PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Lytho, PhotoShelter, Cloudinary, Portfolio

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

PhotoShelter

No

Cloudinary

No

Portfolio

Yes

Everything else

Lytho
PhotoShelter
Cloudinary
Portfolio
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 cloud portfolio and image-storage platform for individual photographers, with client galleries and built-in print/licensing sales.
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
An on-premise DAM known for deep metadata and search, for existing Portfolio users who size and maintain their own server, now under Axle AI ownership after a March 2026 acquisition.
Price published
No
No
Yes
No
Billed on
Team size, product mix and configuration
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.
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Quoted per customer; the licensing model was preserved through the change of owner
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud
On-premise
Free plan
No
No
Yes
No
Free trial
No
No
Yes
No
Transparency index
10%
Not checked
60%
25%
Most common complaint
The tiers are named but cannot be compared on cost
Not checked
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price
It changed hands in March 2026, so anything written before that date describes it as an Extensis product

“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.
Portfolio It changed hands in March 2026, so anything written before that date describes it as an Extensis product — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.