Verdict
A visually organized, board-based DAM for photo/image-heavy creative and marketing teams, with a genuinely usable free tier and a history of shifting, steep paid-tier pricing.
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.
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
Credits; users are not billed
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
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
Yes
No
No
Yes
Free trial
Yes
No
No
No
Transparency index
60%
Not checked
30%
60%
Most common complaint
The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only
Not checked
Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you