Kiosk vs KioWare

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.

KioWare is kiosk and device lockdown software for limiting use of shared or unattended devices and directing people to approved websites or applications. It is intended for kiosks, tablets, PCs and other shared-use stations, including public-facing and internal deployments. Security controls include operating-system lockdown, startup on boot, web access controls and single-app mode. KioWare Kiosk Management can group kiosks, report device health, configure devices remotely, push content, and track usage and uptime. KioCloud is hosted by KioWare; KioWare Server is hosted by the customer. The feature list includes barcode scanners, magstripe readers, accessibility tools, KioCall video conferencing, add-ins and an API for customization. Licenses are annual subscriptions tied to individual devices. The 14-day trial covers Starter, Essential and Enterprise features and does not require a credit card. No plan prices are listed. KioWare supports Windows, Android and Linux. Its Windows version excludes ARM-based CPUs and several Windows editions, including Windows CE, Windows RT, Windows IoT Core and Windows Mobile Enterprise. KioWare was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in York, Pennsylvania.