Managed Xibo Hosting Without a Subscription

If you have spent an afternoon researching digital signage software, you have almost certainly run into Xibo. It is a mature open-source signage platform, and easyCMS is built on it. We do not treat that as an awkward secret. easyCMS is Xibo 4.5, hosted by us in Germany, set up, kept updated and supported by us, and sold with one-time licences instead of a monthly fee per screen. It says so in our footer.

So this is not an “Xibo alternative” page. It is for people who have decided the engine is right and now need to decide how to run it. There are three honest routes, and we will say plainly which is which, including the cases where you should not buy from us.

What Xibo is, plainly

Xibo is an open-source digital signage content management system, released under the AGPLv3 licence. It has two halves that people often confuse. The CMS runs in a browser and is where you build layouts, upload media, assemble playlists and schedule what appears on which screen and when. The player is the software on the device behind the screen, or built into the screen itself. It connects out to the CMS, collects whatever is scheduled for it, caches that content locally and plays it.

Players exist for Windows, Android, LG webOS Signage and Samsung Tizen, which is why the same CMS can drive a PC in a reception, an Android box in a canteen and a commercial LG panel with no external box at all. The players page covers the differences.

The feature set is mature rather than a thin app: multi-zone drag-and-drop layouts, tag-based dynamic playlists, a media library with folders, scheduling with dayparting and campaigns, DataSets for live tabular data such as menus and rotas, display monitoring with on-demand screenshots, offline playback, touch content, CAP emergency alerts, and widgets from clocks and weather to PDFs, HLS streams and embedded web pages. Our features page has the full list, and free digital signage software covers the open-source side.

Good to know “Free software” in the open-source sense means free to use, modify and redistribute. It does not mean free to operate. Somebody still has to run the server, and that somebody is either you or a hosting provider.

The three ways to run Xibo

1. Xibo Cloud

Xibo, the upstream project, sells its own hosted CMS. Their published entry rate is from 4,40€ per display per month on the Professional plan (checked September 2026). You get hosting from the people who write the software, which is a perfectly good reason to choose it, and you pay monthly, per display, for as long as you use it.

2. Self-hosting it yourself

The software costs nothing to download. What you take on instead is everything around it: a server or VPS, Docker upkeep, the database, backups you have actually tested restoring, TLS certificates and their renewal, security patching, major-version upgrades, and your own troubleshooting at 07:30 when the canteen board is blank. None of that is exotic. If you have a sysadmin who already runs Docker workloads, it is an ordinary Tuesday. If you do not, it is a second job.

3. easyCMS, a managed Xibo 4.5 instance

We run Xibo 4.5 for you at Hetzner in Falkenstein, Germany. You log in, build layouts and schedule content. You never touch a Docker container, a certificate renewal or a version upgrade, because the instance is ours to run. You pay once per account and once per display licence, with no renewal.

What the three routes cost over five years

Here is the comparison without the marketing arithmetic. We do not convert currencies, because rates move and a converted number pretends to a precision it does not have, so compare the columns in your own terms.

The easyCMS column is 49€ for the account with its included licence, plus 66€ for each extra display licence bought in the same order, moving to the 299€ PRO account once you pass five displays. The 66€ rate is a discount applied automatically at checkout when the account and the licences go through together: there is no code to enter. Added later, licences are 99€ each, so the same networks at list are 445 EUR for five displays and 2,675 EUR for twenty-five. Years two to five are zero in every case. Cloud rates were checked September 2026 and may have changed since.

The shape of it matters more than any single row. You pay once, and then the line goes flat. Twenty-five screens cost 1,883€ on day one and still 1,883€ in year five. The same twenty-five on Xibo Cloud Professional cost 1,320€ every year: 3,960€ by the end of year three and 6,600€ by the end of year five. That is 4,717€ less over five years, and the network has paid for itself partway through year two. Even at list price, 2,675€ paid once against 6,600€ billed, you keep 3,925€. On five screens the gap is smaller and the same shape: 313€ once against 1,320€ over five years, so 1,007€ kept.

The self-hosting column has no total on purpose, because inventing a VPS price for your situation would be dishonest. The software really is zero. Your server bill is whatever your provider charges for a machine big enough to run the CMS and store your media, and your time is worth what it is worth. Put your own two numbers in that cell. For most organisations the time line decides it.

