Verdict
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
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 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.
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
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.
No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid
Package, number and type of users, storage and add-ons
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise
Cloud
Cloud
Free plan
No
Yes
No
Yes
Free trial
No
No
No
Yes
Transparency index
Not checked
90%
30%
60%
Most common complaint
Not checked
The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026
Only the floor of the base package is published; everything else is quoted
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price