Daminion, CELUM, Pics.io, Transloadit

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.

Daminion

Yes

CELUM

Pics.io

Transloadit

Everything else

Daminion

CELUM

Pics.io

Transloadit

Verdict

A DAM offered as both cloud and on-premise, aimed at small-to-mid teams that want fast metadata-driven search over large asset libraries and want files to stay on their own infrastructure.

An enterprise DAM bundled with workflow and creative-review tools, aimed at mid-to-large manufacturing and consumer brands needing deep Adobe/PIM/CMS/e-shop integration and partner-led setup.

A digital asset management platform layered on Google Drive (or S3/Dropbox), for marketing, creative, and e-commerce teams organizing and sharing brand assets in place.

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.

Price published

Yes

Billed on

Annual subscription covering all features, integrations, updates and support

Quoted per customer

Flat monthly/annual subscription per plan tier (tiers differ by included user count and storage cap), plus per-additional-teammate add-on fee ($15-25/mo depending on plan) and optional paid feature add-ons (custom fields, watermarking, branding, API, CSV import, Okta SSO, etc.)

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.

Deployment

Cloud, On-premise

Cloud

Free plan

Free trial

Transparency index

30%

Not checked

Most common complaint

Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price

The pricing page contains neither tiers nor figures

Not checked

“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.

Daminion Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

CELUM The pricing page contains neither tiers nor figures — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.