Verdict
A digital asset management platform layered on Google Drive (or S3/Dropbox), for marketing, creative, and e-commerce teams organizing and sharing brand assets in place.
A headless content-and-commerce platform with a bundled DAM module, for retail/ecommerce teams that want a marketer-friendly UI and can tolerate slower publish times.
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
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
No
No
Billed on
Flat monthly/annual subscription per plan tier (tiers differ by included user count and storage cap), plus per-additional-teammate add-on fee ($15-25/mo depending on plan) and optional paid feature add-ons (custom fields, watermarking, branding, API, CSV import, Okta SSO, etc.)
Content volume, storage and depth of automation
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.
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
No
No
No
Yes
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
Not checked
10%
Not checked
60%
Most common complaint
Not checked
Neither tiers nor ranges
Not checked
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you