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.
Free, open-source, cross-platform photo cataloging software for large RAW libraries, with tagging, geotagging and duplicate detection, meant to pair with a separate RAW editor.
An enterprise digital asset management platform for newsrooms, publishers, museums, agencies, and manufacturers to organize and distribute digital assets.
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
Price published
No
Yes
No
No
Billed on
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Free software, no licence fee
Not disclosed publicly. Pricing page shows three tiers (Starter, Advanced, Ultimate) all gated behind "Request a quote", billed annually; no per-user, per-GB, or credit figures are shown, so the actual billing unit cannot be confirmed from the vendor's site.
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.
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
Yes
Yes
No
No
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
60%
100%
Not checked
Not checked
Most common complaint
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you
It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design
Not checked
Not checked