Phraseanet, Cloudflare Images, Papirfly, Cloudinary

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

Cloudflare Images

Papirfly

Cloudinary

Everything else

Phraseanet

Cloudflare Images

Papirfly

Cloudinary

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 cloud service for storing, resizing, optimizing and delivering images via API and CDN, aimed at developers building web and mobile apps that handle images at scale.

A DAM with built-in templated content production, for multi-market or franchise brands whose local offices need to self-serve on-brand assets without looping in central design.

A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.

Price published

Yes

Billed on

No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid

Storage ($5 / 100,000 images stored / month), delivery ($1 / 100,000 images delivered / month), and transformations (first 5,000 unique transformations/month free, then $0.50 / 1,000 unique transformations/month). A unique transformation is billed per distinct parameter combination (e.g. same image at 100x100 and 200x200 counts as two). Storage/delivery charges apply only to images hosted in Cloudflare Images; transforming externally-hosted images is billed only under transformations.

The set of solutions chosen

Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth

Deployment

On-premise

Cloud

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

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

A twelve-month minimum commitment at a price you cannot know in advance

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” 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.

Papirfly A twelve-month minimum commitment at a price you cannot know in advance — 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.