Verdict
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
A cloud DAM billed by storage and configuration rather than seat count, aimed at agencies and distributed marketing teams with large or growing user bases where per-seat pricing would balloon.
An enterprise brand-asset DAM built for controlled distribution to many consumers of assets, that needs a permanently staffed administrator and slows down on large files.
An open-licence, self-hosted DAM for teams with in-house server admin capability, trading a free licence for the time to run upgrades, tune dependencies and troubleshoot it themselves.
Price published
No
No
No
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.
Not per user — the vendor states unlimited users and permission groups
Modular packages, quoted per customer
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
No
No
No
Yes
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
Not checked
20%
0%
60%
Most common complaint
Not checked
The promise not to charge per user is prominent, but there is no figure to compare it against
No figure anywhere on the pricing page, so the order of magnitude is unknowable before a call
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you