PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Air, digiKam, imgix, Portfolio

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

digiKam

Yes

imgix

No

Portfolio

Yes

Everything else

Air
digiKam
imgix
Portfolio
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.
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.
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.
An on-premise DAM known for deep metadata and search, for existing Portfolio users who size and maintain their own server, now under Axle AI ownership after a March 2026 acquisition.
Price published
No
Yes
Yes
No
Billed on
Credits; users are not billed
Free software, no licence fee
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.
Quoted per customer; the licensing model was preserved through the change of owner
Deployment
Cloud
On-premise
Cloud
On-premise
Free plan
Yes
Yes
No
No
Free trial
Yes
No
No
No
Transparency index
60%
100%
Not checked
25%
Most common complaint
The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only
It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design
Not checked
It changed hands in March 2026, so anything written before that date describes it as an Extensis product

“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.
digiKam It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Portfolio It changed hands in March 2026, so anything written before that date describes it as an Extensis product — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.