Cloudinary, PhotoShelter Brands, Transloadit, Kontainer

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 · Publishes a price

One of these tells you the order of magnitude before you speak to anyone, and the others do not. That difference sets how long your evaluation takes, whatever the software does.

Cloudinary

Yes

PhotoShelter Brands

Transloadit

Yes

Kontainer

Everything else

Cloudinary

PhotoShelter Brands

Transloadit

Kontainer

Verdict

A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.

A DAM platform for brand and marketing teams, built for real-time camera-to-cloud photo and video distribution during live events.

A file-processing API that handles uploading, transforming, and delivering video, audio, images, and documents, for developers who'd otherwise build that infrastructure in-house.

A Nordic/European DAM, with optional PIM, aimed at mid-market brand, retail and ecommerce teams wanting fast onboarding without heavy IT involvement, backed by a 30-day no-commitment trial.

Price published

Yes

Billed on

Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth

Plan tiers differ by number of Library (admin) seats and storage (TB); unlimited invited/contributor users on every tier. No dollar figures published — all tiers show a "Get Pricing" CTA leading to a sales/demo form.

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.

Depends on configuration; several features are priced separately

Deployment

Cloud

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

60%

Not checked

20%

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

Not checked

Feature-level add-on pricing makes the final figure hard to anticipate before a quote

“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.

Kontainer Feature-level add-on pricing makes the final figure hard to anticipate before a quote — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.