PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Air, Cloudinary, Lytho, 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

No

Cloudinary

No

Lytho

No

Nextcloud

Yes

Everything else

Air
Cloudinary
Lytho
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 developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
A combined creative-operations platform pairing brand-portal DAM with proofing and approval workflows, for in-house teams that want both under one roof rather than a DAM-only search specialist.
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
No
Yes
No
Yes
Billed on
Credits; users are not billed
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Team size, product mix and configuration
Subscription per user per year, cheaper at volume
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Free trial
Yes
Yes
No
No
Transparency index
60%
60%
10%
80%
Most common complaint
The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price
The tiers are named but cannot be compared on cost
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.
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.
Lytho The tiers are named 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.