FWi Pricing, Features, Reviews and Alternatives

The way locations, templates and content cascade down the network tree is both familiar and intuitive, but don't let the simplicity fool you: there are powerful features and settings just under the surface if you know where to look that allow you to build almost anything you can think of.

Accomplishing complex solutions like integrating unique data structures or getting certain behaviors to function properly can involve some trial and error. Documentation for more advanced abilities in the past has been notoriously lacking, although there has been some improvement since they switched to their community portal. The appearance of the CMD software seems a bit antiquated, like old Windows programs.

Eventually, if you're like me, you'll push the limits of you CMS. I like to do more. Maybe you started out wanting to push images to a single display. However, as your business grows, you may now need to pull live data and push that to your display giving your staff up to date metrics to judge business decisions. Does your current Content Management system provide that? Maybe it doesn't. Maybe you...

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If I had to come up with what I like least about the FourWinds software my list wouldn't be long. I have to separate my gripes into two categories. Are my issues caused by the media player I'm choosing to use or is it the software? Most of my gripes are directed at the media player which, really, has nothing to do with the software at all. So, separating the two, I would wish for a way to bulk upload assets. Each month I create, upload and schedule 40-60 promotional assets. If I could select, schedule, set duration of play, days to play, upload, etc. as a bulk list without doing it one at a time would save me considerable time. That would be what I like least about this software.

Automation, i do not have to manually enter information. It saves me time when it works

Inconsistency. Sometimes i call and the person is helpful and great and other is like a tunnel with no end

We had 3 old systems, one for wayfinding, one for signage and 1 a bit of both. Four Winds Interactive allowed us to consolidate our signage/wayfinding into 1 system and gain loads of functionality at the same time. I could build the system I imagined from scratch utilizing Four Winds Interactive. This included creating my own templates, design and touch functionality to make it work best for our audience. It could integrate with 3rd party data utilizing JSON or XML which makes it extremely versatile.

Many past problems I have run into including documentation, etc are being actively addressed by the company with enhancements coming to the customer portal. Content Manager Desktop is only available on Windows (which creates extra steps for Mac users like myself) but with their new Cloud system I need to open Content Manager Desktop less frequently.

The strongest aspect of FWI signage software is the ability to integrate with so many sources of data, including RSS, XML, SQL, and JSON. This has allowed us to greatly reduce the time spent manually managing sign content, as the signs update themselves as information is entered into our many different systems of record which serve as sources of content/data.

The Content Manager Desktop application, as it exists currently, is Windows-only and is much too complex for a beginning user who will only need to make simple image/video content updates. The application is incredibly powerful and makes sense to a power user, but I'm glad to see the FWI Cloud content library start to become available to serve the needs of basic content contributors.