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Search Build shortlist

Islandora, Daminion, Piwigo, 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.

Islandora

Yes

Daminion

Yes

Piwigo

Yes

Salsify

No

Everything else

Islandora
Daminion
Piwigo
Salsify
Verdict
An open-source, community-governed digital repository platform on Drupal, for libraries, archives, and museums to manage digital collections.
A DAM offered as both cloud and on-premise, aimed at small-to-mid teams that want fast metadata-driven search over large asset libraries and want files to stay on their own infrastructure.
A self-hosted, permission-based photo/video catalog with album hierarchies, tagging and a large plugin ecosystem, for archives and small orgs willing to maintain their own server as the library grows.
A product experience management (PXM) platform for brands and manufacturers that centralizes and syndicates product data to retail and ecommerce channels.
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.
Annual subscription covering all features, integrations, updates and support
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
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
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
Free plan
No
No
Yes
No
Free trial
No
No
Yes
No
Transparency index
Not checked
30%
100%
Not checked
Most common complaint
Not checked
Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026
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.

Daminion Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Piwigo A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026 — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.