Brandfolder, PhotoShelter, Filestack, Phraseanet

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.

Brandfolder

PhotoShelter

Filestack

Phraseanet

Yes

Everything else

Brandfolder

PhotoShelter

Filestack

Phraseanet

Verdict

A polished, search-first brand asset DAM sold standalone under Smartsheet ownership, priced for mid-market and enterprise budgets around a $24,700/year median contract.

A cloud portfolio and image-storage platform for individual photographers, with client galleries and built-in print/licensing sales.

A file upload, transformation, and delivery API with a drop-in picker for 20+ sources, for developers adding file handling to web and mobile apps.

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.

Price published

Yes

Billed on

Quoted per customer

Quote-only. Priced per named "Library Seat" (2-5 seats depending on tier, custom for Enterprise) plus a storage allotment per tier (1TB-5TB, custom for Enterprise) and a cap on "Advanced Integrations" (0 to unlimited). Unlimited invited/contributor users and unlimited Social Content Publisher seats included on all/most tiers. Annual or monthly billing toggle shown on the pricing page, but no dollar amounts are published — all tiers show a "Get Pricing" CTA to a demo/sales call.

Monthly subscription tiers with bundled resource allowances (bandwidth in GB, uploads counted per file, transformations per file/image operation, storage in GB, number of team members), plus per-unit overage fees once a tier's allowance is exceeded (e.g. Start plan overage is $0.2/GB bandwidth).

No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid

Deployment

Cloud

On-premise

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Transparency index

Not checked

90%

Most common complaint

Two tiers with no figure and no trial offered on the page

Not checked

The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 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.

Brandfolder Two tiers with no figure and no trial offered on the page — 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.