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 asset library for small-to-mid ecommerce and DTC brands, priced as a flat monthly fee with unlimited users, tiered by storage and downloads.
An open-source, community-governed digital repository platform on Drupal, for libraries, archives, and museums to manage digital collections.
A team file library billed as a flat monthly fee with unlimited users, aimed at organisations where most people only need to download an approved file a few times a month.
Price published
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Billed on
No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid
Flat price per account; users are unlimited, tier set by storage and downloads
No published price on islandora.ca — the core software is free open source ("free to use and always will be"). Paid options are hosting/installation/migration/support/training contracts sold by independent third-party service providers listed on islandora.ca/service-providers (e.g. Born-Digital, discoverygarden); islandora.ca itself does not publish their rates or billing units.
Flat price per account — users are not a billing unit
Deployment
On-premise
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
Free plan
Yes
No
No
No
Free trial
No
No
No
Yes
Transparency index
90%
60%
Not checked
70%
Most common complaint
The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026
The tier is capped by download count as well as volume, which is a less familiar unit to budget against
Not checked
Storage ceilings are modest next to enterprise platforms, so large video libraries outgrow the tiers quickly