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.
A Nordic/European DAM, with optional PIM, aimed at mid-market brand, retail and ecommerce teams wanting fast onboarding without heavy IT involvement, backed by a 30-day no-commitment trial.
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
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
Depends on configuration; several features are priced separately
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.
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
Yes
No
No
Yes
Free trial
Yes
Yes
No
No
Transparency index
60%
20%
Not checked
60%
Most common complaint
The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only
Feature-level add-on pricing makes the final figure hard to anticipate before a quote
Not checked
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you