PicaJet
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Uploadcare, Cloudinary, Piwigo, ResourceSpace

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.

Uploadcare

No

Cloudinary

No

Piwigo

Yes

ResourceSpace

Yes

Everything else

Uploadcare
Cloudinary
Piwigo
ResourceSpace
Verdict
A developer-first file upload and CDN/media-processing API for apps, pitched as a lighter, faster-to-integrate alternative to Cloudinary for teams that don't need its full DAM/video/AI stack.
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
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 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.
Price published
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Billed on
Operations, traffic and storage, with published overage rates
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free trial
No
Yes
Yes
No
Transparency index
70%
60%
100%
60%
Most common complaint
The free tier is stated as personal use only
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you

“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.

Uploadcare The free tier is stated as personal use only — 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.
Piwigo A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026 — 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.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.