PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

PhotoShelter Brands, ACDSee, Piwigo, 4ALLPORTAL

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 Brands

No

ACDSee

Yes

Piwigo

Yes

4ALLPORTAL

Yes

Everything else

PhotoShelter Brands
ACDSee
Piwigo
4ALLPORTAL
Verdict
A DAM platform for brand and marketing teams, built for real-time camera-to-cloud photo and video distribution during live events.
A disk-native photo cataloguer and batch editor sold as a one-off perpetual licence, for photographers with large libraries who don't need Lightroom/Capture One-level RAW editing.
A self-hosted, permission-based photo/video catalog with album hierarchies, tagging and a large plugin ecosystem, for archives and small orgs willing to maintain their own server as the library grows.
A DAM and PIM platform for mid-sized and enterprise companies with complex product data, not built for small teams.
Price published
No
Yes
Yes
No
Billed on
Plan tiers differ by number of Library (admin) seats and storage (TB); unlimited invited/contributor users on every tier. No dollar figures published — all tiers show a "Get Pricing" CTA leading to a sales/demo form.
One-off perpetual licence; a cloud subscription is sold separately
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
not disclosed — vendor states pricing is individually configured based on feature scope, integrations, hosting, and services; no per-user/per-GB/flat/credit unit is published
Deployment
Cloud
On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud, On-premise, Hybrid
Free plan
No
No
Yes
No
Free trial
No
Yes
Yes
No
Transparency index
Not checked
90%
100%
Not checked
Most common complaint
Not checked
The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 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.

ACDSee The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Piwigo A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026 — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.