Verdict
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An open-licence, self-hosted DAM for teams with in-house server admin capability, trading a free licence for the time to run upgrades, tune dependencies and troubleshoot it themselves.
A cloud asset library for small-to-mid ecommerce and DTC brands, priced as a flat monthly fee with unlimited users, tiered by storage and downloads.
Price published
No
No
No
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.
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Flat price per account; users are unlimited, tier set by storage and downloads
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
No
No
Yes
No
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
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60%
60%
Most common complaint
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The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you
The tier is capped by download count as well as volume, which is a less familiar unit to budget against