PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

ACDSee, ImageKit, Cloudinary, 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

ImageKit

No

Cloudinary

No

Piwigo

Yes

Everything else

ACDSee
ImageKit
Cloudinary
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.
An image and video CDN with an API-first asset library, built for fast developer integration, billed on flat monthly tiers with per-GB overage once bandwidth or storage limits are exceeded.
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
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
Yes
Yes
Yes
Billed on
One-off perpetual licence; a cloud subscription is sold separately
Bandwidth, storage and user seats, with published per-unit rates above the limits
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
Deployment
On-premise
Cloud
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free trial
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Transparency index
90%
70%
60%
100%
Most common complaint
The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double
Several units are metered at once: bandwidth, storage, video units and seats
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price
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.
ImageKit Several units are metered at once: bandwidth, storage, video units and seats — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Cloudinary Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price — 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.