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.
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.
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.
Price published
No
No
No
No
Billed on
Number of users and the tier selected
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
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
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
Yes
Yes
No
No
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
40%
60%
Not checked
30%
Most common complaint
The free tier is named while the cost of the next step is not
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you
Not checked
Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price