PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

ResourceSpace, Piwigo, Cloudinary, Canto

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.

ResourceSpace

Yes

Piwigo

Yes

Cloudinary

No

Canto

No

Everything else

ResourceSpace
Piwigo
Cloudinary
Canto
Verdict
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.
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.
A DAM built around search and tagging for mid-market teams, with unlimited free view-only accounts but per-seat pricing for editors that only appears after a sales quote.
Price published
No
Yes
Yes
No
Billed on
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
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
Team size and storage volume
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
Cloud
Free plan
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Free trial
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Transparency index
60%
100%
60%
20%
Most common complaint
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you
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 tiers are named and described but cannot be compared on cost

“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.

ResourceSpace The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
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.
Canto The tiers are named and described but cannot be compared on cost — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.