Comparison
Media portal vs Broadsign vs Footprints
Three ways to sell advertising on screens: an operations layer for venues and networks that sell their own screens (impressBox), an out-of-home trading stack for media owners (Broadsign), and a retail media platform funded by advertisers (Footprints). This is a business comparison, not a feature list: who pays whom, what it really costs, where it runs, who owns the data, how open it is and how you get in. The table uses only what each vendor publishes; where a vendor says nothing, the cell says so.
Side by side
Broadsign and Footprints information comes from their own websites, documentation and listings; impressBox information from our own platform.
| impressBox Media portal | Broadsign | Footprints | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business model: who pays whom | The network pays impressBox a platform fee. That is the whole model: no revenue share, no share of programmatic revenue, no monetisation of the network’s data. Advertisers pay the network, not us. | Media owners license the platform in three tiers (Standard, Professional, Enterprise). Broadsign also operates a programmatic SSP that sells the media owner’s inventory to connected demand-side platforms; the share Broadsign earns on those transactions is not stated publicly. | “The platform is offered free to partner retailers”; income comes from campaigns funded by brands and agencies. The share the retailer receives is not stated publicly. |
| Price and total cost | Custom pricing, agreed per network and in writing before set-up. What is not in it: a share of your advertising revenue, a right to your data, an exclusivity clause, or a lock-in through a proprietary player. There is no free tier: a portal that costs the venue nothing is paid for elsewhere, and we would rather send an invoice. | No prices published; “Request a quote” per tier. What a tier includes beyond the published feature list, and the cost of the PC-class player hardware the full feature set runs on, are not stated publicly. | Free to the retailer. The cost sits in the model: the campaigns on the retailer’s channels are sold and funded through the vendor, and the terms of data use, exclusivity and revenue are not stated publicly. |
| Where it runs | On every platform from the display’s own system-on-chip up: LG webOS, Samsung Tizen, Android displays, BrightSign players, and Electron players on Raspberry Pi and x86. The same engine, the same plan format and the same proof-of-play records everywhere. | The full feature set runs on the Broadsign Control Player on Windows and Ubuntu PCs. Broadsign Control for System on Chip runs on LG webOS 2.0–6.0, Samsung Tizen (SSSP4 to TEP 7.0) and BrightSign players and, per Broadsign, “does not have the full range of Broadsign Control features”. A Broadsign Android Player is documented as beta. | Not stated publicly. |
| Your own bare metal or private cloud | Yes. The whole platform runs on your own servers or Kubernetes cluster, with no data stored with impressBox at all, as well as in our cloud. | Its documentation describes players and edge servers obtaining content “from the Broadsign cloud”; a customer-hosted server option is not stated publicly. | Not stated publicly. |
| Cloud service hosted in Europe, EU data residency | Yes. Dėžutė, UAB, Vilnius, Lithuania (EU), under EU law and the GDPR; the cloud platform runs on Google Cloud Platform in Google Cloud data centres in the EU. | Not stated publicly. Broadsign states SOC 2 Type 2 certification; the hosting region is not published. | A Bucharest-based company serving Romania, Poland, the Baltic states and Croatia (May 2025); the hosting region is not stated publicly. |
| Who owns the data and the proof-of-play records | You do. Every play record is yours, exportable at any time as CSV or through the API, and it leaves with you if you leave. Your first-party data (point of sale, footfall, loyalty) stays in your own layer; no broker, no resale, no pooling across customers. | Proof-of-play data is exportable: the POP Log “exports raw proof of play logs every 24 hours” and the Real-Time POP API “provides near-live data”. Ownership terms are not stated publicly. | Press coverage states that data is “strictly anonymized”; ownership of the data and of campaign records is not stated publicly. |
