An AzanCast alternative from the people who took the same bet.

It is worth saying at the top that AzanCast is a good product built by people who clearly understand mosques. They arrived at the same conclusion we did — that making a masjid buy and maintain an Android box to see prayer times is an unnecessary tax — and they executed on it well. Sign up, set iqamah times, pick a layout, open a URL on the TV, pair with a six-digit code. Five minutes, as advertised.

So none of the usual comparison-page arguments apply here. There is no hardware to point at, no app store to complain about, no compatible-device list on either side. The interesting question is narrower and more useful: given the same starting point, what did each team decide was worth building next?

Their answer was that the display is a channel, and the thing worth attaching to it is the community’s money and attention.

Donationsare the centrepiece. Connect Stripe, build a branded giving page, run campaigns with goals, take one-off or recurring gifts, and put a live QR code on the TV during Jumu’ah so a thousand people with phones in their pockets can give without cash. The platform takes 5% on the free plan and 2% on Pro. As a business model that is smart, and as a mosque feature it is genuinely valuable — Friday collections in a cashless country are a real problem.

Live Jumu’ah translationis the more ambitious one. The imam delivers the khutbah in Arabic; congregants scan a QR code and read live subtitles in English, Urdu, Bengali, Turkish, Spanish or French, with no app install. Pro includes eight sessions a month and it is sold standalone too — explicitly designed to work alongside any other vendor’s display, ours included. Nothing else in this market does it at this price.

Around those sit a Home Assistant integration, screen-view analytics, a public API, an embed widget, and on the consumer side an Alexa adhan skill that feeds the whole funnel.

Our answer was that the display hangs on a wall people pray in front of five times a day for years, and almost nobody treats it that seriously.

Eighteen themes, all with portrait variants. AzanCast has ten layouts and sixteen colour themes, which sounds comparable until you see them side by side: theirs are colour schemes applied to layouts, ours are designed objects — a calligraphic manuscript, a high-contrast minimal dark built to be read from the back of a hall, heritage emerald, editorial serif, geometric tessellation, zellige tile. Several are day-adaptive, shifting light to dark across the day without anyone touching a setting.

Adhan audio on the display.Ten muezzin recordings including Makkah, Madinah and Alafasy, three of them free, with per-prayer enable and disable, a separate voice for Fajr, and volume held per clock. The recordings cache on the device so they play through an outage. AzanCast’s recitation library lives on the consumer Alexa side; their mosque display product does not publish adhan playback.

The three-phase prayer takeover.A few minutes before the adhan, the screen changes to say so and counts down. Between adhan and iqamah it counts down to the jama’ah with rotating reminders. Once the prayer begins, the countdown disappears entirely and the screen states that the prayer is in progress. Every window is configurable and every theme has its own version. We have not seen this anywhere else.

Offline, and knowing when a screen is dark.The display installs as a progressive web app holding thirty days of computed times, so a router reboot mid-Maghrib changes nothing. Every screen sends a heartbeat; the dashboard shows when each was last seen; Pro accounts get an email when one stops reporting. AzanCast’s analytics will tell you a screen has been offline when you go and look. Ours comes to find you.

AzanCast Pro is $20 a month or $169 a year, and includes unlimited paired displays. SalahClock Plus is $8 a month billed yearly — $96 — and covers three clocks across twenty displays. SalahClock Pro is $288 a year for fifteen clocks across a hundred displays with offline alerts and the combined split screen.

So: for a mosque with one to twenty screens, Plus is cheaper than AzanCast Pro by $73 a year and carries more themes. For a mosque with more than twenty screens and no need for monitoring or split screens, AzanCast Pro at $169 is better value than our Pro at $288, and we would rather you knew that from us.

On trials: AzanCast gives thirty days of Pro with no credit card. We give fourteen days and do ask for a card, which is a worse offer on the face of it, though nothing is charged until the trial ends and cancelling before that date costs nothing.