Watch out A five-year comparison flatters us and we know it. In year one, at scale, easyCMS costs more than a cheap monthly plan. Measured against Xibo Cloud Professional at 4,40€ per display per month, the cheapest credible rate on this page, break-even is about eleven months for a first screen, fifteen months for each additional screen bought in the same order at 66€, and about seventeen months for a 25-screen PRO build. Add those screens later at 99€ each and it is roughly twenty-two to twenty-three months for a single screen and about twenty-four months for the 25-screen build. If your project might not exist in a year, a subscription is the rational choice.

A costed 25-display example

A manufacturing site or a college with twenty-five screens:

That is 1,908€ and then nothing, against 1,320€ every year for the same twenty-five screens on Xibo Cloud Professional. Buy the screens in stages instead of together and the licences are 99€ each, so the same build is 2,376€ in licences and 2,700€ in total with the support hour: still paid once, and that is the honest ceiling.

Hardware sits alongside it either way. An easyCMS Android player is 499€ and arrives pre-configured, and it still needs its own display licence, so it is a line in addition to the licence rather than instead of it.

Above 25 displays, or if you want the CMS on your own domain with your own branding and multiple users with roles, the Enterprise account is 1,290€ per year and drops players from 499€ to 299€. On Enterprise the licence drops from 99€ to 49€. The annual fee covers itself on licence savings alone at twenty-six displays (1,290 ÷ 50 = 25.8). On Windows or Linux it covers itself at fourteen, because every screen saves the full 99€, so the Windows route is the cheaper one if your estate can take it. Everything is on the pricing page, and digital signage cost per screen shows the working.

What easyCMS adds on top of the engine

The engine is the same. What you buy from us is the operation of it.

• EU hosting, done. Your CMS lives at Hetzner in Falkenstein, Germany, and we operate within the EU legal framework. For a Data Processing Agreement or a specific GDPR question, email info@myeasycms.com.
• The setup already happened. No Docker compose file, no database tuning, no certificate that expires on a bank holiday. You get a login.
• Free updates, forever. Version upgrades are ours to plan, test and apply. On a self-hosted instance, a major-version upgrade is an evening you scheduled.
• Free expert human support. Every account includes email support at info@myeasycms.com and phone support on +48 509 937 137, Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00 CET, typically answered within two to three working days. Even without an account, the 25 written support guides and the FAQ are free.
• Pre-configured player hardware. If you want the box to arrive working, we sell one that does, with a premium HDMI cable at 29€ and a wireless keyboard at 39€.
• Self-service screen claiming. Adding a display is a form at /add-display/ rather than a support ticket, and you get a signage product rather than a raw admin console. On Enterprise that extends to full white label on your own domain.
• Paid help when you want hands on it. An Expert Support Hour is 25€ and buys up to an hour of investigation by an easyCMS engineer, a written diagnosis and a fixed quote you approve before any further work. Urgent requests start the same working day, and the hour is refunded if the root cause turns out to be a bug in easyCMS.

“Player licences can be bought for less than 99€. Why is yours more?”

This comes up often enough to deserve a straight answer, and we are not going to be rude about the upstream project to make ourselves look better. Xibo is a good piece of engineering and deserves its reputation.

If you have found a lower list price for a commercial player licence bought on its own, you have read it correctly. It is a lower price for a different thing. A standalone player licence is permission to run the player on one device. You still need a CMS for it to talk to, which puts you back to hosting one or paying monthly for one.

Our display licence is one-time and lifetime. It is 99€ on its own, or 66€ when it goes through checkout in the same order as the account, and it covers a seat on a hosted, maintained EU CMS with no server for you to run, free updates for the life of the account, free human support with no per-screen limit, the commercial player licence itself where the platform needs one, and a player configuration we have already tested. Android, LG webOS and Samsung Tizen need a commercial per-display player licence, which we buy in and supply. Windows and Linux player software is free. The display licence itself is the same price whatever the screen runs.

So the honest framing is this: the licence alone is cheaper in licence terms and more expensive in time. If your time is free, take that trade.

What the AGPL actually means for you

Most buyers do not care about software licences, and mostly they are right not to. Two consequences matter here.

