FrontFace vs Kiosk

FrontFace is digital signage and kiosk software for Windows and Android. A Player app displays content on screens, while an Assistant app prepares and schedules it. The maker describes uses including reception boards, digital bulletin boards, interactive terminals, dashboards, menu boards, and video walls. Supported material includes common image, video, and audio formats, PDF and XPS documents, web pages, and live audio and video streams. Content can be published over a local network, FrontFace Publishing Cloud, other cloud storage, a web server, or offline through USB. Calendar data can come from Exchange, Exchange Online, SharePoint, Lotus Notes/Domino, iCalendar, or Excel. Optional plugins include Power BI and RSS. FrontFace operates on-premises and offline. Windows lists touchscreen menus, a kiosk browser, and accessible interfaces with SSML-compatible speech output; Android has fewer features. The fully functional trial lasts 14 days and can be upgraded without losing configuration. Offers are for business customers, with prices shown net of applicable taxes.

Kiosk is a free, open-source PDF reader for web, desktop, mobile, and browser extensions. It renders PDFs and offers full-text search with highlighted results, page thumbnails, zoom, and light, dark, and night display modes. Its Chrome extension adds highlighting, underlining, strikethrough, drawing, shapes, and text annotations. The project says PDFs stay on the device, with no telemetry, cloud processing, or account requirement. Android works offline after installation, and the extension release notes also state that offline use is supported. The web app can run locally or be deployed through GitHub Pages as a self-hosted instance. Desktop apps can open PDFs directly and associate Kiosk with PDF files; the extension can intercept PDFs opened in Chrome. The extension supports Chrome 88+, Edge 88+, and Brave, but not Firefox or Safari. The project is released under the MIT License. Its Android release is an early alpha, and the macOS app is ad-hoc signed but not notarized, so Gatekeeper may warn on first launch.