PicaJet

Amplience, Frontify, Cloudinary, 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.

Amplience

No

Frontify

No

Cloudinary

No

Piwigo

Yes

Everything else

Verdict
A headless content-and-commerce platform with a bundled DAM module, for retail/ecommerce teams that want a marketer-friendly UI and can tolerate slower publish times.
A brand-management platform built around a single, always-current source of truth for guidelines, logos and templates, aimed at brand teams working with internal staff and external agencies.
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
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
No
No
Yes
Yes
Billed on
Content volume, storage and depth of automation
Monthly active users
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
No
No
Yes
Yes
Free trial
No
No
Yes
Yes
Transparency index
10%
30%
60%
100%
Most common complaint
Neither tiers nor ranges
The MAU model favours occasional users, but there is no figure to verify that with
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price
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.

Amplience Neither tiers nor ranges — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Frontify The MAU model favours occasional users, but there is no figure to verify that with — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Cloudinary Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price — 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.

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