Air, Lytho, Akeneo, ACDSee

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

Lytho

Akeneo

Yes

ACDSee

Yes

Everything else

Air

Lytho

Akeneo

ACDSee

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 combined creative-operations platform pairing brand-portal DAM with proofing and approval workflows, for in-house teams that want both under one roof rather than a DAM-only search specialist.

A PIM platform with a built-in DAM module, used by manufacturing and ecommerce companies to manage product data and assets; also available as a free open-source Community Edition.

A disk-native photo cataloguer and batch editor sold as a one-off perpetual licence, for photographers with large libraries who don't need Lightroom/Capture One-level RAW editing.

Price published

Yes

Billed on

Credits; users are not billed

Team size, product mix and configuration

No genuine dollar pricing is published. The vendor's package-comparison page lists four tiers: Community Edition (free, open-source, self-hosted), Growth (SaaS, shown only as "Starting at $0 Annually" with a free-trial CTA — no real recurring price disclosed), Advanced and Premium (both "Call for a quote"). No billing unit (per user, per SKU, per asset, per GB) is stated anywhere on the site for the paid tiers.

One-off perpetual licence; a cloud subscription is sold separately

Deployment

Cloud

Cloud, On-premise

On-premise

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

60%

10%

Not checked

90%

Most common complaint

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

The tiers are named but cannot be compared on cost

Not checked

The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double

“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.

Lytho The tiers are named but cannot be compared on cost — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

ACDSee The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.