PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Cloudinary, Air, Dash, Piwigo

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

No

Air

No

Dash

No

Piwigo

Yes

Everything else

Cloudinary
Air
Dash
Piwigo
Verdict
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
A visually organized, board-based DAM for photo/image-heavy creative and marketing teams, with a genuinely usable free tier and a history of shifting, steep paid-tier pricing.
A cloud asset library for small-to-mid ecommerce and DTC brands, priced as a flat monthly fee with unlimited users, tiered by storage and downloads.
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.
Price published
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
Billed on
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Credits; users are not billed
Flat price per account; users are unlimited, tier set by storage and downloads
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Free trial
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Transparency index
60%
60%
60%
100%
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
The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only
The tier is capped by download count as well as volume, which is a less familiar unit to budget against
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 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.

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.
Air The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Dash The tier is capped by download count as well as volume, which is a less familiar unit to budget against — 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.