Verdict
A headless CMS with a built-in asset library for images and files, not a standalone DAM — it lacks file versioning, rights/expiry management and native video transcoding.
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.
An open-source, community-governed digital repository platform on Drupal, for libraries, archives, and museums to manage digital collections.
A digital asset management platform layered on Google Drive (or S3/Dropbox), for marketing, creative, and e-commerce teams organizing and sharing brand assets in place.
Price published
No
No
No
Yes
Billed on
Seats, content types and volume
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
No published price on islandora.ca — the core software is free open source ("free to use and always will be"). Paid options are hosting/installation/migration/support/training contracts sold by independent third-party service providers listed on islandora.ca/service-providers (e.g. Born-Digital, discoverygarden); islandora.ca itself does not publish their rates or billing units.
Flat monthly/annual subscription per plan tier (tiers differ by included user count and storage cap), plus per-additional-teammate add-on fee ($15-25/mo depending on plan) and optional paid feature add-ons (custom fields, watermarking, branding, API, CSV import, Okta SSO, etc.)
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
Free plan
No
Yes
No
No
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
10%
60%
Not checked
Not checked
Most common complaint
The calculator shows what drives the price without showing the price
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you
Not checked
Not checked