PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Cloudinary, PhotoPrism, HyperCMS, 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

PhotoPrism

Yes

HyperCMS

Yes

Piwigo

Yes

Everything else

Cloudinary
PhotoPrism
HyperCMS
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 self-hosted, single-container photo indexer under AGPL/commercial licensing, for people who want a private on-hardware archive without Google-Photos-level AI tagging or mobile app polish.
An open-source DAM, CMS, and PIM platform combining asset, content, and product management for mid-to-large enterprises in banking, insurance, and retail.
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
Yes
No
Yes
Billed on
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Subscription per edition, billed annually
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.
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
Deployment
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Free trial
Yes
No
No
Yes
Transparency index
60%
100%
Not checked
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 gap between the free edition and the first paid one is wide: €200 a month
Not checked
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.
PhotoPrism The gap between the free edition and the first paid one is wide: €200 a month — 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.