Air, digiKam, Pics.io, NetX

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

digiKam

Yes

Pics.io

NetX

Yes

Everything else

Air

digiKam

Pics.io

NetX

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.

A digital asset management platform layered on Google Drive (or S3/Dropbox), for marketing, creative, and e-commerce teams organizing and sharing brand assets in place.

A digital asset management platform for enterprises, agencies, museums, and nonprofits, paired with in-house consulting and data-migration services.

Price published

Yes

Billed on

Credits; users are not billed

Free software, no licence fee

Flat monthly/annual subscription per plan tier (tiers differ by included user count and storage cap), plus per-additional-teammate add-on fee ($15-25/mo depending on plan) and optional paid feature add-ons (custom fields, watermarking, branding, API, CSV import, Okta SSO, etc.)

Not disclosed publicly. Plans are differentiated by number of admin users, storage (TB), and number of portals (e.g. Essential: 5 admin users/1TB; Signature: 20 admin users/2TB/3 portals; Premium: 50 admin users/5TB/5 portals); exact per-unit or per-tier prices are not published, visitors must request a consult.

Deployment

Cloud

On-premise

Cloud

Cloud, On-premise, Hybrid

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

60%

100%

Not checked

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

“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.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.