PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Cloudinary, Dash, Portfolio, Optimizely

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

Dash

No

Portfolio

Yes

Optimizely

No

Everything else

Cloudinary
Dash
Portfolio
Optimizely
Verdict
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
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.
An on-premise DAM known for deep metadata and search, for existing Portfolio users who size and maintain their own server, now under Axle AI ownership after a March 2026 acquisition.
A DAM module bundled inside the Optimizely CMS/Content Marketing Platform/DXP, for teams already on Optimizely who don't need best-of-breed asset management, bulk operations, or metadata governance.
Price published
Yes
Yes
No
No
Billed on
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Flat price per account; users are unlimited, tier set by storage and downloads
Quoted per customer; the licensing model was preserved through the change of owner
Quoted per customer
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
Yes
No
No
No
Free trial
Yes
No
No
No
Transparency index
60%
60%
25%
0%
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 tier is capped by download count as well as volume, which is a less familiar unit to budget against
It changed hands in March 2026, so anything written before that date describes it as an Extensis product
Not one tier and not one figure on the pricing page

“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.
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.
Portfolio It changed hands in March 2026, so anything written before that date describes it as an Extensis product — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Optimizely Not one tier and not one figure on the pricing page — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.