PhotoShelter Brands, Brandworkz, FotoWare, MediaValet
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”.
Everything else
Verdict
A DAM platform for brand and marketing teams, built for real-time camera-to-cloud photo and video distribution during live events.
A brand-guidelines and asset portal for mid-market marketing teams, with a genuine free tier that covers a branded guidelines page but not the full asset library or workflow tools.
A modular, metadata-heavy DAM aimed at large organisations with IT capacity to manage taxonomy, sold through quote-based pricing with on-prem and private-cloud options.
A cloud DAM billed by storage and configuration rather than seat count, aimed at agencies and distributed marketing teams with large or growing user bases where per-seat pricing would balloon.
Price published
No
No
No
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.
Number of users and the tier selected
A modular model — you pay for the modules you take
Not per user — the vendor states unlimited users and permission groups
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud
Free plan
No
Yes
No
No
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
Not checked
40%
10%
20%
Most common complaint
Not checked
The free tier is named while the cost of the next step is not
The pricing page works as a lead form rather than a price list
The promise not to charge per user is prominent, but there is no figure to compare it against
“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.
Brandworkz
The free tier is named while the cost of the next step is not — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
FotoWare
The pricing page works as a lead form rather than a price list — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
MediaValet
The promise not to charge per user is prominent, but there is no figure to compare it against — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
No email required — the page prints as it stands.