Verdict
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
A cloud service for storing, resizing, optimizing and delivering images via API and CDN, aimed at developers building web and mobile apps that handle images at scale.
Free, open-source, cross-platform photo cataloging software for large RAW libraries, with tagging, geotagging and duplicate detection, meant to pair with a separate RAW editor.
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.
Price published
No
Yes
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.
Storage ($5 / 100,000 images stored / month), delivery ($1 / 100,000 images delivered / month), and transformations (first 5,000 unique transformations/month free, then $0.50 / 1,000 unique transformations/month). A unique transformation is billed per distinct parameter combination (e.g. same image at 100x100 and 200x200 counts as two). Storage/delivery charges apply only to images hosted in Cloudflare Images; transforming externally-hosted images is billed only under transformations.
Free software, no licence fee
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
No
No
Yes
Yes
Free trial
No
No
No
Yes
Transparency index
Not checked
Not checked
100%
100%
Most common complaint
Not checked
Not checked
It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026