Guides → Self-hosted vs cloud wallboards

Self-hosted vs cloud wallboards

An explainer · ~6 min read

Most help desk wallboards are cloud SaaS: you grant access to your help desk, they pull your ticket data into their platform, and they render the board from there. A self-hosted wallboard flips that — it runs on your own machine and reads your help desk directly. Here's what actually changes, and how to decide which is right for your team.

The core difference: where your data lives

With a cloud wallboard, your customer and ticket data is copied to a third party's servers to be processed and displayed. With a self-hosted wallboard, the app calls your help desk's API from your infrastructure and renders locally — the data never makes that extra hop to a vendor's cloud. Everything else (panels, themes, TV mode) can look identical; the difference is who holds the data.

Data ownership & compliance

If you handle regulated data — health, finance, public sector — or you simply have a policy against customer information sitting on extra third-party servers, self-hosting removes an entire data-processor from the equation. There's no new sub-processor to add to your records, no extra DPA to sign, and a smaller attack surface. For many teams this alone decides it.

Cost over time

Cloud wallboards usually price per dashboard, per data source, or per seat — so the bill grows as your team and screens grow. Self-hosted tools tend to be flat: you run them on hardware you already own. Over a couple of years the gap can be large. (We work this through with real numbers on the comparison page.)

Reliability

A cloud wallboard depends on the vendor's uptime as well as your help desk's. A self-hosted board has one fewer dependency: if the vendor's cloud has an outage, your wall keeps running because it talks to your help desk directly. The flip side — you're responsible for keeping the host up, though for a wallboard that's usually a single small machine or container.

Where cloud genuinely wins

Self-hosting isn't always the right answer, and it's worth being honest about that:

• Nothing to run. A fully managed cloud product means zero infrastructure on your side. If you have no one to look after even a small box or container, that simplicity has real value.
• Huge connector libraries. If you need dozens of unrelated cloud sources (CRM, marketing, finance) on one screen, the big cloud dashboards have a head start.
• Instant scaling. Cloud handles spikes for you; self-hosting means sizing your own host (rarely an issue for a wallboard, but worth noting).

How to decide

Ask three questions: Does customer data leaving your network matter for your compliance or policy? Will per-seat or per-dashboard pricing bite as you grow? Do you have somewhere to run a small container? If data ownership and flat cost matter and you can run a container, self-hosted wins comfortably. If you need zero-maintenance and massive source breadth, cloud is the pragmatic call.