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.
An open-source PHP/Symfony platform unifying PIM, DAM, CMS and MDM on one codebase, for teams with in-house developers or an integrator partner rather than a marketing team wanting to self-serve.
An open-source, community-governed digital repository platform on Drupal, for libraries, archives, and museums to manage digital collections.
A self-hosted file-sync and collaboration platform some organisations stretch into asset-library duty; tagging, batch metadata editing and dynamic tag-based collections are still limited or missing.
Price published
No
Yes
No
Yes
Billed on
Annual subscription covering all features, integrations, updates and support
Annual licence per edition, not per user
No published price on islandora.ca — the core software is free open source ("free to use and always will be"). Paid options are hosting/installation/migration/support/training contracts sold by independent third-party service providers listed on islandora.ca/service-providers (e.g. Born-Digital, discoverygarden); islandora.ca itself does not publish their rates or billing units.
Subscription per user per year, cheaper at volume
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
No
Yes
No
Yes
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
30%
100%
Not checked
80%
Most common complaint
Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price
It is a broader platform than a DAM — some capability has to be built rather than switched on
Not checked
It is a file platform with DAM features rather than a DAM: asset-level metadata and rights are thinner