PhotoShelter Brands, NetX, Transloadit, 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

NetX

Yes

Transloadit

Piwigo

Yes

Everything else

PhotoShelter Brands

NetX

Transloadit

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 digital asset management platform for enterprises, agencies, museums, and nonprofits, paired with in-house consulting and data-migration services.

A file-processing API that handles uploading, transforming, and delivering video, audio, images, and documents, for developers who'd otherwise build that infrastructure in-house.

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

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.

Not disclosed publicly. Plans are differentiated by number of admin users, storage (TB), and number of portals (e.g. Essential: 5 admin users/1TB; Signature: 20 admin users/2TB/3 portals; Premium: 50 admin users/5TB/5 portals); exact per-unit or per-tier prices are not published, visitors must request a consult.

GB of data processed per month (combined input + output file size); paid tiers also gate priority processing slots, collaborator seats, and max file size. Overage on the paid Startup tier billed at $1.80/GB. Enterprise tier is custom/quote-based tiered pricing with whitelabeling.

Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited

Deployment

Cloud

Cloud, On-premise, Hybrid

Cloud

On-premise, Cloud

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

Not checked

100%

Most common complaint

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.

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.