PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Air, Daminion, imgix, Cloudinary

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

Daminion

Yes

imgix

No

Cloudinary

No

Everything else

Air
Daminion
imgix
Cloudinary
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 offered as both cloud and on-premise, aimed at small-to-mid teams that want fast metadata-driven search over large asset libraries and want files to stay on their own infrastructure.
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 developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
Price published
No
No
Yes
Yes
Billed on
Credits; users are not billed
Annual subscription covering all features, integrations, updates and support
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.
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Cloud
Free plan
Yes
No
No
Yes
Free trial
Yes
No
No
Yes
Transparency index
60%
30%
Not checked
60%
Most common complaint
The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only
Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price
Not checked
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price

“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.
Daminion Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price — 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.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.