Contentstack, PhotoShelter Brands, Cloudflare Images, 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.

Contentstack

PhotoShelter Brands

Cloudflare Images

Piwigo

Yes

Everything else

Contentstack

PhotoShelter Brands

Cloudflare Images

Piwigo

Verdict

An enterprise headless CMS and composable DXP for developer-led teams needing multi-channel content delivery, with a native asset-management module that's newer and thinly reviewed.

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

A cloud service for storing, resizing, optimizing and delivering images via API and CDN, aimed at developers building web and mobile apps that handle images at scale.

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

Billed on

Quoted per customer

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.

Storage ($5 / 100,000 images stored / month), delivery ($1 / 100,000 images delivered / month), and transformations (first 5,000 unique transformations/month free, then $0.50 / 1,000 unique transformations/month). A unique transformation is billed per distinct parameter combination (e.g. same image at 100x100 and 200x200 counts as two). Storage/delivery charges apply only to images hosted in Cloudflare Images; transforming externally-hosted images is billed only under transformations.

Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited

Deployment

Cloud

On-premise, Cloud

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

30%

Not checked

100%

Most common complaint

A free start exists, but the terms for moving to a paid tier are not on the page

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.

Contentstack A free start exists, but the terms for moving to a paid tier are not on the page — 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.