Verdict
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
A disk-native photo cataloguer and batch editor sold as a one-off perpetual licence, for photographers with large libraries who don't need Lightroom/Capture One-level RAW editing.
An enterprise brand-asset DAM built for controlled distribution to many consumers of assets, that needs a permanently staffed administrator and slows down on large files.
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
No
Yes
No
No
Billed on
No public price list; sales quote required for both packages (Prime and Ultimate). Adobe's own on-premise product description sheet lists separate license metrics per component — AEM Assets itself is licensed 'Per Instance', 'Users' are licensed 'Per User', Brand Portal is licensed 'Per Brand Portal User', and Dynamic Media/Personalized Media are licensed by 'Page Views per month' — so billing is multi-metric and only available via custom quote, not a single flat per-user or per-GB rate.
One-off perpetual licence; a cloud subscription is sold separately
Modular packages, quoted per customer
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
No
No
No
Yes
Free trial
No
Yes
No
No
Transparency index
Not checked
90%
0%
60%
Most common complaint
Not checked
The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double
No figure anywhere on the pricing page, so the order of magnitude is unknowable before a call
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you