PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Lytho, Cloudinary, Brandfolder, Piwigo

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.

Lytho

No

Cloudinary

No

Brandfolder

No

Piwigo

Yes

Everything else

Lytho
Cloudinary
Brandfolder
Piwigo
Verdict
A combined creative-operations platform pairing brand-portal DAM with proofing and approval workflows, for in-house teams that want both under one roof rather than a DAM-only search specialist.
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
A polished, search-first brand asset DAM sold standalone under Smartsheet ownership, priced for mid-market and enterprise budgets around a $24,700/year median contract.
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.
Price published
No
Yes
No
Yes
Billed on
Team size, product mix and configuration
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Quoted per customer
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
No
Yes
No
Yes
Free trial
No
Yes
No
Yes
Transparency index
10%
60%
0%
100%
Most common complaint
The tiers are named but cannot be compared on cost
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price
Two tiers with no figure and no trial offered on the page
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026

“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.

Lytho The tiers are named but cannot be compared on cost — 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.
Brandfolder Two tiers with no figure and no trial offered on the page — 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.