PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Transloadit, Cloudinary, ResourceSpace, 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.

Transloadit

No

Cloudinary

No

ResourceSpace

Yes

Brandfolder

No

Everything else

Transloadit
Cloudinary
ResourceSpace
Brandfolder
Verdict
Not checked
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
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 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
No
No
Billed on
GB of data processed per month (combined input + output file size); paid tiers also gate priority processing slots, collaborator seats, and max file size. Overage on the paid Startup tier billed at $1.80/GB. Enterprise tier is custom/quote-based tiered pricing with whitelabeling.
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Quoted per customer
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
No
Yes
Yes
No
Free trial
No
Yes
No
No
Transparency index
Not checked
60%
60%
0%
Most common complaint
Not checked
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you
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.

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.
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.
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.