PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

PhotoShelter, HyperCMS, Daminion, Uploadcare

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

Daminion

Yes

Uploadcare

No

Everything else

PhotoShelter
HyperCMS
Daminion
Uploadcare
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.
A DAM offered as both cloud and on-premise, aimed at small-to-mid teams that want fast metadata-driven search over large asset libraries and want files to stay on their own infrastructure.
A developer-first file upload and CDN/media-processing API for apps, pitched as a lighter, faster-to-integrate alternative to Cloudinary for teams that don't need its full DAM/video/AI stack.
Price published
No
No
No
Yes
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.
Annual subscription covering all features, integrations, updates and support
Operations, traffic and storage, with published overage rates
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
No
No
No
Yes
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
Not checked
Not checked
30%
70%
Most common complaint
Not checked
Not checked
Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price
The free tier is stated as personal use only

“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.

Daminion Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Uploadcare The free tier is stated as personal use only — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.