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.
A modular, metadata-heavy DAM aimed at large organisations with IT capacity to manage taxonomy, sold through quote-based pricing with on-prem and private-cloud options.
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
A cloud service for storing, resizing, optimizing and delivering images via API and CDN, aimed at developers building web and mobile apps that handle images at scale.
Price published
No
No
No
Yes
Billed on
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
A modular model — you pay for the modules you take
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.
Storage ($5 / 100,000 images stored / month), delivery ($1 / 100,000 images delivered / month), and transformations (first 5,000 unique transformations/month free, then $0.50 / 1,000 unique transformations/month). A unique transformation is billed per distinct parameter combination (e.g. same image at 100x100 and 200x200 counts as two). Storage/delivery charges apply only to images hosted in Cloudflare Images; transforming externally-hosted images is billed only under transformations.
Deployment
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Cloud
Free plan
Yes
No
No
No
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
60%
10%
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Most common complaint
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you
The pricing page works as a lead form rather than a price list
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