PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Kontainer, PhotoShelter, Frontify, ResourceSpace

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

No

PhotoShelter

No

Frontify

No

ResourceSpace

Yes

Everything else

Kontainer
PhotoShelter
Frontify
ResourceSpace
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 cloud portfolio and image-storage platform for individual photographers, with client galleries and built-in print/licensing sales.
A brand-management platform built around a single, always-current source of truth for guidelines, logos and templates, aimed at brand teams working with internal staff and external agencies.
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
No
No
Billed on
Depends on configuration; several features are priced separately
Quote-only. Priced per named "Library Seat" (2-5 seats depending on tier, custom for Enterprise) plus a storage allotment per tier (1TB-5TB, custom for Enterprise) and a cap on "Advanced Integrations" (0 to unlimited). Unlimited invited/contributor users and unlimited Social Content Publisher seats included on all/most tiers. Annual or monthly billing toggle shown on the pricing page, but no dollar amounts are published — all tiers show a "Get Pricing" CTA to a demo/sales call.
Monthly active users
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
No
No
No
Yes
Free trial
Yes
No
No
No
Transparency index
20%
Not checked
30%
60%
Most common complaint
Feature-level add-on pricing makes the final figure hard to anticipate before a quote
Not checked
The MAU model favours occasional users, but there is no figure to verify that with
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you

“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.
Frontify The MAU model favours occasional users, but there is no figure to verify that with — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
ResourceSpace The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.