Air, Kontainer, Cloudflare Images, Nextcloud

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

Kontainer

Cloudflare Images

Nextcloud

Yes

Everything else

Air

Kontainer

Cloudflare Images

Nextcloud

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 Nordic/European DAM, with optional PIM, aimed at mid-market brand, retail and ecommerce teams wanting fast onboarding without heavy IT involvement, backed by a 30-day no-commitment trial.

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 file-sync and collaboration platform some organisations stretch into asset-library duty; tagging, batch metadata editing and dynamic tag-based collections are still limited or missing.

Price published

Yes

Billed on

Credits; users are not billed

Depends on configuration; several features are priced separately

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.

Subscription per user per year, cheaper at volume

Deployment

Cloud

On-premise, Cloud

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

60%

20%

Not checked

80%

Most common complaint

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

Feature-level add-on pricing makes the final figure hard to anticipate before a quote

Not checked

It is a file platform with DAM features rather than a DAM: asset-level metadata and rights are thinner

“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.

Kontainer Feature-level add-on pricing makes the final figure hard to anticipate before a quote — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

Nextcloud It is a file platform with DAM features rather than a DAM: asset-level metadata and rights are thinner — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.