Air, Canto, Bunny.net, Nextcloud

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.

Air

Canto

Bunny.net

Nextcloud

Yes

Everything else

Air

Canto

Bunny.net

Nextcloud

Verdict

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.

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.

A CDN and edge-computing platform bundling storage, video streaming, DNS and image optimization, aimed at developers and cost-conscious teams as an alternative to larger CDN providers.

A self-hosted file-sync and collaboration platform some organisations stretch into asset-library duty; tagging, batch metadata editing and dynamic tag-based collections are still limited or missing.

Price published

Yes

Billed on

Credits; users are not billed

Team size and storage volume

Primarily pay-as-you-go per GB of bandwidth/storage (CDN from $0.01/GB standard, volume network from $0.005/GB down to $0.002/GB; Storage from $0.01/GB standard tier, $0.02/GB edge SSD tier; Stream storage from $0.01/GB and CDN from $0.005/GB), with a $1/month account minimum. Bunny Optimizer is a flat $9.50/month per website (unlimited optimizations). No per-request fees. Enterprise-scale volume (above 2PB) requires contacting sales.

Subscription per user per year, cheaper at volume

Deployment

Cloud

On-premise, Cloud

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

60%

20%

Not checked

80%

Most common complaint

The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only

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

Not checked

It is a file platform with DAM features rather than a DAM: asset-level metadata and rights are thinner

“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.

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.

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

Nextcloud It is a file platform with DAM features rather than a DAM: asset-level metadata and rights are thinner — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.