PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

PhotoShelter Brands, Phraseanet, Cloudinary, PhotoShelter

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

Phraseanet

Yes

Cloudinary

No

PhotoShelter

No

Everything else

PhotoShelter Brands
Phraseanet
Cloudinary
PhotoShelter
Verdict
A DAM platform for brand and marketing teams, built for real-time camera-to-cloud photo and video distribution during live events.
A free, self-hosted GPLv3 DAM used by French public-sector, cultural and broadcast institutions with in-house technical staff, now being sunset by its vendor in favor of a paid successor, Phrasea.
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
A cloud portfolio and image-storage platform for individual photographers, with client galleries and built-in print/licensing sales.
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.
No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Quote-only. Priced per named "Library Seat" (2-5 seats depending on tier, custom for Enterprise) plus a storage allotment per tier (1TB-5TB, custom for Enterprise) and a cap on "Advanced Integrations" (0 to unlimited). Unlimited invited/contributor users and unlimited Social Content Publisher seats included on all/most tiers. Annual or monthly billing toggle shown on the pricing page, but no dollar amounts are published — all tiers show a "Get Pricing" CTA to a demo/sales call.
Deployment
Cloud
On-premise
Cloud
Cloud
Free plan
No
Yes
Yes
No
Free trial
No
No
Yes
No
Transparency index
Not checked
90%
60%
Not checked
Most common complaint
Not checked
The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price
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.

Phraseanet The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026 — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Cloudinary Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.