Screenly alternative
for Raspberry Pi and beyond

Free plan and price

Screenly has no free plan. You start with a 14-day trial without a credit card, then pay per screen: Starter is $17 per screen per month on monthly billing for up to 5 screens, Business $27 from 5 screens, and Enterprise $38 from 25 screens on yearly billing. Yearly billing lowers Starter to $15 and Business to $24.

TVpilot is free for 1 screen, forever. Starter is €5 a month with 3 screens included and €2 per extra screen up to 10, Pro €29 a month with 10 screens and every Premium feature. Five Raspberry Pi screens cost €9 a month on TVpilot Starter, against $85 on Screenly Starter paid monthly.

Raspberry Pi: what the player does

On TVpilot, you generate one install command in the dashboard and run it on any Raspberry Pi with Raspberry Pi OS with a desktop. It sets up Chromium kiosk mode, auto-start, a watchdog that restarts the player within about 10 seconds, a quiet boot and a hidden cursor. The Pi checks the power schedule every minute and switches the TV on and to standby through HDMI-CEC, without a smart plug. Players update themselves at night and can be rebooted or updated from the dashboard.

Screenly sells its own Screenly Player and Player Max, and its Screenly Anywhere app runs on Android, ChromeOS, Samsung Tizen, Android TV and the Amazon Signage Stick. That native Tizen support is something TVpilot does not have: on Samsung and LG smart TVs TVpilot uses the built-in browser.

Security and developer tooling

This is where Screenly leads. It has SOC 2 Type II on every plan and ISO 27001, a zero-trust architecture with no open ports on the player, passwordless login, 802.1x and mTLS for corporate networks, SAML single sign-on, and an API, CLI, Edge Apps SDK and MCP server for developers.

TVpilot is hosted in the EU, with two-factor authentication for every user, session management, roles, and a signed webhook for screen alerts. Its hosting, database and payment providers are SOC 2 and ISO 27001, but TVpilot holds no certificate of its own yet. If a certificate from the vendor is a hard requirement, Screenly fits better today.

Content and live data

TVpilot adds a built-in Designer, AI Studio for generated screens, per-slide schedules with expiry dates, a calendar per screen, video walls up to 4×4 and proof-of-play reports. Live plugins bring weather, news, reviews, calendars, Power BI and webshop dashboards (Shopify, WooCommerce, Lightspeed, bol.com, Mollie, Stripe) to the screen, as well as NS departures and ANWB traffic for Dutch businesses.