ACDSee, Piwigo, imgix, Canto

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

Piwigo

Yes

imgix

Canto

Everything else

ACDSee

Piwigo

imgix

Canto

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 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.

An image and video API for real-time resizing, compression, and format conversion via URL parameters, built for developers at ecommerce, media, and agency teams.

A DAM built around search and tagging for mid-market teams, with unlimited free view-only accounts but per-seat pricing for editors that only appears after a sales quote.

Price published

Yes

Billed on

One-off perpetual licence; a cloud subscription is sold separately

Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited

Consumption-based credits, sold in monthly tiers ($25–$500/mo self-serve, custom above that). Credits are spent on Management (2 credits/GB/month for stored assets), Delivery (1 credit/GB bandwidth), and Transformation (variable by operation). Per-credit rate drops as plan tier rises ($0.25 down to $0.12, monthly billing; slightly cheaper on annual commitment). Each plan also states an implied storage/bandwidth cap in GB.

Team size and storage volume

Deployment

On-premise

On-premise, Cloud

Cloud

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

90%

100%

Not checked

20%

Most common complaint

The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double

A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026

Not checked

The tiers are named and described but cannot be compared on cost

“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.

Piwigo A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026 — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

Canto The tiers are named and described but cannot be compared on cost — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.