PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Cloudinary, Air, Piwigo, Frontify

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

Piwigo

Yes

Frontify

No

Everything else

Cloudinary
Air
Piwigo
Frontify
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 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 brand-management platform built around a single, always-current source of truth for guidelines, logos and templates, aimed at brand teams working with internal staff and external agencies.
Price published
Yes
No
Yes
No
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 by storage; users are unlimited
Monthly active users
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
Free plan
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Free trial
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Transparency index
60%
60%
100%
30%
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
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026
The MAU model favours occasional users, but there is no figure to verify that with

“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.
Piwigo A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026 — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Frontify The MAU model favours occasional users, but there is no figure to verify that with — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.