Verdict
A cloud DAM billed by storage and configuration rather than seat count, aimed at agencies and distributed marketing teams with large or growing user bases where per-seat pricing would balloon.
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
An enterprise marketing-work-management platform with a bundled, AI-tagged DAM, for large brand organisations able to staff a multi-month rollout and a budget well past the list price.
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.
Price published
No
No
No
No
Billed on
Not per user — the vendor states unlimited users and permission groups
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.
Chosen products and number of users
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
No
No
No
Yes
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
20%
Not checked
10%
60%
Most common complaint
The promise not to charge per user is prominent, but there is no figure to compare it against
Not checked
A modular line-up means the total is assembled from several unknowns
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you