Verdict
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
An open-source, community-governed digital repository platform on Drupal, for libraries, archives, and museums to manage digital collections.
A compliance-focused DAM with built-in audit trails and multi-stage approval workflows, aimed at regulated industries like pharma, finance, insurance and franchise/multi-brand marketing teams.
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.
No published price on islandora.ca — the core software is free open source ("free to use and always will be"). Paid options are hosting/installation/migration/support/training contracts sold by independent third-party service providers listed on islandora.ca/service-providers (e.g. Born-Digital, discoverygarden); islandora.ca itself does not publish their rates or billing units.
Package, number and type of users, storage and add-ons
Annual licence per edition, not per user
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
No
No
No
Yes
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
Not checked
Not checked
30%
100%
Most common complaint
Not checked
Not checked
Only the floor of the base package is published; everything else is quoted
It is a broader platform than a DAM — some capability has to be built rather than switched on