Verdict
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 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.
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.
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
Yes
Yes
No
Billed on
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
One-off perpetual licence; a cloud subscription is sold separately
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.
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Deployment
On-premise, Cloud
On-premise
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
Yes
No
No
Yes
Free trial
Yes
Yes
No
No
Transparency index
100%
90%
Not checked
60%
Most common complaint
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026
The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double
Not checked
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you