PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Cloudinary, Dash, Transloadit, Phraseanet

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

Transloadit

No

Phraseanet

Yes

Everything else

Cloudinary
Dash
Transloadit
Phraseanet
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.
Not checked
A free, self-hosted GPLv3 DAM used by French public-sector, cultural and broadcast institutions with in-house technical staff, now being sunset by its vendor in favor of a paid successor, Phrasea.
Price published
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
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
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.
No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud
On-premise
Free plan
Yes
No
No
Yes
Free trial
Yes
No
No
No
Transparency index
60%
60%
Not checked
90%
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
Not checked
The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 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.
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.
Phraseanet The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026 — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.