PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

PhotoPrism, Cloudinary, HyperCMS, Lytho

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.

PhotoPrism

Yes

Cloudinary

No

HyperCMS

Yes

Lytho

No

Everything else

PhotoPrism
Cloudinary
HyperCMS
Lytho
Verdict
A self-hosted, single-container photo indexer under AGPL/commercial licensing, for people who want a private on-hardware archive without Google-Photos-level AI tagging or mobile app polish.
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
An open-source DAM, CMS, and PIM platform combining asset, content, and product management for mid-to-large enterprises in banking, insurance, and retail.
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.
Price published
Yes
Yes
No
No
Billed on
Subscription per edition, billed annually
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Cloud service: billed by storage capacity (GB) plus which optional modules you select; user accounts are unlimited/uncapped. No public price list — pricing is obtained via a configurator/calculator or by requesting a quote. On-premise/hosted deployments use Free, Standard, and Enterprise license editions (feature-gated), also quote-only. A non-commercial Free Edition exists with no disclosed price.
Team size, product mix and configuration
Deployment
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
Yes
Yes
No
No
Free trial
No
Yes
No
No
Transparency index
100%
60%
Not checked
10%
Most common complaint
The gap between the free edition and the first paid one is wide: €200 a month
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price
Not checked
The tiers are named but cannot be compared on cost

“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.

PhotoPrism The gap between the free edition and the first paid one is wide: €200 a month — 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.
Lytho The tiers are named but cannot be compared on cost — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.