PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Amplience, Phraseanet, Censhare, 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.

Amplience

No

Phraseanet

Yes

Censhare

Yes

ACDSee

Yes

Everything else

Amplience
Phraseanet
Censhare
ACDSee
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 free, self-hosted GPLv3 DAM used by French public-sector, cultural and broadcast institutions with in-house technical staff, now being sunset by its vendor in favor of a paid successor, Phrasea.
An enterprise PIM, DAM and content management platform, for multi-brand retailers, manufacturers and publishers with multilingual product content.
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
No
Yes
No
Yes
Billed on
Content volume, storage and depth of automation
No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid
Not published — quote-only (custom enterprise pricing via demo request; no plans, per-user, or per-GB figures disclosed on site)
One-off perpetual licence; a cloud subscription is sold separately
Deployment
Cloud
On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise
Free plan
No
Yes
No
No
Free trial
No
No
No
Yes
Transparency index
10%
90%
Not checked
90%
Most common complaint
Neither tiers nor ranges
The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026
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.

Amplience Neither tiers nor ranges — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Phraseanet The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026 — 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.