Cloudinary, Acquia DAM, Filestack, HyperCMS

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.

Cloudinary

Acquia DAM

Filestack

HyperCMS

Yes

Everything else

Cloudinary

Acquia DAM

Filestack

HyperCMS

Verdict

A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.

A quote-only enterprise DAM (formerly Widen) built on configurable metadata and external sharing portals, for organisations already standardised on the Acquia stack.

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.

An open-source DAM, CMS, and PIM platform combining asset, content, and product management for mid-to-large enterprises in banking, insurance, and retail.

Price published

Yes

Billed on

Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth

Organisation size, user count, storage volume and feature set

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).

Cloud service: billed by storage capacity (GB) plus which optional modules you select; user accounts are unlimited/uncapped. No public price list — pricing is obtained via a configurator/calculator or by requesting a quote. On-premise/hosted deployments use Free, Standard, and Enterprise license editions (feature-gated), also quote-only. A non-commercial Free Edition exists with no disclosed price.

Deployment

Cloud

Cloud, On-premise

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

60%

20%

Not checked

Most common complaint

Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price

Cost depends on four variables at once, none of them priced publicly

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.

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.

Acquia DAM Cost depends on four variables at once, none of them priced publicly — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.