A MAWAQIT alternative for mosques that want the screen, not the project.

It is difficult to write a comparison page against a charity. MAWAQIT is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and a dedicated waqf. It has said publicly that it will never become a paid service and will never carry advertising, and after years of operating at the scale of ten thousand installations across a hundred and sixty countries, it has kept that promise. The Android TV app, the Raspberry Pi image and the mobile apps are open source. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has written about it. Nothing in the rest of this page is a criticism of that.

What follows is narrower: MAWAQIT and SalahClock make opposite engineering choices, and those choices suit different mosques. If you read this page and conclude MAWAQIT is right for you, that is a perfectly good outcome and you should go and install it.

MAWAQIT’s TV product is an Android application. To run it you need an Android TV, an Android TV box, or a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 flashed with their image, connected to the screen over HDMI. This is well documented and well supported, and a Raspberry Pi running a mosque display is a genuinely charming thing. It is also a computer, and computers in mosques have a way of becoming somebody’s unpaid second job — the SD card that corrupts after two years, the app that needs updating, the box that boots to a home screen after a power cut instead of to the clock.

SalahClock has no box. The hall’s existing Samsung or LG opens the display URL in its own browser and that is the entire installation. If the TV has no usable browser, a $40 Fire Stick works, or the Raspberry Pi you already bought for MAWAQIT works too — we are not fussy about what opens the page, because from our side it is just a page.

The screen also defends itself. SalahClock holds a wake lock so the TV never sleeps, goes fullscreen and hides the cursor, and reloads itself after a crash or a long network outage. Nothing about that requires a technical volunteer to be reachable.

To synchronise a mosque with MAWAQIT you register it on their website and supply two photographs — exterior and interior — plus proof that the mosque exists. A human reviews it. This is the right design for what MAWAQIT is: a public directory that millions of worshippers use to find their local masjid, where a fake entry would be worse than a missing one.

It is also a gate. It takes time you may not have if Ramadan starts in nine days. And it excludes a whole category of people who need exactly the same screen: the company that has set aside a meeting room as a musalla, the Islamic school that wants the times in every corridor, the family that wants the clock on the kitchen tablet, the community centre with a prayer space but no registration.

A SalahClock clock is created in the dashboard and live immediately. Listing it in our public directory is a separate, optional step — you can run a completely private display forever and never appear anywhere. That is the trade: MAWAQIT gets a directory you can trust, we get a product anyone can use in the next minute.

MAWAQIT’s display is functional and consistent — the same recognisable layout in mosques from Lille to Jakarta, with adjustable colours and a theme choice. Consistency is a real virtue, and a congregation that has travelled will recognise it.

SalahClock takes the other view: that the display is part of the room. There are eighteen themes, from a warm calligraphic manuscript to a high-contrast minimal dark built to be read from the back of a hall, with heritage, editorial, geometric and zellige-tile designs in between. Every one of them has a portrait variant, so a vertical screen in an entrance is not an afterthought. Several are day-adaptive — light through Dhuhr and Asr, dark for Isha — without anybody touching a setting.

There is also a three-phase prayer takeover that we have not seen elsewhere. A few minutes before the adhan the screen changes to say so, with a countdown. In the gap between adhan and iqamah it counts down to the jama’ah with rotating reminders. Once the prayer starts, the countdown disappears and the screen simply says the prayer is in progress, so nobody walking in late is reading a timer.

Both systems survive a network blip, but differently. MAWAQIT caches on the device it runs on, which is one of the advantages of shipping a native app. SalahClock installs the display as a progressive web app and holds thirty days of computed prayer times, plus the adhan recordings, locally — so a router reboot mid-Maghrib changes nothing on screen.

The part MAWAQIT does not cover is the other side of that: telling you. Every SalahClock display sends a heartbeat, the dashboard shows when each screen was last seen, and Pro accounts get an email when one stops reporting. Screens die quietly. Somebody should find out before Jumu’ah.