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Phraseanet, Daminion, Salsify, Adobe Experience Manager Assets

Side by side on what we have verified on each vendor’s own pages. Where a fact was not checked, the table says so rather than leaving a blank that reads as “no”.

What decides it · Runs on your own servers

If the files genuinely cannot leave your infrastructure, this is not a close race — the platforms marked No below should not be on the call at all.

Phraseanet

Yes

Daminion

Yes

Salsify

No

Adobe Experience Manager Assets

Yes

Everything else

Phraseanet
Daminion
Salsify
Adobe Experience Manager Assets
Verdict
A free, self-hosted GPLv3 DAM used by French public-sector, cultural and broadcast institutions with in-house technical staff, now being sunset by its vendor in favor of a paid successor, Phrasea.
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.
A product experience management (PXM) platform for brands and manufacturers that centralizes and syndicates product data to retail and ecommerce channels.
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
Price published
Yes
No
No
No
Billed on
No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid
Annual subscription covering all features, integrations, updates and support
Not disclosed publicly — pricing page routes to Request Demo / Contact Sales only, no tiers, per-SKU/per-user/per-asset pricing, or plan names shown
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.
Deployment
On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
Yes
No
No
No
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
90%
30%
Not checked
Not checked
Most common complaint
The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026
Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price
Not checked
Not checked

“Not checked” means exactly that: we have not verified it, not that the platform lacks it. Every other value was read off the vendor’s own pages on the date shown on each platform page.

What to ask on the demo

One question per platform, drawn from what actually goes wrong with it — not a generic checklist. Vendors run the demo; this hands the agenda back to you.

Phraseanet The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026 — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Daminion Like the platforms it competes with, it asks for a form submission before naming a price — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.