Verdict
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.
An enterprise brand-asset DAM built for controlled distribution to many consumers of assets, that needs a permanently staffed administrator and slows down on large files.
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
A disk-native photo cataloguer and batch editor sold as a one-off perpetual licence, for photographers with large libraries who don't need Lightroom/Capture One-level RAW editing.
Price published
No
No
No
Yes
Billed on
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Modular packages, quoted per customer
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.
One-off perpetual licence; a cloud subscription is sold separately
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise
Free plan
Yes
No
No
No
Free trial
No
No
No
Yes
Transparency index
60%
0%
Not checked
90%
Most common complaint
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you
No figure anywhere on the pricing page, so the order of magnitude is unknowable before a call
Not checked
The published prices are promotional and dated; list price is roughly double