PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Daminion, Lytho, Adobe Experience Manager Assets, digiKam

Side by side on what we have verified on each vendor’s own pages. Where a fact was not checked, the table says so rather than leaving a blank that reads as “no”.

What decides it · Runs on your own servers

If the files genuinely cannot leave your infrastructure, this is not a close race — the platforms marked No below should not be on the call at all.

Daminion

Yes

Lytho

No

Adobe Experience Manager Assets

Yes

digiKam

Yes

Everything else

Daminion
Lytho
Adobe Experience Manager Assets
digiKam
Verdict
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.
A combined creative-operations platform pairing brand-portal DAM with proofing and approval workflows, for in-house teams that want both under one roof rather than a DAM-only search specialist.
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
Free, open-source, cross-platform photo cataloging software for large RAW libraries, with tagging, geotagging and duplicate detection, meant to pair with a separate RAW editor.
Price published
No
No
No
Yes
Billed on
Annual subscription covering all features, integrations, updates and support
Team size, product mix and configuration
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.
Free software, no licence fee
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise
Free plan
No
No
No
Yes
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
30%
10%
Not checked
100%
Most common complaint
Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price
The tiers are named but cannot be compared on cost
Not checked
It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design

“Not checked” means exactly that: we have not verified it, not that the platform lacks it. Every other value was read off the vendor’s own pages on the date shown on each platform page.

What to ask on the demo

One question per platform, drawn from what actually goes wrong with it — not a generic checklist. Vendors run the demo; this hands the agenda back to you.

Daminion Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Lytho The tiers are named but cannot be compared on cost — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
digiKam It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.