PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

PhotoShelter Brands, Dash, HyperCMS, Piwigo

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

Dash

No

HyperCMS

Yes

Piwigo

Yes

Everything else

PhotoShelter Brands
Dash
HyperCMS
Piwigo
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 asset library for small-to-mid ecommerce and DTC brands, priced as a flat monthly fee with unlimited users, tiered by storage and downloads.
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 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.
Price published
No
Yes
No
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.
Flat price per account; users are unlimited, tier set by storage and downloads
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.
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
No
No
No
Yes
Free trial
No
No
No
Yes
Transparency index
Not checked
60%
Not checked
100%
Most common complaint
Not checked
The tier is capped by download count as well as volume, which is a less familiar unit to budget against
Not checked
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026

“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.

Dash The tier is capped by download count as well as volume, which is a less familiar unit to budget against — 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.