PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Frontify, Cloudinary, Akeneo, Adobe Experience Manager Assets

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.

Frontify

No

Cloudinary

No

Akeneo

Yes

Adobe Experience Manager Assets

Yes

Everything else

Frontify
Cloudinary
Akeneo
Adobe Experience Manager Assets
Verdict
A brand-management platform built around a single, always-current source of truth for guidelines, logos and templates, aimed at brand teams working with internal staff and external agencies.
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
Not checked
Not checked
Price published
No
Yes
No
No
Billed on
Monthly active users
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
No genuine dollar pricing is published. The vendor's package-comparison page lists four tiers: Community Edition (free, open-source, self-hosted), Growth (SaaS, shown only as "Starting at $0 Annually" with a free-trial CTA — no real recurring price disclosed), Advanced and Premium (both "Call for a quote"). No billing unit (per user, per SKU, per asset, per GB) is stated anywhere on the site for the paid tiers.
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.
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
No
Yes
No
No
Free trial
No
Yes
No
No
Transparency index
30%
60%
Not checked
Not checked
Most common complaint
The MAU model favours occasional users, but there is no figure to verify that with
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price
Not checked
Not checked

“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.

Frontify The MAU model favours occasional users, but there is no figure to verify that with — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Cloudinary Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.