Verdict
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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.
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
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Price published
No
No
Yes
No
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.
Annual subscription covering all features, integrations, updates and support
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
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, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
No
No
Yes
No
Free trial
No
No
Yes
No
Transparency index
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30%
60%
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Most common complaint
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Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price
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