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.
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
Yes
No
Yes
No
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
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Deployment
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
Free trial
No
No
Yes
No
Transparency index
100%
Not checked
60%
60%
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
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you