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 image/video optimization and delivery API with a lightweight DAM layered on top, aimed at EU-based teams that want GDPR/France-hosted processing and hands-on vendor support.
A file upload, transformation, and delivery API with a drop-in picker for 20+ sources, for developers adding file handling to web and mobile apps.
An enterprise DAM module within Adobe Experience Manager, for large organizations managing thousands to millions of brand assets across marketing channels.
Price published
No
No
Yes
No
Billed on
Self-hosted: no licence fee. Hosted: a user ceiling per tier
Quoted per customer
Monthly subscription tiers with bundled resource allowances (bandwidth in GB, uploads counted per file, transformations per file/image operation, storage in GB, number of team members), plus per-unit overage fees once a tier's allowance is exceeded (e.g. Start plan overage is $0.2/GB bandwidth).
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
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud, On-premise
Free plan
Yes
No
No
No
Free trial
No
No
No
No
Transparency index
60%
10%
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Not checked
Most common complaint
The free route is genuinely free of licence fees but moves hosting, upgrades and support onto you
Three tiers described by features, none of them priced
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