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Phraseanet, Piwigo, Akeneo, ACDSee

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 · Publishes a price

One of these tells you the order of magnitude before you speak to anyone, and the others do not. That difference sets how long your evaluation takes, whatever the software does.

Phraseanet

Yes

Piwigo

Yes

Akeneo

No

ACDSee

Yes

Everything else

Phraseanet
Piwigo
Akeneo
ACDSee
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 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 PIM platform with a built-in DAM module, used by manufacturing and ecommerce companies to manage product data and assets; also available as a free open-source Community Edition.
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.
Price published
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Billed on
No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
No genuine dollar pricing is published. The vendor's package-comparison page lists four tiers: Community Edition (free, open-source, self-hosted), Growth (SaaS, shown only as "Starting at $0 Annually" with a free-trial CTA — no real recurring price disclosed), Advanced and Premium (both "Call for a quote"). No billing unit (per user, per SKU, per asset, per GB) is stated anywhere on the site for the paid tiers.
One-off perpetual licence; a cloud subscription is sold separately
Deployment
On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise
Free plan
Yes
Yes
No
No
Free trial
No
Yes
No
Yes
Transparency index
90%
100%
Not checked
90%
Most common complaint
The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026
Not checked
The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double

“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.
ACDSee The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.