A Masjidal alternative that needs no box on the wall.

It helps to be precise here, because “Masjidal” means two different things depending on who is asking. To most Muslims it is a consumer brand: the Athan Frame, a Wi-Fi prayer clock for the hallway, sold alongside Athan+ on the app stores, decorative frames, wall mounts and Eid gift bundles. That is a retail business, and a good one — multi-currency checkout, AUD through GBP, the whole Shopify apparatus.

Al-Iqamahis the part a mosque committee actually evaluates. It is a cloud-managed bulletin board for TV screens: prayer and iqamah timings in a choice of layouts, images, YouTube video, embedded web content, Google Slides and Sheets, automatic daily verses and du’as, countdown timers before adhan and iqamah, colour-coded alerts when an iqamah time changes, funeral announcements, and a blank-screen mode that clears the display once the jama’ah has started. Masjidal reports 1,700+ mosques and 6,000+ screens across 27 countries. It is a real product with real deployments behind it.

The distinction matters because the two halves pull the company in different directions. Al-Iqamah exists partly to sell signage players, the way a printer exists to sell ink. That is not a criticism — it is a business model, and for some mosques it is the right one. But it explains almost every difference in the table further down this page.

These are the four reasons we hear most often from committees who arrive here already running Al-Iqamah. None of them are dealbreakers on their own; together they are why the search happens.

The screen you own is the wrong kind of screen.Al-Iqamah is distributed as a TV app for Android TV, Google TV and Amazon Fire TV. If the masjid’s hall already has a Samsung or an LG on the wall — which, between Tizen and webOS, is most of the TVs sold in the last decade — the app will not install on it. You buy a Fire Stick, or you buy Masjidal’s own player at $119.99, and now the display has a second device, a second power supply and a second thing that can be unplugged by a cleaner.

Split screen is behind the paywall, and the free tier is thin. Al-Iqamah Basic gives you prayer times, themes, countdowns, iqamah-change notifications and a slideshow of exactly one image. Putting the Jumu’ah notice next to the clock — the single most-requested thing any masjid display is asked to do — means Professional at $20/month. For a mosque running one screen, that is $240 a year to show an announcement.

It assumes the internet stays up. Al-Iqamah is cloud-managed and documented as requiring an active connection. Mosque Wi-Fi is famously not that. A router reboot during Maghrib should not take the clock off the wall.

Nobody tells you when a screen dies. Six thousand screens is a lot of screens, and the failure mode is always the same: it goes dark on a Tuesday, and someone mentions it the following Friday. Al-Iqamah does not publish display health monitoring or offline alerting.

Everything else follows from this: Al-Iqamah is an app, and SalahClock is a page.

An app has to be built for each TV platform, installed, kept updated and permitted to run at boot. That is why the compatible-device list is a list at all, and why a signage player exists to make the list go away. A page has no list. Any device with a browser can open it — the Samsung in the main hall, the Fire Stick in the women’s section, the Raspberry Pi in the classroom, the iPad the youth group stopped using, a laptop during Ramadan when you need a fourth screen for one week and are not about to buy hardware for it.

It also changes what offline means. Because SalahClock installs as a progressive web app, the display keeps thirty days of computed prayer times on the device itself. If the Wi-Fi drops mid-Salah, the clock carries on — right times, right countdown, right adhan audio — and quietly re-syncs when the connection returns. There is no state where the congregation is looking at a loading spinner.

This is the feature nobody asks for in the first meeting and everybody asks for in the second. Every SalahClock display sends a heartbeat. The dashboard shows Main hall — last seen 2 minutes ago, and if a screen stops reporting, Pro accounts get an email. The person who fixes it finds out from their inbox, not from the imam after Jumu’ah.

For a single-screen masjid this is a nicety. For the 1,700-mosque, 6,000-screen end of the market that Masjidal serves — multi-site trusts, Islamic schools with a screen in every corridor — it is the difference between managing a fleet and hoping for one.