Verdict
A self-hosted, single-container photo indexer under AGPL/commercial licensing, for people who want a private on-hardware archive without Google-Photos-level AI tagging or mobile app polish.
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.
A team file library billed as a flat monthly fee with unlimited users, aimed at organisations where most people only need to download an approved file a few times a month.
Price published
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
Billed on
Subscription per edition, billed annually
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
Flat price per account — users are not a billing unit
Deployment
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Cloud
Free plan
Yes
No
Yes
No
Free trial
No
No
Yes
Yes
Transparency index
100%
Not checked
60%
70%
Most common complaint
The gap between the free edition and the first paid one is wide: €200 a month
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
Storage ceilings are modest next to enterprise platforms, so large video libraries outgrow the tiers quickly