PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Brandworkz, Islandora, Piwigo, Transloadit

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.

Brandworkz

No

Islandora

Yes

Piwigo

Yes

Transloadit

No

Everything else

Brandworkz
Islandora
Piwigo
Transloadit
Verdict
A brand-guidelines and asset portal for mid-market marketing teams, with a genuine free tier that covers a branded guidelines page but not the full asset library or workflow tools.
An open-source, community-governed digital repository platform on Drupal, for libraries, archives, and museums to manage digital collections.
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.
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.
Price published
No
No
Yes
Yes
Billed on
Number of users and the tier selected
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.
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
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.
Deployment
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
Free plan
Yes
No
Yes
No
Free trial
No
No
Yes
No
Transparency index
40%
Not checked
100%
Not checked
Most common complaint
The free tier is named while the cost of the next step is not
Not checked
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026
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.

Brandworkz The free tier is named while the cost of the next step is not — 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.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.