PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Filestack, PhotoPrism, Transloadit, 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.

Filestack

No

PhotoPrism

Yes

Transloadit

No

Cloudinary

No

Everything else

Filestack
PhotoPrism
Transloadit
Cloudinary
Verdict
A file upload, transformation, and delivery API with a drop-in picker for 20+ sources, for developers adding file handling to web and mobile apps.
A self-hosted, single-container photo indexer under AGPL/commercial licensing, for people who want a private on-hardware archive without Google-Photos-level AI tagging or mobile app polish.
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.
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
Yes
Yes
Yes
Billed on
Monthly subscription tiers with bundled resource allowances (bandwidth in GB, uploads counted per file, transformations per file/image operation, storage in GB, number of team members), plus per-unit overage fees once a tier's allowance is exceeded (e.g. Start plan overage is $0.2/GB bandwidth).
Subscription per edition, billed annually
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.
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Deployment
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
Cloud
Free plan
No
Yes
No
Yes
Free trial
No
No
No
Yes
Transparency index
Not checked
100%
Not checked
60%
Most common complaint
Not checked
The gap between the free edition and the first paid one is wide: €200 a month
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.

PhotoPrism The gap between the free edition and the first paid one is wide: €200 a month — 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.