Verdict
A flat-fee-per-account DAM and MAM with a free 500GB/5-user tier and unlimited paid users, for teams willing to pilot without much recent independent review evidence.
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.
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
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.
Price published
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Billed on
Flat price per account by volume; the vendor states there are no per-user fees
Annual licence per edition, not per user
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.
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.)
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise, Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
Yes
Yes
No
No
Free trial
Yes
No
No
No
Transparency index
90%
100%
Not checked
Not checked
Most common complaint
On-premise is available only in the enterprise tier, whose price is not published
It is a broader platform than a DAM — some capability has to be built rather than switched on
Not checked
Not checked