PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Amplience, Phraseanet, Transloadit, Islandora

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

Transloadit

No

Islandora

Yes

Everything else

Amplience
Phraseanet
Transloadit
Islandora
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.
A file-processing API that handles uploading, transforming, and delivering video, audio, images, and documents, for developers who'd otherwise build that infrastructure in-house.
An open-source, community-governed digital repository platform on Drupal, for libraries, archives, and museums to manage digital collections.
Price published
No
Yes
Yes
No
Billed on
Content volume, storage and depth of automation
No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid
GB of data processed per month (combined input + output file size); paid tiers also gate priority processing slots, collaborator seats, and max file size. Overage on the paid Startup tier billed at $1.80/GB. Enterprise tier is custom/quote-based tiered pricing with whitelabeling.
No published price on islandora.ca — the core software is free open source ("free to use and always will be"). Paid options are hosting/installation/migration/support/training contracts sold by independent third-party service providers listed on islandora.ca/service-providers (e.g. Born-Digital, discoverygarden); islandora.ca itself does not publish their rates or billing units.
Deployment
Cloud
On-premise
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
No
Yes
No
No
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
10%
90%
Not checked
Not checked
Most common complaint
Neither tiers nor ranges
The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026
Not checked
Not checked

“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.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.