A Masjidbox alternative for mosques that only wanted the screen.

Masjidbox has been going since 2015, is based in Paris, is unfunded, and has 2,500 mosques on it. That is a decade of steady building and it deserves respect. The product is organised as a suite: Screens for signage, Applications for the community mobile app, Pages for the mosque website, with Donations, Widgets, a calendar and a live-streaming tool alongside.

Each of the three carries its own subscription. Screens Silver is €29 a month. Applications Silver is another €29. Pages Silver is €15. Take the global offer and it is €62 a month, which they will correctly point out saves you €11 against buying them separately. Over three years that bundle is roughly €2,230.

For a large, well-resourced masjid running an app and a website and four screens, that may be perfectly fair value. For the very common case — one hall, one TV, a committee that wanted the iqamah times to stop drifting — it is a suite price for a single feature.

Both products have a free plan, and the shapes are quite different.

Masjidbox Screens Free gives you one manager, basic support, and one playlist containing five slides. It is a genuine free tier and it will put prayer times on a TV. The ceiling arrives quickly: one person can administer it, and the content rotation is capped.

SalahClock Free gives you one clock across two displays, four starter themes including light and dark, adhan audio with three muezzin recordings, all ten languages and four numeral systems, the bilingual announcement banner, the thirty-day offline cache, and a public URL your community can open at home. There are no image slides on the free plan — that is what Plus is for — but everything that makes the clock a clock is included, permanently, without a card.

Masjidbox will sell you a Masjidbox Player, a small media device that plugs into any screen with an HDMI port. Their pitch is reasonable: you do not need a smart TV, and a dedicated appliance behaves more predictably than a TV’s own software.

SalahClock’s answer is that a browser is the appliance. The display page takes a wake lock so the panel never sleeps, goes fullscreen, hides the cursor after idle, and reloads itself after a crash or a long outage. Run it on the smart TV, a $40 stick, a Raspberry Pi or an old tablet — all of them behave the same, because the hardening lives in the page rather than in the device.

This is the one specification where Masjidbox is clearly ahead and it is worth stating plainly. They list seventeen display languages: Arabic, English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Turkish, Swahili, Burmese, Bosnian, Albanian, Indonesian, Somali, Urdu, Japanese, Danish and Russian. For a Somali community in Minneapolis or a Bosnian jamaat in Missouri, that is not a line on a spec sheet, it is whether the screen speaks to the room.

SalahClock carries ten languages and four numeral systems — Latin, Arabic-Indic, Eastern Arabic-Indic and Devanagari — with proper right-to-left layout on every theme, and lets you override the label for any prayer so the screen uses the word your community actually uses. That is deeper on typography and shallower on coverage. If your language is on their list and not on ours, believe the list.