Verdict
A peer-to-device photo sync and library tool for individuals and families with photos spread across computers, phones and tablets who want them synced without uploading to a public cloud.
A visually organized, board-based DAM for photo/image-heavy creative and marketing teams, with a genuinely usable free tier and a history of shifting, steep paid-tier pricing.
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
Price published
No
No
No
Yes
Billed on
Personal, Family and Business plans; no amounts on the page
Credits; users are not billed
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.
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Deployment
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
No
Yes
No
Yes
Free trial
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Transparency index
50%
60%
Not checked
60%
Most common complaint
Three plans are named and none is priced on the pricing page
The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only
Not checked
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price