| Openness: public contract, API, MCP | The plan a screen receives, the control messages and the proof-of-play rows are a documented contract; the portal is an OpenAPI service; the same tools are exposed over MCP for agents; the exchange boundary speaks OpenRTB 2.6, VAST 4.2 and the OpenOOH venue taxonomy. | Documented APIs: a Control Player API and a Real-Time POP API, among others. An MCP server or a public plan contract is not stated publicly. | Listed on the Microsoft Marketplace as a SaaS application; a public API is not stated publicly. |
| Migration path | Shadow fleet: the portal is set up beside the current system, content is imported from the current CMS, its exports or screenshots, and a headless player per real screen runs the real plans so proof of play is seen before any real screen changes. Screens switch one at a time, when you are confident; the old system stays until the last one has moved. | Not stated publicly. | Not stated publicly. |
| AI agents on real campaigns | An agent inside every page that sees the record and acts on it with your permissions: plan from a brief, check conflicts, explain why a play did not happen, open a task, propose a fix. Anything that touches money or screens is applied only on your confirmation. The same tools over MCP for your own AI client. | Broadsign AI Assistant for the SSP: it “streamlines the creative approval process” with category and approval suggestions for image and video creatives; “HTML creatives are currently not supported.” | An “AI copilot specifically designed for physical retail”, announced in May 2025, giving retailers insights for supply chain planning, marketing and community needs. |
Sources, reviewed 27 October 2026: Broadsign Platform ; Broadsign pricing ; Broadsign Control products ; Broadsign Control for System on Chip ; Broadsign Android Player ; Broadsign Real-Time POP API ; Broadsign Control Player API ; Broadsign SSP (Reach) Open Exchange ; Broadsign AI Assistant ; Footprints for Retail on Microsoft Marketplace ; Footprints AI launches its first AI copilot (Business Forum, 29 May 2025) . impressBox: Media portal, security and hosting.
Footprints’ own website could not be reached when this page was reviewed; its column uses its Microsoft Marketplace listing and trade press, and will be updated against its site.
How to read the table
“Free” is a price
A portal that costs the venue nothing is paid for somewhere: in data, in exclusivity, in a share of the revenue, or in a player you cannot leave. Before comparing licence fees, ask what the contract takes besides money. The Media portal takes a fee and nothing else, and says so in writing.
If you are a media owner with an ad-ops team
Broadsign brings its own SSP and a mature guaranteed-campaigns module; its full feature set runs on PC-class players, with system-on-chip players for a reduced set. The Media portal connects to SSPs instead of running one, runs the full engine on the display’s own chip, and is built for a small team that also runs the venue’s own content.
If you are a retailer
Footprints offers a retail media platform at no cost to the retailer, funded by the campaigns. The Media portal keeps the network, its proof-of-play records and its first-party data with you, on screens you run, in the EU or on your own servers; a retail media partner can sell on top of it.
Frequently asked questions
Is the impressBox Media portal a Broadsign alternative?
For a different buyer. Broadsign is a trading stack for out-of-home media owners, with its own SSP and a PC-class player for the full feature set, plus system-on-chip and Android players with a reduced set. The Media portal is an operations layer for venues and networks that sell their own screens: content, advertising and proof on one platform, on the players they already run, connecting to SSPs rather than running one. See the Media portal.
Is Footprints a competitor or a partner?
Footprints sells retailers a retail media platform funded by advertisers and does not publish a screen operations layer. A retailer can run Footprints campaigns on screens that impressBox operates and proves, so the two can sit on top of each other.
Why do so many cells say “not stated publicly”?
Because we write only what a vendor publishes itself. Where Broadsign’s or Footprints’ public material says nothing about a row, the cell says so rather than guessing, and the row is kept only where the difference is factual and sourced.
How often is this page checked?
The Broadsign and Footprints columns were last checked against the linked pages on 27 October 2026. If something has changed, tell us and we correct it.
Selling advertising on impressBox
Compare on your own network
Tell us how many screens you have and who sells the advertising today, and we show the Media portal on a shadow copy of your network, with a written price.