PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Piwigo, Excire, HyperCMS, Pics.io

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

Excire

Yes

HyperCMS

Yes

Pics.io

No

Everything else

Piwigo
Excire
HyperCMS
Pics.io
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.
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.
An open-source DAM, CMS, and PIM platform combining asset, content, and product management for mid-to-large enterprises in banking, insurance, and retail.
A digital asset management platform layered on Google Drive (or S3/Dropbox), for marketing, creative, and e-commerce teams organizing and sharing brand assets in place.
Price published
Yes
No
No
Yes
Billed on
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
One-off purchase, no subscription
Cloud service: billed by storage capacity (GB) plus which optional modules you select; user accounts are unlimited/uncapped. No public price list — pricing is obtained via a configurator/calculator or by requesting a quote. On-premise/hosted deployments use Free, Standard, and Enterprise license editions (feature-gated), also quote-only. A non-commercial Free Edition exists with no disclosed price.
Flat monthly/annual subscription per plan tier (tiers differ by included user count and storage cap), plus per-additional-teammate add-on fee ($15-25/mo depending on plan) and optional paid feature add-ons (custom fields, watermarking, branding, API, CSV import, Okta SSO, etc.)
Deployment
On-premise, Cloud
On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
Yes
No
No
No
Free trial
Yes
Yes
No
No
Transparency index
100%
60%
Not checked
Not checked
Most common complaint
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026
The amount is not on the product page — it lives on the reseller’s storefront
Not checked
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.

Piwigo A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026 — 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.