Air, IntelligenceBank, Cloudflare Images, 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

IntelligenceBank

Cloudflare Images

Piwigo

Yes

Everything else

Air

IntelligenceBank

Cloudflare Images

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.

A compliance-focused DAM with built-in audit trails and multi-stage approval workflows, aimed at regulated industries like pharma, finance, insurance and franchise/multi-brand marketing teams.

A cloud service for storing, resizing, optimizing and delivering images via API and CDN, aimed at developers building web and mobile apps that handle images at scale.

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

Yes

Billed on

Credits; users are not billed

Package, number and type of users, storage and add-ons

Storage ($5 / 100,000 images stored / month), delivery ($1 / 100,000 images delivered / month), and transformations (first 5,000 unique transformations/month free, then $0.50 / 1,000 unique transformations/month). A unique transformation is billed per distinct parameter combination (e.g. same image at 100x100 and 200x200 counts as two). Storage/delivery charges apply only to images hosted in Cloudflare Images; transforming externally-hosted images is billed only under transformations.

Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited

Deployment

Cloud

On-premise, Cloud

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

60%

30%

Not checked

100%

Most common complaint

The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only

Only the floor of the base package is published; everything else is quoted

Not checked

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.

IntelligenceBank Only the floor of the base package is published; everything else is quoted — 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.