Verdict
A file upload, transformation, and delivery API with a drop-in picker for 20+ sources, for developers adding file handling to web and mobile apps.
A highly configurable DAM/MAM (Cortex) for museums, archives, media companies and multi-department organisations, with an admin ramp-up reviewers describe as weeks to months.
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
Price published
Yes
No
No
Yes
Billed on
Monthly subscription tiers with bundled resource allowances (bandwidth in GB, uploads counted per file, transformations per file/image operation, storage in GB, number of team members), plus per-unit overage fees once a tier's allowance is exceeded (e.g. Start plan overage is $0.2/GB bandwidth).
Quoted per customer
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.
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
No
No
No
Yes
Free trial
No
No
No
Yes
Transparency index
Not checked
0%
Not checked
60%
Most common complaint
Not checked
No price anywhere on the site — only a demo
Not checked
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price