PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

ACDSee, Air, HyperCMS, Piwigo

Side by side on what we have verified on each vendor’s own pages. Where a fact was not checked, the table says so rather than leaving a blank that reads as “no”.

What decides it · Runs on your own servers

If the files genuinely cannot leave your infrastructure, this is not a close race — the platforms marked No below should not be on the call at all.

ACDSee

Yes

Air

No

HyperCMS

Yes

Piwigo

Yes

Everything else

ACDSee
Air
HyperCMS
Piwigo
Verdict
A disk-native photo cataloguer and batch editor sold as a one-off perpetual licence, for photographers with large libraries who don't need Lightroom/Capture One-level RAW editing.
A visually organized, board-based DAM for photo/image-heavy creative and marketing teams, with a genuinely usable free tier and a history of shifting, steep paid-tier pricing.
An open-source DAM, CMS, and PIM platform combining asset, content, and product management for mid-to-large enterprises in banking, insurance, and retail.
A self-hosted, permission-based photo/video catalog with album hierarchies, tagging and a large plugin ecosystem, for archives and small orgs willing to maintain their own server as the library grows.
Price published
Yes
No
No
Yes
Billed on
One-off perpetual licence; a cloud subscription is sold separately
Credits; users are not billed
Cloud service: billed by storage capacity (GB) plus which optional modules you select; user accounts are unlimited/uncapped. No public price list — pricing is obtained via a configurator/calculator or by requesting a quote. On-premise/hosted deployments use Free, Standard, and Enterprise license editions (feature-gated), also quote-only. A non-commercial Free Edition exists with no disclosed price.
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
Deployment
On-premise
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
No
Yes
No
Yes
Free trial
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Transparency index
90%
60%
Not checked
100%
Most common complaint
The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double
The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only
Not checked
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026

“Not checked” means exactly that: we have not verified it, not that the platform lacks it. Every other value was read off the vendor’s own pages on the date shown on each platform page.

What to ask on the demo

One question per platform, drawn from what actually goes wrong with it — not a generic checklist. Vendors run the demo; this hands the agenda back to you.

ACDSee The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Air The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Piwigo A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026 — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.