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 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.
An open-source PHP/Symfony platform unifying PIM, DAM, CMS and MDM on one codebase, for teams with in-house developers or an integrator partner rather than a marketing team wanting to self-serve.
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.
Annual subscription covering all features, integrations, updates and support
Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited
Annual licence per edition, not per user
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
No
No
Yes
Yes
Free trial
No
No
Yes
No
Transparency index
Not checked
30%
100%
100%
Most common complaint
Not checked
Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price
A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026
It is a broader platform than a DAM — some capability has to be built rather than switched on