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Piwigo, Portfolio, Islandora, Nextcloud

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.

Piwigo

Yes

Portfolio

No

Islandora

No

Nextcloud

Yes

Everything else

Piwigo
Portfolio
Islandora
Nextcloud
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.
An on-premise DAM known for deep metadata and search, for existing Portfolio users who size and maintain their own server, now under Axle AI ownership after a March 2026 acquisition.
An open-source, community-governed digital repository platform on Drupal, for libraries, archives, and museums to manage digital collections.
A self-hosted file-sync and collaboration platform some organisations stretch into asset-library duty; tagging, batch metadata editing and dynamic tag-based collections are still limited or missing.
Price published
Yes
No
No
Yes
Billed on
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
Quoted per customer; the licensing model was preserved through the change of owner
No published price on islandora.ca — the core software is free open source ("free to use and always will be"). Paid options are hosting/installation/migration/support/training contracts sold by independent third-party service providers listed on islandora.ca/service-providers (e.g. Born-Digital, discoverygarden); islandora.ca itself does not publish their rates or billing units.
Subscription per user per year, cheaper at volume
Deployment
On-premise, Cloud
On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
Yes
No
No
Yes
Free trial
Yes
No
No
No
Transparency index
100%
25%
Not checked
80%
Most common complaint
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026
It changed hands in March 2026, so anything written before that date describes it as an Extensis product
Not checked
It is a file platform with DAM features rather than a DAM: asset-level metadata and rights are thinner

“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.
Portfolio It changed hands in March 2026, so anything written before that date describes it as an Extensis product — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Nextcloud It is a file platform with DAM features rather than a DAM: asset-level metadata and rights are thinner — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.