PhotoShelter, Lytho, Cloudinary, ResourceSpace

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

Lytho

Cloudinary

ResourceSpace

Yes

Everything else

PhotoShelter

Lytho

Cloudinary

ResourceSpace

Verdict

A cloud portfolio and image-storage platform for individual photographers, with client galleries and built-in print/licensing sales.

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 developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.

An open-licence, self-hosted DAM for teams with in-house server admin capability, trading a free licence for the time to run upgrades, tune dependencies and troubleshoot it themselves.

Price published

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.

Team size, product mix and configuration

Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth

Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier

Deployment

Cloud

Cloud, On-premise

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

Not checked

10%

60%

Most common complaint

Not checked

The tiers are named but cannot be compared on cost

Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price

The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you

“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.

ResourceSpace The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.