Verdict
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
A DAM offered as both cloud and on-premise, aimed at small-to-mid teams that want fast metadata-driven search over large asset libraries and want files to stay on their own infrastructure.
A free, self-hosted GPLv3 DAM used by French public-sector, cultural and broadcast institutions with in-house technical staff, now being sunset by its vendor in favor of a paid successor, Phrasea.
A product experience management (PXM) platform for brands and manufacturers that centralizes and syndicates product data to retail and ecommerce channels.
Price published
No
No
Yes
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.
Annual subscription covering all features, integrations, updates and support
No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid
Not disclosed publicly — pricing page routes to Request Demo / Contact Sales only, no tiers, per-SKU/per-user/per-asset pricing, or plan names shown
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
No
No
Yes
No
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
Not checked
30%
90%
Not checked
Most common complaint
Not checked
Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price
The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026
Not checked