Comparisons, written to be fair
How Sally compares — including where she loses
Three products come up constantly when people describe the problem Sally solves: Mylio, Immich and Google Photos. All three are good, and every one of them does something Sally will never do. Here is the whole picture, with their advantages printed before ours and every fact stamped with the day we checked it.
Checked August 2, 2026
Sally vs Mylio Photos+
Mylio is the incumbent for exactly the person Sally serves — multi-device, multi-source, privacy-leaning families — and it earns four rows below outright. But it went subscription-only at $240 a year in March 2025, its sync architecture wants a vault computer that stays awake, and it has no answer to "let my AI see my catalog." Sally costs $72 a year, moves nothing, and ships the MCP server.
What Mylio does better: It actually moves and syncs your files across devices
12 rows compared — 3 to Mylio, 7 to Sally, and 2 that come down to what you want.
Read the comparison →
Checked August 2, 2026
Sally vs Immich
Immich wins five rows below, including the big one for self-hosters: it is free, open source, and backs up your phone to hardware you own. The cost is the job — Docker Compose, Postgres, ML containers, GPU quirks and backup discipline, forever. Sally holds nothing, hosts nothing of yours by default, and ships the MCP server Immich’s team explicitly declined to build.
What Immich does better: It is free, open source, and enormous
12 rows compared — 5 to Immich, 5 to Sally, and 2 that come down to what you want.
Read the comparison →
Checked August 2, 2026
Sally vs Google Photos
Google Photos wins the rows you would expect — effortless backup, editing magic, search over its own copy, and a free 15GB start. The catch is structural: its AI sees only what Google holds, answers only through Gemini, and since March 31, 2025 no third-party app or assistant can read your library at all. Sally is not a better Google Photos; she is the map of everything — Google’s copy included — that any assistant you consent to can read.
What Google Photos does better: The best automatic backup pipeline ever shipped
12 rows compared — 3 to Google Photos, 7 to Sally, and 2 that come down to what you want.
Read the comparison →
How these pages are written
Comparison pages have a bad reputation because most of them are sales copy with a table in the middle. These are the rules ours are held to. If you catch one of them being broken, that is a bug and we would like to hear about it at hello@sallydoesdata.com.
- 1The other product’s advantages are printed before Sally’s, and they have to be real ones — a comparison that cannot praise its rival is an advertisement wearing a lab coat.
- 2Every fact is stamped with the day we checked it. If one has gone stale, that is a bug: tell us and we fix the fact, not the framing.
- 3Every table row names who it favours, and the labels were written before they were counted — which is why plenty of rows say the other product.
- 4Sally is only described doing things the shipped product actually does today. Nothing on these pages is a roadmap wearing present tense.
- 5We only write a comparison when people genuinely weigh the two against each other. The products we decided not to compare are listed below, with the reason.
Comparisons we decided not to write
Not every product that shares a shelf with Sally is a rival, and writing a page against one that is not would be a cheap way to get traffic.
Excire Foto 2027
It does a different job: AI culling and keyword tagging on one computer, $249 one-time, fully local. Plenty of people should use Excire with Sally — Excire writes keywords, Sally catalogs and serves them. A "versus" page would be a fight nobody is actually having.
Peakto (CYME)
The closest philosophy to ours — a Mac app that indexes photos in place across libraries. It is Mac-only and aimed at working photographers, and the honest comparison would mostly be "different audience." We would rather say that in one sentence than stretch it to a page.
FOREVER and Permanent.org
They sell permanence — endowment-backed storage measured in decades. That is a different promise from cataloging, and often a complementary one: plenty of Sally items will point at files kept there. We work alongside preservation services rather than against them.
Apple Photos
Apple’s intelligence is real and stops at Apple’s wall, which is the same story as Google’s — so it lives as a section of the Google Photos comparison instead of a thinner copy of that page with a different logo.
✨
Or skip the reading and try the thing.
Sally fingerprints your photos and files wherever they live, finds the copies you forgot about, and helps you write down the part only you know. Five thousand items free, no card, and your originals never move.