Kontainer, Air, Akeneo, Excire

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.

Kontainer

Air

Akeneo

Yes

Excire

Yes

Everything else

Kontainer

Air

Akeneo

Excire

Verdict

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.

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 PIM platform with a built-in DAM module, used by manufacturing and ecommerce companies to manage product data and assets; also available as a free open-source Community Edition.

AI-assisted photo search and culling software for photographers with large local archives, sold as a one-time purchase that runs without uploading files to the cloud.

Price published

Billed on

Depends on configuration; several features are priced separately

Credits; users are not billed

No genuine dollar pricing is published. The vendor's package-comparison page lists four tiers: Community Edition (free, open-source, self-hosted), Growth (SaaS, shown only as "Starting at $0 Annually" with a free-trial CTA — no real recurring price disclosed), Advanced and Premium (both "Call for a quote"). No billing unit (per user, per SKU, per asset, per GB) is stated anywhere on the site for the paid tiers.

One-off purchase, no subscription

Deployment

Cloud

Cloud, On-premise

On-premise

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

20%

60%

Not checked

60%

Most common complaint

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

The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only

Not checked

The amount is not on the product page — it lives on the reseller’s storefront

“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.

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.

Air The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

Excire The amount is not on the product page — it lives on the reseller’s storefront — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.