Score every vendor on six categories: governance and permissions, rollout and hardware fit, reliability, security and audit, support, and price at scale. Weight governance, rollout and reliability highest. A gap there is the hardest to fix after you sign. Weight price last: a cheap platform that cannot run 200 screens costs more than a vendor that costs more per screen and works. Test every category in a pilot before you sign, not only in a demo.
If your committee needs to score vendors on paper, start from a free RFP template with scoring built in instead of building a spreadsheet from scratch. That template scores written vendor responses before the pilot, with its own 100-point table and weights for that earlier stage. This scorecard is for the pilot itself: your own test results on real hardware.
The weighted scorecard
Use a 100-point scale. Score each row 0 to 5, then multiply by the weight and divide by 5. Each reviewer scores every vendor on the same categories, so a demo cannot outweigh a real gap.
| Category | Weight | What to check | How to test it in a pilot |
|---|---|---|---|
| Governance & permissions | 20 | Who can publish to which screens, the approval workflow, whether a change is logged | Have two people try to publish conflicting content to the same screen. See who wins, and whether the change shows in an audit log |
| Rollout & hardware fit | 20 | Works with the TVs and players you already own, remote pairing, time to add one location | Pair a real screen at two or three locations using the exact steps your field team will use. Time it |
| Reliability | 20 | Offline playback, screen monitoring, alerts when a screen goes dark | Unplug one screen's network for an hour. It should keep playing, and someone should get an alert |
| Security, SSO & audit | 15 | Identity-provider login, role mapping from your HR system, who changed what and when | Send the vendor your security questionnaire before the pilot starts. After test changes, pull the audit log and check it names the person and the change |
| Support | 10 | Hours covered, who answers, response time | Open a real support ticket during the pilot, at a normal hour and an odd one, and time the reply |
| Price at scale | 15 | Per-screen price, annual vs. monthly, what is included | Price your real screen count, not the demo account, before you sign |
That adds up to 100. Treat these weights as a starting point, not a rule.
Adjust the weights to your rollout, not the vendor's pitch. A rollout across 100 or more locations and hundreds of users usually needs its own line for the approval hierarchy: who signs off content at the location level, the region level and head office, and whether the platform can even represent that hierarchy. A retailer or restaurant chain rolling out menu boards weights rollout and hardware fit higher, because a sign that will not pair on a real store's Wi-Fi is worthless at any price. A healthcare or finance buyer weights security higher, because the audit trail is the thing their own compliance team will ask for first.
Run a small pilot to win the budget
Before you ask for budget to fund the full rollout, run a small pilot: two locations, or about ten screens, is enough to prove every row in the scorecard without committing the budget. A pilot that size still surfaces the real problems — a store's Wi-Fi that drops, a manager who should not have access to another location's screens, a support ticket that takes two days instead of two hours.
Run the pilot on your own hardware and your own network, not the vendor's demo account. A phased implementation plan keeps the pilot's scope fixed: which locations, which screens, which content, and the date you score it. Score the pilot the same day it ends, while the test results are fresh, and write the scores down category by category — not as one overall impression.
Three checks catch most of the vendors that look good in a demo and fail at scale:
- Governance: have a store or branch-level user try to edit another location's screen. If they can, and nothing stops or logs it, mark governance down regardless of how the sales demo looked.
- Rollout: have someone outside IT — a store manager, a facilities person — do the pairing steps from the vendor's own instructions, with no one from the vendor in the room. If they get stuck, your field team will too.
- Reliability: unplug one screen's network for an hour during the pilot. It should keep playing, and someone should get an alert when it drops.
Answering IT's questions about a signage vendor
Your security questionnaire is part of the scorecard, not a side process that runs after you have picked a vendor. Send it before the pilot starts, so a vendor that cannot answer it does not waste a pilot slot. At minimum, ask for: how sign-in works (password only, or single sign-on through your identity provider), whether roles can follow your HR system's groups, where the data and media are stored, and what the audit log records.
During the pilot, test the answers instead of taking them on faith. Make a handful of changes — add a screen, edit a playlist, change a user's role — then open the audit log and check it names the person, the action and the time for each one. A vendor that cannot show you that log in the pilot will not produce one after you sign. For the full list of questions a security team typically asks, and how to read the answers, see the digital signage security questionnaire guide.
Where Brix fits
Brix scores well on governance. Roles are scoped to a location, with an organization tier above it for head office. Brix logs every mutating action, so the audit trail shows who changed what.
On reliability, the offline cache keeps a screen playing when its network drops. Offline alerts reach you by email, webhook or Teams when a screen goes dark.
On rollout, TV-based screens pair in minutes: the Amazon Signage Stick, Fire TV, Android TV boxes and the Windows player.
Brix places every workspace's media and database in the US, EU, Oceania or Asia-Pacific region, based on the country you sign up from. The EU is a contractual jurisdiction. US, Oceania and Asia-Pacific are placement, not a legal guarantee. That matters for the governance and security rows on a cross-border rollout.
The 7-day free trial, no card needed, is the pilot. Run the tests above on it before you score anything.
On price at scale, Brix is $6 per screen per month billed annually, or $8 billed monthly. The price is the same in every region. If a committee switches vendors mid-rollout, Brix does the migration for you, free, usually in a day.
Where Brix is not the right fit: sign-on through SAML 2.0, a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certificate, or a video wall spanning many screens as one image. If your scorecard has a hard requirement in any of those rows, score Brix against that row honestly and move on. Ask any vendor these questions before you score the demo. If your rollout fits what Brix does well, talk to us about running the pilot.
What should a vendor demo prove?
A demo should prove the vendor can do the things on your scorecard, on your hardware, not show you their best-case content. Ask the vendor to run your governance, rollout and reliability tests live, on a screen you choose, instead of a prepared walkthrough.
Who should score the vendor evaluation?
Whoever will use or support the platform after it ships: IT or security for the SSO and audit rows, whoever runs the field rollout for hardware and reliability, support for its own row, and finance for price at scale. A demo scored only by marketing or the executive sponsor misses the rows that cause the rollout to fail.
How long should a pilot run before you decide?
Long enough to see one full cycle of normal use: a content update, a new user added, a support ticket, and the screen running unattended overnight and over a weekend. Two to four weeks covers that for most rollouts.