Verdict
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
A brand-guidelines and asset portal for mid-market marketing teams, with a genuine free tier that covers a branded guidelines page but not the full asset library or workflow tools.
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.
Price published
No
No
Yes
Yes
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.
Number of users and the tier selected
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
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
Free plan
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free trial
No
No
Yes
Yes
Transparency index
Not checked
40%
100%
60%
Most common complaint
Not checked
The free tier is named while the cost of the next step is not
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