to the CMS, not just the editor.
• Your media library is large enough that hosted storage tiers are a real constraint, or policy says data stays on infrastructure you control.
• A CMS outage lasting a working day is survivable, because the screens keep playing their cache while you fix it.

Do not self-host if the volunteer is enthusiastic rather than experienced, if you have fewer than about ten screens and the savings cannot pay for the risk, if nobody has written down who covers holidays and departures, or if you are buying signage precisely so that you can stop thinking about infrastructure. Compliance can point either way: our GDPR checklist covers what to ask on both routes, and for a DPA you email info@myeasycms.com.

FAQ

Is Xibo really free, or is there a catch? Really free. The catch is not the software, it is the hosting, the maintenance and the commercial player licence for Android, webOS and Tizen devices.

How much is Xibo Cloud? From 4,40€ per display per month on the Professional plan, checked September 2026. Treat that as a floor and check the current plan table.

What does a managed Xibo CMS cost? For easyCMS, 49€ one-time for an account with one display licence and up to five displays, 66€ per additional display when the licences go through checkout with the account and 99€ each if you add them later, 299€ for PRO up to 25 displays with proof-of-play, and 1,290€ per year for Enterprise above that. On Enterprise, licences are 49€ each. Five screens bought in one order is 313€ and twenty-five is 1,883€. The full list is on the pricing page.

Do I get administrator access on easyCMS? No. You get the layout editor, media library, playlists, scheduling, DataSets and display monitoring, and not Administration, Settings, Configuration or the CMS log. Features lists what is included. There is also no free plan and no free trial: if you want to try Xibo for nothing, self-host it.

The short version

The software is free on all three routes, so stop comparing software prices. What differs is who carries the server, the upgrades and the incidents.

Xibo Cloud from 4,40€ per display per month buys hosting from the people who write the code, priced per screen per month, forever. Self-hosting costs nothing in software, a modest amount in server, and a large amount in hours no invoice will ever show you. A managed instance is a one-time price with the hours transferred to somebody else, and less control in exchange.

Work out what an hour of your team’s time is worth, put it in the table above, and the answer usually picks itself.

Related reading: managed Xibo hosting, digital signage with no monthly fee, compared and digital signage cost per screen.