PhotoShelter Brands, Canto, Brandworkz, Salsify
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 DAM built around search and tagging for mid-market teams, with unlimited free view-only accounts but per-seat pricing for editors that only appears after a sales quote.
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 product experience management (PXM) platform for brands and manufacturers that centralizes and syndicates product data to retail and ecommerce channels.
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.
Team size and storage volume
Number of users and the tier selected
Not disclosed publicly — pricing page routes to Request Demo / Contact Sales only, no tiers, per-SKU/per-user/per-asset pricing, or plan names shown
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud
Free plan
No
No
Yes
No
Free trial
No
Yes
No
No
Transparency index
Not checked
20%
40%
Not checked
Most common complaint
Not checked
The tiers are named and described but cannot be compared on cost
The free tier is named while the cost of the next step is not
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.
Canto
The tiers are named and described but cannot be compared on cost — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
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.
No email required — the page prints as it stands.