Verdict
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
A self-hosted, single-container photo indexer under AGPL/commercial licensing, for people who want a private on-hardware archive without Google-Photos-level AI tagging or mobile app polish.
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
An enterprise marketing-work-management platform with a bundled, AI-tagged DAM, for large brand organisations able to staff a multi-month rollout and a budget well past the list price.
Price published
Yes
Yes
No
No
Billed on
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Subscription per edition, billed annually
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.
Chosen products and number of users
Deployment
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
Yes
Yes
No
No
Free trial
Yes
No
No
No
Transparency index
60%
100%
Not checked
10%
Most common complaint
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price
The gap between the free edition and the first paid one is wide: €200 a month
Not checked
A modular line-up means the total is assembled from several unknowns