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.
An open-source, community-governed digital repository platform on Drupal, for libraries, archives, and museums to manage digital collections.
A combined creative-operations platform pairing brand-portal DAM with proofing and approval workflows, for in-house teams that want both under one roof rather than a DAM-only search specialist.
An open-source PHP/Symfony platform unifying PIM, DAM, CMS and MDM on one codebase, for teams with in-house developers or an integrator partner rather than a marketing team wanting to self-serve.
Price published
Yes
No
No
Yes
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.)
No published price on islandora.ca — the core software is free open source ("free to use and always will be"). Paid options are hosting/installation/migration/support/training contracts sold by independent third-party service providers listed on islandora.ca/service-providers (e.g. Born-Digital, discoverygarden); islandora.ca itself does not publish their rates or billing units.
Team size, product mix and configuration
Annual licence per edition, not per user
Deployment
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
No
No
No
Yes
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
Not checked
Not checked
10%
100%
Most common complaint
Not checked
Not checked
The tiers are named but cannot be compared on cost
It is a broader platform than a DAM — some capability has to be built rather than switched on