Air, WoodWing Assets, NetX, 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

WoodWing Assets

Yes

NetX

Yes

Nextcloud

Yes

Everything else

Air

WoodWing Assets

NetX

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.

An enterprise digital asset management platform for newsrooms, publishers, museums, agencies, and manufacturers to organize and distribute digital assets.

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

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

Not disclosed publicly. Pricing page shows three tiers (Starter, Advanced, Ultimate) all gated behind "Request a quote", billed annually; no per-user, per-GB, or credit figures are shown, so the actual billing unit cannot be confirmed from the vendor's site.

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.

Subscription per user per year, cheaper at volume

Deployment

Cloud

Cloud, On-premise

Cloud, On-premise, Hybrid

On-premise, Cloud

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

60%

Not checked

80%

Most common complaint

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

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.

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.