Best Digital Menu Boards for Quick-Service Restaurants: WAND Digital vs SmarterSign

With several digital menu board platforms on the market for quick-service restaurants (QSRs), dining halls, drive-thrus, and food service operators to choose from, you might be feeling overwhelmed by features, offerings, and more as you do your initial comparison research. Instead of comparing features side-by-side in a long list, we’re looking at the bigger picture – the fundamental aspects of the technology and company – to help make your comparison research a bit simpler. In this article, we’ll compare WAND Digital with SmarterSign.

SmarterSign won’t procure or install hardware for you, although they’ll make recommendations for installation services, for displays, and for what they refer to as SmarterSign players, which are hardware and operating systems that you can run their digital signage software on. Compared to WAND Digital, SmarterSign is more of a build-your-own in regards to setting up each location with all your technology needs. If you are more of the do-it-yourself (DIY) type or are very technically savvy, and you have time to put all the pieces together (literally and figuratively), this may work for you, but it certainly won’t work for all QSR and food service owners and operators.

Not to mention, SmarterSign’s platform is not just for digital menu boards, but for digital signage across several industries like hospitality, healthcare, retail, corporate communications and more.

As you are well aware, QSR owners and operators have busy schedules and often little time to invest into researching, purchasing and implementing new technology and equipment (even if it means time and money saved in the long run). WAND Digital’s full service hands-on support is a major time (and effort) saver for everything you’ll need to implement a digital menu board platform at your location/s. WAND experts will help you decide on the optimal set-up and solution based on your business’s budget, parameters, and challenges. Then, we’ll procure and install hardware (like displays) for you, install WAND’s digital menu board software, integrate it with your POS system (if desired), and train and support your teams to ensure you get up and running quickly and sturdily.

End-to-end support might require a bit more investment up front, but you’ll soon increase your average order values and repeat customer rate, as well as save time and unnecessary costs trying to DIY. Though, WAND does offer digital menu packages for any stage of growth (whether you’re a do-it-your-selfer or you want as much support as you can get).

With our installation and onboarding services, content management resources, and award-winning menu design, you’ll be able to easily make updates to menu items, prices, descriptions, calories and sizes, as well as upload brand assets, schedule day-parting, and deploy a premium outdoor and indoor experience from one store to hundreds in minutes.

Here’s this issue with that: There are risks with connectivity when stringing one media player to multiple TVs. WAND recommends a 1:1 ratio when it comes to players and displays, because multi display players can be unreliable and create a rabbit hole of failure and implementation scenarios. The added complexity of multi display players outweighs the savings, especially as you scale. Yes, SmarterSign does offer a 1:1 ratio, though you’ll need to decide on the best configuration of technology and then install and set-up the player and display yourself (or hire someone else to do it).

WAND Digital will outfit your location/s with modern commercial grade displays, which eliminate the need for an external player. WAND embeds the player within the display itself, which is a more reliable set-up. Though, if you already have display screens you want to use, WAND is able to accommodate and install a WAND media player (though we still recommend taking the embedded player route). With WAND’s easy, no-code, no-fuss displays, and 24/7/365 operational support, you’ll never miss a beat or stress about an outage again.

For all these reasons, we hope you’ll see that WAND Digital is the preferred alternative to SmarterSign. Overall, SmarterSign offers a lot across the spectrum of digital signage needs. Though, perhaps their lack of support when it comes to procuring and installing hardware could leave you with a patchwork of unreliable technology and higher costs in the long run.

If you’d like to continue your research to find the best digital menu board platform for your business, see the related articles below for additional comparisons of the best digital menu technology on the market.

Disclaimer: All information was obtained from public sources on or around the date of publishing this article and may have changed since then. References to SmarterSign are for illustrative and educational purposes only. We are not affiliated with or sponsored by SmarterSign.