The engine outlives any single vendor. Xibo is not a proprietary product that disappears when a company is acquired or changes direction. The source is public, the licence is AGPLv3, and the project has a community that is not us. If easyCMS stopped trading tomorrow, the software you built your layouts in would still exist and still be runnable by somebody else. That is a different risk profile from a closed platform, and one of the reasons we chose it.

You are not locked into a private format. Your media is your media, in ordinary image, video and PDF files you hold the originals of, and your layouts sit in a standard Xibo instance. If you ever decide to move to your own server or another host, email us and we will talk through what that involves.

Tip Keep master copies of your artwork and video somewhere other than the CMS. That is good practice with any signage platform, ours included, and it is the one thing that makes a future move painless.

When you should self-host instead

We would rather say this out loud than have you discover it after buying.

If you have the skills in-house. If your IT team already runs Docker, keeps backups, renews certificates and patches Linux boxes as routine, adding a Xibo CMS to that estate is a small marginal cost. Paying us to do something you already do well is a poor use of budget.

If you are air-gapped. If the screens sit on a network with no route to the internet at all, a hosted CMS is not an option, because the player has to reach it. That is firewall policy, not something we can engineer around. See network requirements for what a player actually needs.

If policy requires it. Some organisations must keep the application and database on infrastructure they control. Note that Enterprise white label puts easyCMS on your domain, not on your server, so it does not solve this.

If you want to modify the software. The AGPL gives you that right. Ours is a managed service, so you cannot patch the code on it.

If any of those describe you, the download page points at the players, and the upstream project is where the CMS itself comes from. No hard feelings.

What easyCMS cannot do

The limitation that matters most here is this one: you are not an administrator of the CMS. Customers cannot reach Administration, Settings, Configuration or the CMS log. That is the trade at the heart of a managed service. We keep the instance stable and up to date, and in exchange the settings that could destabilise it are not in your hands. If you need one changed, you email us and we change it. If that sounds intolerable, self-host, genuinely.

Other things we do not have, so you can rule us out quickly:

• No SSO or SAML, no public API portal, no integration marketplace, no native mobile app.
• No SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification. We are not going to claim one we do not hold.
• No free plan and no free trial. The entry point is 49€, once.
• Proof-of-play reporting is PRO and Enterprise only, and users and permissions are Enterprise only.
• Synchronised video walls are Android only.
• No Twitter or X widget in Xibo 4.x, no charts widget, and no Google Calendar connector, though the calendar widget takes an iCal feed URL.

Questions about running Xibo

Is easyCMS the same software as Xibo?

Yes. easyCMS runs the Xibo 4.5 engine under the AGPLv3, hosted and supported by us. The features are Xibo’s features. What we add is the hosting, the setup, the updates, the human support and the hardware.

Which version do you run, and who upgrades it?

Xibo 4.5, and we do. Updates are free with every account, applied by us and tested before they reach you. You never schedule a maintenance window.

Can I move an existing self-hosted Xibo CMS to easyCMS?

Talk to us before assuming it either way. Email info@myeasycms.com with what you are running now and how many displays are on it, and we will tell you honestly what is and is not straightforward.

Do I need to open a port in the firewall?

No. Players pull content from the CMS and accept no inbound connections, so there is no inbound port to open. Traffic runs over an encrypted connection, and every display must be authorised in the CMS before it receives anything. Network requirements has the detail for your IT team.

What happens to the screens if your hosting goes down?

They keep playing. Content is cached on the player, so whatever is scheduled carries on, and the player collects changes once it can reach the CMS again. See troubleshooting offline displays and digital signage without internet.

Is there really no monthly fee?

For the account and licences, no. The 49€ account, the 99€ licence and the 299€ PRO account are one-time and lifetime, and licences bought in the same order as an account are 66€ each. The only recurring plan is Enterprise at 1,290€ per year, wanted above 25 displays or for white labelling. More at digital signage with no monthly fee.

Where to go from here

If you are still weighing self-hosting against a managed instance, the deciding question is usually not price. It is who gets the phone call when a screen goes blank on a Monday morning. Work out honestly whether that person exists in your organisation and whether they have the time. If they do, self-host and keep your money. If they do not, tell us how many screens you have and we will give you one number, paid once.

Email info@myeasycms.com, call +48 509 937 137, or use the support request form. If you would rather read first, getting started with easyCMS shows what the first hour looks like, and getting help and support options sets out what is free and what is not.