PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Piwigo, Cloudinary, digiKam, Brandfolder

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.

Piwigo

Yes

Cloudinary

No

digiKam

Yes

Brandfolder

No

Everything else

Piwigo
Cloudinary
digiKam
Brandfolder
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 developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
Free, open-source, cross-platform photo cataloging software for large RAW libraries, with tagging, geotagging and duplicate detection, meant to pair with a separate RAW editor.
A polished, search-first brand asset DAM sold standalone under Smartsheet ownership, priced for mid-market and enterprise budgets around a $24,700/year median contract.
Price published
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Billed on
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Free software, no licence fee
Quoted per customer
Deployment
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Free trial
Yes
Yes
No
No
Transparency index
100%
60%
100%
0%
Most common complaint
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price
It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design
Two tiers with no figure and no trial offered on the page

“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.

Piwigo A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026 — 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.
digiKam It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Brandfolder Two tiers with no figure and no trial offered on the page — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.