PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Daminion, digiKam, Censhare, ACDSee

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.

Daminion

No

digiKam

Yes

Censhare

No

ACDSee

Yes

Everything else

Daminion
digiKam
Censhare
ACDSee
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.
Free, open-source, cross-platform photo cataloging software for large RAW libraries, with tagging, geotagging and duplicate detection, meant to pair with a separate RAW editor.
An enterprise PIM, DAM and content management platform, for multi-brand retailers, manufacturers and publishers with multilingual product content.
A disk-native photo cataloguer and batch editor sold as a one-off perpetual licence, for photographers with large libraries who don't need Lightroom/Capture One-level RAW editing.
Price published
No
Yes
No
Yes
Billed on
Annual subscription covering all features, integrations, updates and support
Free software, no licence fee
Not published — quote-only (custom enterprise pricing via demo request; no plans, per-user, or per-GB figures disclosed on site)
One-off perpetual licence; a cloud subscription is sold separately
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise
Free plan
No
Yes
No
No
Free trial
No
No
No
Yes
Transparency index
30%
100%
Not checked
90%
Most common complaint
Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price
It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design
Not checked
The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double

“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.
digiKam It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
ACDSee The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.