Verdict
A combined creative-operations platform pairing brand-portal DAM with proofing and approval workflows, for in-house teams that want both under one roof rather than a DAM-only search specialist.
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.
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
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
No
Yes
Billed on
Team size, product mix and configuration
Annual subscription covering all features, integrations, updates and support
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.
Annual licence per edition, not per user
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
No
No
No
Yes
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
10%
30%
Not checked
100%
Most common complaint
The tiers are named but cannot be compared on cost
Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price
Not checked
It is a broader platform than a DAM — some capability has to be built rather than switched on