Verdict
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
A digital asset management platform layered on Google Drive (or S3/Dropbox), for marketing, creative, and e-commerce teams organizing and sharing brand assets in place.
An open-source DAM, CMS, and PIM platform combining asset, content, and product management for mid-to-large enterprises in banking, insurance, and retail.
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
Yes
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.
Flat monthly/annual subscription per plan tier (tiers differ by included user count and storage cap), plus per-additional-teammate add-on fee ($15-25/mo depending on plan) and optional paid feature add-ons (custom fields, watermarking, branding, API, CSV import, Okta SSO, etc.)
Cloud service: billed by storage capacity (GB) plus which optional modules you select; user accounts are unlimited/uncapped. No public price list — pricing is obtained via a configurator/calculator or by requesting a quote. On-premise/hosted deployments use Free, Standard, and Enterprise license editions (feature-gated), also quote-only. A non-commercial Free Edition exists with no disclosed price.
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
No
No
No
Yes
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
Not checked
Not checked
Not checked
60%
Most common complaint
Not checked
Not checked
Not checked
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you