PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Phraseanet, Filestack, Piwigo, Transloadit

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

Filestack

No

Piwigo

Yes

Transloadit

No

Everything else

Phraseanet
Filestack
Piwigo
Transloadit
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 file upload, transformation, and delivery API with a drop-in picker for 20+ sources, for developers adding file handling to web and mobile apps.
A self-hosted, permission-based photo/video catalog with album hierarchies, tagging and a large plugin ecosystem, for archives and small orgs willing to maintain their own server as the library grows.
A file-processing API that handles uploading, transforming, and delivering video, audio, images, and documents, for developers who'd otherwise build that infrastructure in-house.
Price published
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Billed on
No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid
Monthly subscription tiers with bundled resource allowances (bandwidth in GB, uploads counted per file, transformations per file/image operation, storage in GB, number of team members), plus per-unit overage fees once a tier's allowance is exceeded (e.g. Start plan overage is $0.2/GB bandwidth).
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
GB of data processed per month (combined input + output file size); paid tiers also gate priority processing slots, collaborator seats, and max file size. Overage on the paid Startup tier billed at $1.80/GB. Enterprise tier is custom/quote-based tiered pricing with whitelabeling.
Deployment
On-premise
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
Free plan
Yes
No
Yes
No
Free trial
No
No
Yes
No
Transparency index
90%
Not checked
100%
Not checked
Most common complaint
The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026
Not checked
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026
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.
Piwigo A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026 — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.