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Islandora, Phraseanet, Pixelboxx, 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.

Islandora

Yes

Phraseanet

Yes

Pixelboxx

Yes

Cloudinary

No

Everything else

Islandora
Phraseanet
Pixelboxx
Cloudinary
Verdict
An open-source, community-governed digital repository platform on Drupal, for libraries, archives, and museums to manage digital collections.
A free, self-hosted GPLv3 DAM used by French public-sector, cultural and broadcast institutions with in-house technical staff, now being sunset by its vendor in favor of a paid successor, Phrasea.
An on-prem, cloud or hybrid DAM aimed at likely DACH-region enterprise manufacturers who need to keep data in-house, with a public review record too thin to lean on without running your own trial.
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
Price published
No
Yes
No
Yes
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.
No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid
Quoted per customer
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Deployment
On-premise, Cloud
On-premise
On-premise, Cloud, Hybrid
Cloud
Free plan
No
Yes
No
Yes
Free trial
No
No
No
Yes
Transparency index
Not checked
90%
20%
60%
Most common complaint
Not checked
The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026
No prices, though it does name three deployment models including fully managed on-premise
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.

Phraseanet The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026 — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Pixelboxx No prices, though it does name three deployment models including fully managed on-premise — 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.