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 DAM with built-in templated content production, for multi-market or franchise brands whose local offices need to self-serve on-brand assets without looping in central design.
An open-source, community-governed digital repository platform on Drupal, for libraries, archives, and museums to manage digital collections.
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.)
The set of solutions chosen
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.
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
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
A twelve-month minimum commitment at a price you cannot know in advance
Not checked
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you