digiKam, Brandfolder, Plytix, Cloudinary

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.

digiKam

Yes

Brandfolder

Plytix

Cloudinary

Everything else

digiKam

Brandfolder

Plytix

Cloudinary

Verdict

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.

A polished, search-first brand asset DAM sold standalone under Smartsheet ownership, priced for mid-market and enterprise budgets around a $24,700/year median contract.

A combined PIM and DAM platform for managing product data and media, built for SMB and mid-market ecommerce brands, manufacturers, and agencies.

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

Price published

Yes

Billed on

Free software, no licence fee

Quoted per customer

Tiered plans priced by SKU (product) count, not by user seat — all plans include unlimited user seats. Each tier also caps monthly AI credits, API calls/hour, and DAM file storage + CDN traffic (GB/month). Standard is free (500 SKUs, 50GB storage); Pro is $499/mo (50,000 SKUs, 750GB storage); Enterprise is custom/quote-only (unlimited SKUs, custom storage). Optional flat-fee add-ons (Product Feeds $300/mo, Brand Portals $300/mo, Product Data Sheets $200/mo) and one-time onboarding fees ($0 / $3,000 / custom).

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

Deployment

On-premise

Cloud

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

100%

Not checked

60%

Most common complaint

It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design

Two tiers with no figure and no trial offered on the page

Not checked

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” 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.

digiKam It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

Brandfolder Two tiers with no figure and no trial offered on the page — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

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.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.