PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

PhotoShelter Brands, Cloudflare Images, Piwigo, Optimizely

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

Cloudflare Images

No

Piwigo

Yes

Optimizely

No

Everything else

PhotoShelter Brands
Cloudflare Images
Piwigo
Optimizely
Verdict
A DAM platform for brand and marketing teams, built for real-time camera-to-cloud photo and video distribution during live events.
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.
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 module bundled inside the Optimizely CMS/Content Marketing Platform/DXP, for teams already on Optimizely who don't need best-of-breed asset management, bulk operations, or metadata governance.
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.
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.
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
Quoted per customer
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
Free plan
No
No
Yes
No
Free trial
No
No
Yes
No
Transparency index
Not checked
Not checked
100%
0%
Most common complaint
Not checked
Not checked
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026
Not one tier and not one figure on the pricing page

“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.

Piwigo A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026 — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Optimizely Not one tier and not one figure on the pricing page — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.