Verdict
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A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
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.
Price published
No
No
Yes
Yes
Billed on
Cloud service: billed by storage capacity (GB) plus which optional modules you select; user accounts are unlimited/uncapped. No public price list — pricing is obtained via a configurator/calculator or by requesting a quote. On-premise/hosted deployments use Free, Standard, and Enterprise license editions (feature-gated), also quote-only. A non-commercial Free Edition exists with no disclosed price.
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
Annual licence per edition, not per user
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
No
No
Yes
Yes
Free trial
No
No
Yes
No
Transparency index
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60%
100%
Most common complaint
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Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price
It is a broader platform than a DAM — some capability has to be built rather than switched on