PicaJet

HyperCMS, Cloudinary, digiKam, Salsify

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.

HyperCMS

Yes

Cloudinary

No

digiKam

Yes

Salsify

No

Everything else

Verdict
Not checked
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
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.
Not checked
Price published
No
Yes
Yes
No
Billed on
Cloud service: billed by storage capacity (GB) plus which optional modules you select; user accounts are unlimited/uncapped. No public price list — pricing is obtained via a configurator/calculator or by requesting a quote. On-premise/hosted deployments use Free, Standard, and Enterprise license editions (feature-gated), also quote-only. A non-commercial Free Edition exists with no disclosed price.
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Free software, no licence fee
Not disclosed publicly — pricing page routes to Request Demo / Contact Sales only, no tiers, per-SKU/per-user/per-asset pricing, or plan names shown
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
No
Yes
Yes
No
Free trial
No
Yes
No
No
Transparency index
Not checked
60%
100%
Not checked
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
It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design
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.

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

No email required — the page prints as it stands.