digiKam, Kontainer, Bunny.net, 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.

digiKam

Yes

Kontainer

Bunny.net

Piwigo

Yes

Everything else

digiKam

Kontainer

Bunny.net

Piwigo

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 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.

A CDN and edge-computing platform bundling storage, video streaming, DNS and image optimization, aimed at developers and cost-conscious teams as an alternative to larger CDN providers.

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

Free software, no licence fee

Depends on configuration; several features are priced separately

Primarily pay-as-you-go per GB of bandwidth/storage (CDN from $0.01/GB standard, volume network from $0.005/GB down to $0.002/GB; Storage from $0.01/GB standard tier, $0.02/GB edge SSD tier; Stream storage from $0.01/GB and CDN from $0.005/GB), with a $1/month account minimum. Bunny Optimizer is a flat $9.50/month per website (unlimited optimizations). No per-request fees. Enterprise-scale volume (above 2PB) requires contacting sales.

Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited

Deployment

On-premise

Cloud

On-premise, Cloud

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

100%

20%

Not checked

100%

Most common complaint

It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design

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

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.

digiKam It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design — 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.

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.