Verdict
An open-source, community-governed digital repository platform on Drupal, for libraries, archives, and museums to manage digital collections.
A visually organized, board-based DAM for photo/image-heavy creative and marketing teams, with a genuinely usable free tier and a history of shifting, steep paid-tier pricing.
A cloud service for storing, resizing, optimizing and delivering images via API and CDN, aimed at developers building web and mobile apps that handle images at scale.
An open-licence, self-hosted DAM for teams with in-house server admin capability, trading a free licence for the time to run upgrades, tune dependencies and troubleshoot it themselves.
Price published
No
No
Yes
No
Billed on
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.
Credits; users are not billed
Storage ($5 / 100,000 images stored / month), delivery ($1 / 100,000 images delivered / month), and transformations (first 5,000 unique transformations/month free, then $0.50 / 1,000 unique transformations/month). A unique transformation is billed per distinct parameter combination (e.g. same image at 100x100 and 200x200 counts as two). Storage/delivery charges apply only to images hosted in Cloudflare Images; transforming externally-hosted images is billed only under transformations.
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Deployment
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
No
Yes
No
Yes
Free trial
No
Yes
No
No
Transparency index
Not checked
60%
Not checked
60%
Most common complaint
Not checked
The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only
Not checked
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you