Phraseanet, ACDSee, Nextcloud
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 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 disk-native photo cataloguer and batch editor sold as a one-off perpetual licence, for photographers with large libraries who don't need Lightroom/Capture One-level RAW editing.
A self-hosted file-sync and collaboration platform some organisations stretch into asset-library duty; tagging, batch metadata editing and dynamic tag-based collections are still limited or missing.
Price published
Yes
Yes
Yes
Billed on
No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid
One-off perpetual licence; a cloud subscription is sold separately
Subscription per user per year, cheaper at volume
Deployment
On-premise
On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
Yes
No
Yes
Free trial
No
Yes
No
Transparency index
90%
90%
80%
Most common complaint
The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026
The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double
It is a file platform with DAM features rather than a DAM: asset-level metadata and rights are thinner
“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.
ACDSee
The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Nextcloud
It is a file platform with DAM features rather than a DAM: asset-level metadata and rights are thinner — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
No email required — the page prints as it stands.