PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

ACDSee, Kontainer, HyperCMS, Air

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

Kontainer

No

HyperCMS

Yes

Air

No

Everything else

ACDSee
Kontainer
HyperCMS
Air
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 Nordic/European DAM, with optional PIM, aimed at mid-market brand, retail and ecommerce teams wanting fast onboarding without heavy IT involvement, backed by a 30-day no-commitment trial.
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 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.
Price published
Yes
No
No
No
Billed on
One-off perpetual licence; a cloud subscription is sold separately
Depends on configuration; several features are priced separately
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.
Credits; users are not billed
Deployment
On-premise
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
No
No
No
Yes
Free trial
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Transparency index
90%
20%
Not checked
60%
Most common complaint
The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double
Feature-level add-on pricing makes the final figure hard to anticipate before a quote
Not checked
The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only

“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.
Kontainer Feature-level add-on pricing makes the final figure hard to anticipate before a quote — 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.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.