Screenly VS ViewForge

Screenly's answer

• NASA
• Amazon
• Canonical
• Bupa
• Lowe's
• Capital One

Screenly's answer

Screenly is a highly secure and reliable digital signage platform. It is trusted by top organizations like NASA and Amazon, powers over 10,000 screens globally, and is SOC 2 compliant. By building its own hardware and software, Screenly ensures total end-to-end control over safety and performance.

ViewForge's answer:

Three things. (1) Data ownership: ViewForge writes fitment as Shopify metaobjects native to your store — most competitors store fitment in their own database. (2) 8 verticals out of the box: auto, motorcycle, tractor, marine, power equipment, bicycle, printer, electronics — most competitors are automotive-only. (3) Smart Parse: extract fitment automatically from your existing product titles and descriptions instead of re-typing everything.

Screenly's answer

You should choose Screenly because it builds both its own hardware and software, giving you complete control over your screens' security and reliability. It offers award-winning cybersecurity, strict SOC 2 compliance, and is trusted by major companies and small businesses alike. Plus, it is highly flexible, allowing you to use Screenly's dedicated media players or display content on any device you already own using a web browser.

ViewForge's answer:

Data ownership. Fitment lives in your Shopify metaobjects, so uninstalling does not take your compatibility data with it. Convermax, EasySearch and PartFinder all keep it in their own databases, and getting it back depends on their export tooling on the day you cancel.

Cost at the low end. The search widget, the compatibility table on the product page and the saved-vehicle garage are all on the free tier, up to 50 products, with no expiry. EasySearch puts the table and the garage behind its $75/month Premium plan. Convermax starts at $250/month.

Automotive and non-automotive coverage. Eight built-in templates, and fully custom templates from $19/month, for catalogs that do not decompose into Year/Make/Model at all.

Screenly's answer

Screenly’s primary audience consists of organizations and businesses of all sizes—from small companies to Fortune 500 enterprises—that need to manage content on screens globally. It is specifically built for teams in highly regulated, security-conscious industries where strict data protection and compliance are non-negotiable.

ViewForge's answer:

Shopify merchants whose customers need to know whether a part fits before they will buy it — and who do not have an engineer on staff to build that themselves.

Concretely: auto and truck parts retailers, powersports and motorcycle dealers, tractor and agricultural parts sellers, marine and outboard suppliers, small-engine and power equipment stores, bicycle and e-bike component shops, printer supply merchants, and electronics accessory sellers.

Catalog sizes run from a few dozen products on the free tier up into the tens of thousands; it is running in production on a catalog of roughly 40,000 SKUs. The common thread is not the industry — it is that "does this fit my thing" is the question deciding the sale.

Screenly's answer

Screenly started in 2012 as a simple project created by co-founder Viktor Petersson to run digital signage on the Raspberry Pi. That project evolved into Anthias, which became one of the most popular free and open-source digital signage projects on GitHub. Recognizing the need for a highly secure, enterprise-grade solution, the project grew into a fully managed commercial platform, leading to the official establishment of Screenly, Inc. in 2013. Today, the company differentiates itself by building both its own hardware and software, growing from its open-source roots into a global platform that powers over 10,000 screens.

ViewForge's answer:

ViewForge came out of agency work. Normal View was building for a parts retailer running roughly 12,000 SKUs who needed fitment search, and every app we evaluated stored the merchant's compatibility data in the vendor's own database.

That is a strange trade when you look at it directly. Fitment data is genuinely expensive to produce — it is weeks of work — and the merchant would not own the result. It would belong to whichever app happened to be installed that year.

Shopify metaobjects made a different answer possible: write fitment as native structured data inside the merchant's own store. The theme reads it, the Storefront API queries it, Admin GraphQL exports it, and it is still there after an uninstall. That decision is what the rest of the app is built around.

Everything else came from real catalogs rather than a roadmap. Eight verticals exist because a tractor catalog is not Year/Make/Model. Smart Parse exists because that retailer had already written fitment into 12,000 product titles, and nobody was ever going to retype them.

Screenly's answer

Screenly is built using its own custom operating system, ScreenlyOS, which runs on its dedicated media players, alongside "Screenly Anywhere" which can display content on any device with a modern web browser. The company's open-source version, Anthias, is designed to run on Raspberry Pi hardware and PCs. Under the hood, the platform's infrastructure relies on advanced cloud technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, which the company's CEO utilized as an early adopter to build a highly secure and scalable system.

ViewForge's answer:

• TypeScript
• Shopify metaobjects, as the fitment data store
• Shopify theme app extensions for the storefront components: fitment search, saved-vehicle garage, compatibility table, product-page fit notice
• Shopify Storefront API, for querying fitment from the theme
• Shopify Admin GraphQL API, for writing and exporting fitment records
• NHTSA vehicle database, for VIN decoding
• ACES and PIES XML parsing, for automotive catalog import