Filestack, WoodWing Assets, Cloudinary, Kontainer

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

WoodWing Assets

Yes

Cloudinary

Kontainer

Everything else

Filestack

WoodWing Assets

Cloudinary

Kontainer

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.

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.

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.

Price published

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).

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

Depends on configuration; several features are priced separately

Deployment

Cloud

Cloud, On-premise

Cloud

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

Not checked

60%

20%

Most common complaint

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

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

“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.

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.

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.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.