CHOOSING A CATEGORY
Digital Signage vs. a Dedicated Currency Rate Board
Signage platforms, converter widgets and LED panels all put numbers on a screen. Only one of them shows what an exchange office actually posts: your buy price and your sell price, per currency. Here is how the categories differ — including where we are the wrong choice.
WHAT ACTUALLY DIFFERS
Four Distinctions That Decide the Choice
A converter is not a rate board
A converter answers "what is 500 EUR worth?" using the mid-market rate. A rate board answers "what will this shop pay me for 500 EUR?" — a lower number, with the sell price above it, and the business's margin in between. Most currency widgets are converters.
Signage schedules content; a rate board publishes prices
A signage platform's job is deciding what plays on which screen and when. That is a real and hard problem, but it is not the problem an exchange office has. Their problem is that the number on the wall must match the number at the counter.
Someone has to own the numbers
A feed-driven widget takes the rate out of your hands. A rate board keeps it in them: you type your buy and your sell, and that is exactly what customers see. There is no market feed behind our board — the numbers are yours.
The screen has to survive bad wifi
A browser pointed at a URL usually shows an error page the moment the network drops. Our board keeps displaying the last rates it loaded, flags them as possibly stale after about ten minutes, and only says rates are unavailable after thirty.
THE FOUR CATEGORIES
What Each Category Is Good and Bad At
| Category | Strong at | Weak at |
|---|---|---|
| Digital signage platformsOptiSigns, ScreenCloud, Pickcel, Xibo | Running many screens with mixed content — video, promotions, menus — on a schedule, with monitoring and permissions. | Two-sided pricing. Their currency apps show a conversion rate, not a bureau's buy and sell columns. |
| Website widget marketplacesElfsight, Common Ninja | Adding a converter, reviews, forms and social feeds to a website, with styling controls. | Publishing your own posted prices, and anything to do with an in-store screen. |
| LED rate board hardwareForexBoard and regional manufacturers | Shop windows in direct sunlight, and running with no internet at all. Genuinely better in those conditions. | Cost per screen, updating rates from anywhere, fixed row counts, and putting the same rates on your website. |
| Dedicated rate board softwareExchange Rate Management | Publishing your own buy and sell rates to a shop TV and your website from one dashboard, on hardware you already own. | Anything else. No video, no scheduling, no branding controls, no market feed, no multi-branch roles. |
ONE BY ONE
Detailed Comparisons
Each of these says plainly where the other tool is the better buy. If you read one and conclude you should choose them, that page did its job.
Digital signage platform
vs OptiSigns
OptiSigns is a general digital signage platform that happens to have currency apps. This is a currency rate board that does nothing else. If you need to run playlists across a fleet of screens, they win. If you need buy and sell columns your customers can read from the counter, we do.
Read the comparisonEnterprise digital signage
vs ScreenCloud
ScreenCloud sells digital signage to organisations with a lot of screens and people who manage them. We sell one thing to exchange offices. The right answer depends far more on the size of your operation than on any feature list.
Read the comparisonDigital signage software
vs Pickcel
Pickcel is digital signage software with a broad app library, currency among them. The distinction that matters for an exchange office is the same one that applies to every signage suite: a currency app displays rates, but a bureau posts two prices per currency, and those are different jobs.
Read the comparisonOpen-source digital signage
vs Xibo
Xibo is open source and can be self-hosted, which makes it the strongest option here if control and cost-at-scale matter more to you than setup time. The trade is that you become the person who runs it.
Read the comparisonWebsite widget marketplace
vs Elfsight
This is the sharpest distinction on the whole site, and it is not about features. Elfsight's currency widget is a converter: it shows the market rate. Ours is a rate board: it shows your prices. A customer deciding whether to walk into your shop needs the second one.
Read the comparisonDedicated LED display hardware
vs LED rate board hardware
Dedicated LED rate boards — ForexBoard and the many regional manufacturers like it — are physical displays built for exactly this job. They are genuinely better in some conditions. The question is whether those conditions are yours.
Read the comparisonWHERE WE ARE THE WRONG CHOICE
Things This Product Does Not Do
Buy something else if you need any of these, because they are not in the product today and we would rather lose the signup than the trust:
- Automatic rates from a market feed. Every number is typed in by you. There is no ECB, OpenExchangeRates or mid-market integration, and no spread rules that derive buy and sell from a base rate.
- Branding and layout control. No logo, no colour scheme, no font choice, no portrait mode, no ticker. One clean layout.
- Video, playlists and scheduling. If the screen needs to do more than show rates, you want a signage platform.
- Multi-branch accounts and roles. One account holds one set of rates, and anyone with the login can change them.
- Instant push updates. Screens poll every 5 minutes. Fast enough for a rate board, but it is not sub-second.
What is left is narrow on purpose: your buy and sell rates, set in one dashboard, shown correctly on any TV and on your website, on hardware you already own. If that is the job, start with the currency rate board or the website widget.
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