PhotoShelter, HyperCMS
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.
PhotoShelter
No
HyperCMS
Yes
Everything else
Verdict
A cloud portfolio and image-storage platform for individual photographers, with client galleries and built-in print/licensing sales.
An open-source DAM, CMS, and PIM platform combining asset, content, and product management for mid-to-large enterprises in banking, insurance, and retail.
Price published
No
No
Billed on
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.
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.
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
No
No
Free trial
No
No
Transparency index
Not checked
Not checked
Most common complaint
Not checked
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.