PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Piwigo, Cloudinary, Excire

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

Excire

Yes

Everything else

Piwigo
Cloudinary
Excire
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.
AI-assisted photo search and culling software for photographers with large local archives, sold as a one-time purchase that runs without uploading files to the cloud.
Price published
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
One-off purchase, no subscription
Deployment
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
On-premise
Free plan
Yes
Yes
No
Free trial
Yes
Yes
Yes
Transparency index
100%
60%
60%
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
The amount is not on the product page — it lives on the reseller’s storefront

“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.
Excire The amount is not on the product page — it lives on the reseller’s storefront — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.