Migrate from Xibo
1:1 human support
If you've spent months on self-hosted Xibo and decided to move to cloud, you don't have to rebuild everything from scratch. We'll show you how to migrate without losing campaigns.
Free first screen · No credit card
No more 11 PM Friday calls
You're here because one of these sounds familiar
- →You've spent months on Xibo, Anthias, Concerto, info-beamer or PiSignage and every upgrade is a drama.
- →Your sysadmin left, nobody touches the VPS, and content gets updated by USB stick.
- →You ran the numbers and "free" came out at £1,400/year between VPS, hours and incidents.
Keep reading. If after this you think your case is different, email us and we'll see.
Xibo vs Digisini
no bashing
This isn't marketing. It's day-to-day operational facts. If anything here doesn't match your experience, tell us and we'll fix it.
| Xibo self-hosted | Digisini | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence cost | £0 | Free, or Starter from €9/month |
| Server / infra | VPS + backups + domain + SSL | Included |
| Updates | You do them, they break periodically | We do them, transparent |
| Support when something breaks | Stack Overflow + Discord | Human email in English (and Spanish), EU + LATAM hours |
| Dayparting (time scheduling) | Works, heavy editor | Mobile editor, change from the street |
| Multi-site multi-screen | VPN, static IPs, manual push | Central panel, automatic |
| Vertical templates | Empty layouts | 37 verticals built per sector |
| Player hardware | Android TV (Google restricting APKs), Windows kiosk, Linux | Smart TV with browser, Chromecast £25, Fire Stick £30 |
| Editor learning curve | For technical profile | For the manager at 9 PM |
| Allergen / sector compliance | You build it | Templates with 14 allergens, queue management, 18+, multi-language |
| Commitment | N/A | Month to month, cancel anytime |
| Forever free | Yes (open source) | Yes (1 screen with watermark) |
| Trial on paid plans | N/A | 14 days, no card |
When Xibo is still the right answer: agencies and integrators with several devs on payroll, installations of 80+ screens with dedicated sysadmin, departments with non-negotiable data sovereignty. For everyone else in European/UK SMB, the numbers rarely work out.
How migration actually goes
six steps
Typical full migration for a 2-10 screen business: one afternoon, maximum two.
Audit what you have on Xibo
Note how many active screens, what playlists run, what calendar you have scheduled (Christmas, events, finals), what media you'll reuse. This is the only part where you know something we don't.
Sign up to Digisini's Free plan
No card. In 5 minutes you have the panel. A Demo TV appears so you can poke around.
Export media and playlists from Xibo
Media: download from your VPS via SFTP. Layouts: Xibo lets you export each layout as .zip (Layouts → Export). Not industry standard, but exportable.
Upload content to Digisini
Drag files to the panel. Build playlists with the editor. For built verticals (cafe, dental, gym, driving school, hostel, garage…) start from a template and just change logo, colours and content. Saves hours.
Connect the screens
On each TV open signage.digisini.com, enter the 6-digit PIN your panel shows, and that screen is registered and broadcasting. 5 minutes per screen, no installers.
Turn off Xibo (or run both for a week)
Conservative option: leave Xibo on for a week while you confirm Digisini behaves. Quick option: shut the VPS and cancel the hosting subscription. Your call.
If you get stuck on any of these six steps, email [email protected] and we reply within European working hours. No chatbot, no absurd form.
What we can do and what we can't
We can
- Give you the step-by-step guide for all six steps above.
- 1:1 email support during migration.
- Review your first layout in Digisini and suggest improvements.
- Recommend which plan fits your real screen count.
We can't (today)
- "Send us your VPS and we migrate for you." Doesn't scale today. If we can ever automate it, current customers will hear first.
- Auto-import Xibo
.ziplayouts directly. It's manual visual rebuild — fast with vertical templates, but not "one click". - Rewrite your custom Xibo modules. If you depend on a custom module, we'll help you see if Digisini's standard functionality covers your case. If not, we won't paint a picture that isn't true.
Saying it straight today saves us both problems later.
Which plan fits you?
Quick guide based on current screens + growth headroom.
- Unlimited playlists
- Email support
- Digisini watermark
- No watermark
- All templates
- Email support
- Vertical modules
- Priority support
- Allergen templates
- Dayparting
- Multi-room retail
- Central panel
- All vertical templates
- Multi-site centralised
- White-label
- Priority SLA
- Custom SLA
- API access
- Dedicated account
No commitment. 14-day trial with no card. Cancel anytime from the panel. See full plan details →
Open Source vs SaaS
TCO Calculator
Before migrating, run the maths with your real numbers. We give you an Excel calculator with your three-year cost for self-hosted Xibo, Anthias, info-beamer, and Digisini — plus an 22-page PDF guide with the methodology and full audit checklist.
