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 file-processing API that handles uploading, transforming, and delivering video, audio, images, and documents, for developers who'd otherwise build that infrastructure in-house.
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.
GB of data processed per month (combined input + output file size); paid tiers also gate priority processing slots, collaborator seats, and max file size. Overage on the paid Startup tier billed at $1.80/GB. Enterprise tier is custom/quote-based tiered pricing with whitelabeling.
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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