Verdict
A brand-guidelines and asset portal for mid-market marketing teams, with a genuine free tier that covers a branded guidelines page but not the full asset library or workflow tools.
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 enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
A DAM module bundled inside the Optimizely CMS/Content Marketing Platform/DXP, for teams already on Optimizely who don't need best-of-breed asset management, bulk operations, or metadata governance.
Price published
No
Yes
No
No
Billed on
Number of users and the tier selected
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.)
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.
Quoted per customer
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
Yes
No
No
No
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
40%
Not checked
Not checked
0%
Most common complaint
The free tier is named while the cost of the next step is not
Not checked
Not checked
Not one tier and not one figure on the pricing page