PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Air, Contentstack, digiKam, 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.

Air

No

Contentstack

No

digiKam

Yes

Piwigo

Yes

Everything else

Air
Contentstack
digiKam
Piwigo
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.
An enterprise headless CMS and composable DXP for developer-led teams needing multi-channel content delivery, with a native asset-management module that's newer and thinly reviewed.
Free, open-source, cross-platform photo cataloging software for large RAW libraries, with tagging, geotagging and duplicate detection, meant to pair with a separate RAW editor.
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
No
No
Yes
Yes
Billed on
Credits; users are not billed
Quoted per customer
Free software, no licence fee
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free trial
Yes
No
No
Yes
Transparency index
60%
30%
100%
100%
Most common complaint
The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only
A free start exists, but the terms for moving to a paid tier are not on the page
It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design
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.

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.
Contentstack A free start exists, but the terms for moving to a paid tier are not on the page — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
digiKam It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design — 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.