Phraseanet, Bunny.net, FotoWare, ResourceSpace

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.

Phraseanet

Yes

Bunny.net

FotoWare

ResourceSpace

Yes

Everything else

Phraseanet

Bunny.net

FotoWare

ResourceSpace

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 CDN and edge-computing platform bundling storage, video streaming, DNS and image optimization, aimed at developers and cost-conscious teams as an alternative to larger CDN providers.

A modular, metadata-heavy DAM aimed at large organisations with IT capacity to manage taxonomy, sold through quote-based pricing with on-prem and private-cloud options.

An open-licence, self-hosted DAM for teams with in-house server admin capability, trading a free licence for the time to run upgrades, tune dependencies and troubleshoot it themselves.

Price published

Yes

Billed on

No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid

Primarily pay-as-you-go per GB of bandwidth/storage (CDN from $0.01/GB standard, volume network from $0.005/GB down to $0.002/GB; Storage from $0.01/GB standard tier, $0.02/GB edge SSD tier; Stream storage from $0.01/GB and CDN from $0.005/GB), with a $1/month account minimum. Bunny Optimizer is a flat $9.50/month per website (unlimited optimizations). No per-request fees. Enterprise-scale volume (above 2PB) requires contacting sales.

A modular model — you pay for the modules you take

Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier

Deployment

On-premise

Cloud

Cloud, On-premise

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Transparency index

90%

Not checked

10%

60%

Most common complaint

The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026

Not checked

The pricing page works as a lead form rather than a price list

The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you

“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.

FotoWare The pricing page works as a lead form rather than a price list — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

ResourceSpace The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.