PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Papirfly, Pics.io, Phraseanet, Transloadit

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.

Papirfly

No

Pics.io

No

Phraseanet

Yes

Transloadit

No

Everything else

Papirfly
Pics.io
Phraseanet
Transloadit
Verdict
A DAM with built-in templated content production, for multi-market or franchise brands whose local offices need to self-serve on-brand assets without looping in central design.
A digital asset management platform layered on Google Drive (or S3/Dropbox), for marketing, creative, and e-commerce teams organizing and sharing brand assets in place.
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.
A file-processing API that handles uploading, transforming, and delivering video, audio, images, and documents, for developers who'd otherwise build that infrastructure in-house.
Price published
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Billed on
The set of solutions chosen
Flat monthly/annual subscription per plan tier (tiers differ by included user count and storage cap), plus per-additional-teammate add-on fee ($15-25/mo depending on plan) and optional paid feature add-ons (custom fields, watermarking, branding, API, CSV import, Okta SSO, etc.)
No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid
GB of data processed per month (combined input + output file size); paid tiers also gate priority processing slots, collaborator seats, and max file size. Overage on the paid Startup tier billed at $1.80/GB. Enterprise tier is custom/quote-based tiered pricing with whitelabeling.
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
No
No
Yes
No
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
10%
Not checked
90%
Not checked
Most common complaint
A twelve-month minimum commitment at a price you cannot know in advance
Not checked
The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026
Not checked

“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.

Papirfly A twelve-month minimum commitment at a price you cannot know in advance — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Phraseanet The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026 — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.