PhotoShelter Brands, Brandfolder, HyperCMS, Cloudflare Images

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

Brandfolder

HyperCMS

Yes

Cloudflare Images

Everything else

PhotoShelter Brands

Brandfolder

HyperCMS

Cloudflare Images

Verdict

A DAM platform for brand and marketing teams, built for real-time camera-to-cloud photo and video distribution during live events.

A polished, search-first brand asset DAM sold standalone under Smartsheet ownership, priced for mid-market and enterprise budgets around a $24,700/year median contract.

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 cloud service for storing, resizing, optimizing and delivering images via API and CDN, aimed at developers building web and mobile apps that handle images at scale.

Price published

Yes

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.

Quoted per customer

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.

Storage ($5 / 100,000 images stored / month), delivery ($1 / 100,000 images delivered / month), and transformations (first 5,000 unique transformations/month free, then $0.50 / 1,000 unique transformations/month). A unique transformation is billed per distinct parameter combination (e.g. same image at 100x100 and 200x200 counts as two). Storage/delivery charges apply only to images hosted in Cloudflare Images; transforming externally-hosted images is billed only under transformations.

Deployment

Cloud

Cloud, On-premise

Cloud

Free plan

Free trial

Transparency index

Not checked

Most common complaint

Not checked

Two tiers with no figure and no trial offered on the page

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.

Brandfolder Two tiers with no figure and no trial offered on the page — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.