Email not required. But if you leave it, we let you know when we update market figures (VPS, salaries, hardware).
Download calculator + PDF guide →Coming soon — lead magnet in development.
Keeping the old system running a fortnight longer
costs almost nothing and removes the only expensive failure
A cutover has one bad outcome: something you had not thought of turns out to matter, the screens are already switched, and you are fixing it live. Running both in parallel removes that outcome entirely, and the cost is two weeks of a subscription you were paying anyway.
The point of the overlap is not caution — it is that some things only surface with real use:
- Content that looked fine and reads badly. Fonts render differently, images crop differently, a price ends up on a second line. None of this appears in a preview; all of it appears on the wall.
- The schedule you forgot. There is always one — the Sunday version, the one that runs during a monthly event, the one somebody set up two years ago and never mentioned.
- The person who updates it. Two weeks is roughly how long it takes for the new routine to stop requiring thought. Until then, having the old system as a fallback is what stops the screens going stale.
There is a specific thing worth doing during the overlap that most people skip: write down every schedule the old system has, by hand, before you stop looking at it. Not exported — read and written down. It is the only part of a migration that cannot be recovered afterwards, because once the old system is off there is nothing left to consult.
The full cost breakdown of a move — the hours, the re-pairing of each player, the fortnight of double running — is worked through in our guide to migrating from open source without losing your campaigns.
Set the date you will switch the old one off, in the calendar, on the day you start. Without a date the parallel period does not end at two weeks — it ends at six months, and you are paying for both.
What stops a migration is almost never the data
— it is who can still log in
A self-hosted setup was installed by somebody, once, competently. Two years later that person has changed job, the admin account is their personal email address, and the hosting appears on a card statement nobody recognises. None of that is visible until the day you try to move.
Three questions that decide the plan
Can somebody here sign in as an administrator today. Can somebody reach the machine itself, or the hosting panel it runs on. And who controls the domain name the players are pointed at. Any of those three you cannot answer is not a detail to sort out later — it is the actual first task, and it can add a fortnight that has nothing to do with screens. Finding out in week one costs an afternoon of asking ; finding out on the Saturday costs the weekend.
The parts somebody added and nobody wrote down
A scheduled job that renames files overnight, a template edited by hand, a folder that something else drops images into. These are invisible while they work, and when they stop the failure looks like a fault in the new system — which is how a perfectly good migration acquires a reputation for having broken things. The cheap precaution is to spend an hour listing anything that happens automatically, before anything is switched off, while the old system is still there to be inspected.
Keep the old machine reachable, not running
There is a difference, and it matters for a month or two. Switched off but recoverable — the disk kept, the credentials written down — costs nothing and answers the questions that only surface later : what exactly was that layout, which file did the Tuesday promotion use. Left running instead, it quietly keeps serving something to a screen somebody forgot, and the two systems disagree in public.
And the reframe worth saying out loud
If one person held the whole thing in their head, that was the real problem, and it was never a software problem. A migration that ends with one different person holding everything has changed the logo and nothing else. The honest test of the new setup is not whether it is easier to use : it is whether two people can make next month's change without one of them asking the other for a password.
A migration is validated
with the place open
Almost all of them happen on a Saturday and are declared finished on Sunday night, which is exactly when nothing has been tested yet.
A screen system is not tested with the business closed. On Saturday there are three people watching, the network is empty and nobody is in a hurry. At eight on Monday there are a hundred phones on the same wifi, the queue screen has been on for four hours straight, and whoever publishes a change does it between two customers. None of those three conditions existed on the day it was declared a success.
So it is worth writing down beforehand what «it went well» is going to mean, in a form you can look at. That at eight on Monday the ones that should be on are on, showing today's content and not the test content; that somebody on site publishes a change without phoning anyone; that at eight in the evening it is still the same ones. Without a criterion written in advance, «it works» is an opinion, and a week later everyone has their own.
And the warning sign is not something failing on Monday: it is nobody finding out. A screen that is off does not complain, and one left showing last week's content complains even less. Until there is somewhere you can see which ones are current and which are not, the migration is not finished — it has only stopped being watched, which is a different thing and looks very similar from outside.
Straight with you: this is not a promise that nothing will fail. It is that when it does, you find out before your customer does — which is the only part of this that can genuinely be guaranteed.
Questions about
migrating
Three options. Pick yours.
Try before talking. Run the maths first. Or talk to a person.
14-day trial on all paid plans · No commitment · Human support in English and Spanish