PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Excire, WoodWing Assets, Cloudinary, Islandora

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.

Excire

Yes

WoodWing Assets

Yes

Cloudinary

No

Islandora

Yes

Everything else

Excire
WoodWing Assets
Cloudinary
Islandora
Verdict
AI-assisted photo search and culling software for photographers with large local archives, sold as a one-time purchase that runs without uploading files to the cloud.
An enterprise digital asset management platform for newsrooms, publishers, museums, agencies, and manufacturers to organize and distribute digital assets.
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
An open-source, community-governed digital repository platform on Drupal, for libraries, archives, and museums to manage digital collections.
Price published
No
No
Yes
No
Billed on
One-off purchase, no subscription
Not disclosed publicly. Pricing page shows three tiers (Starter, Advanced, Ultimate) all gated behind "Request a quote", billed annually; no per-user, per-GB, or credit figures are shown, so the actual billing unit cannot be confirmed from the vendor's site.
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
No published price on islandora.ca — the core software is free open source ("free to use and always will be"). Paid options are hosting/installation/migration/support/training contracts sold by independent third-party service providers listed on islandora.ca/service-providers (e.g. Born-Digital, discoverygarden); islandora.ca itself does not publish their rates or billing units.
Deployment
On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
No
No
Yes
No
Free trial
Yes
No
Yes
No
Transparency index
60%
Not checked
60%
Not checked
Most common complaint
The amount is not on the product page — it lives on the reseller’s storefront
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

“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.

Excire The amount is not on the product page — it lives on the reseller’s storefront — 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.