Is Adobe’s DAM solution a good pick for your brand?

If your ecommerce business already uses Adobe Creative Cloud to create and edit product images and illustrations, you might be tempted to choose Adobe DAM as your digital asset management tool. Also called Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), it’s a place for you to organise those final assets ready to share to your marketing campaigns. 

With Adobe DAM, you can create assets in Creative Cloud applications (like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign) and then store, manage, and share those assets directly within your DAM.

This seems like a logical solution. However, several user reviews suggest that you need above-average knowledge of Java to begin making sense of Adobe DAM. And even if you have that, you'll still need a tech team to handle deployment and maintenance. And that’s before we even get on to the expensive pricing. 😮‍💨 

So, is Adobe DAM really the best solution for your brand? 🤔 Let’s find out in this article.

What is Adobe Experience Manager?

Adobe Experience Manager is a digital experience platform (DXP) that lives in the cloud. 

Think of ‘the cloud’ as a shared, super-secure locker on the internet that you can access from anywhere, on any device. If you’d like to learn more, Barney has a great article explaining how cloud software, especially cloud DAMs, works. 

Back to Adobe Experience Manager. As a DXP, it lets you: 

• Organise and deliver all types of digital content, including images and videos, to different online channels — such as your social media accounts and websites.

• Ensure your customers have the best experience as they engage with your content. For example, you can personalise the text and images visitors see on your ecommerce website based on their previous shopping experiences.

All of the above is made possible by the six core solutions shown in the image below — including digital asset management software. 

‍

Is Adobe Experience Manager a DAM? 

No. Adobe Experience Manager isn't a standalone digital asset management solution like Dash. Instead, it's a digital platform with many tools and capabilities, including a DAM solution called Adobe Experience Manager Assets. 

Adobe Experience Manager Assets offers decent digital asset management features, such as smart tagging, bulk uploads, and image cropping and resizing. You can purchase it as a separate tool or with the other AEM solutions, including the content management system and digital signage.

Basically: think of Adobe Experience Manager as a jack of all trades. It can do a lot of things. But it’s not specialised enough to do DAM software justice.  

Standalone DAM software like Dash offers just as many (if not more) features as AEM Assets — while giving you complete flexibility. For example, Dash lets you create portals to share updated assets with your retailers and partners. That way, they always have access to the latest images and videos for campaigns, and you don’t need to send links repeatedly. 

As an ecommerce business, you’ll also be able to access and use Dash assets directly in your Shopify or WooCommerce store. AEM Assets, however, doesn’t have any native Shopify or WooCommerce integrations. We’ll dig deeper into how both tools compare later in this article. 

Pros and cons of Adobe DAM

Now that you have an overview of Adobe Experience Manager, let’s discuss what people love and don’t love about using this tool for digital asset management. 

Adobe DAM pros

• All-in-one platform: AEM aims to provide everything you need to manage your digital presence on a single platform. It includes DAM software and a content management system, so you can have both tools within the same platform. This sounds great on the surface, but it’s very expensive (keep reading to find out how much AEM could cost you). 

• Native Adobe integrations: AEM integrates with many native Adobe applications, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Analytics and Express. This is super helpful, especially when you already use some of these tools in your ecommerce workflow. 

For example, you can create new product images in Adobe Illustrator, edit them in Photoshop, and use them in AEM Assets. Similarly, Dash integrates with Adobe Creative Cloud, so you can easily do the same with our DAM. 

• Smart tagging: Adobe DAM uses AI (specifically Adobe Sensei) to automatically scan your visual assets and add relevant tags. This means less time spent manually tagging every asset — perfect for big libraries. With tags automatically generated, finding assets becomes a breeze. Even if you don’t remember the exact filename, you can just type in keywords, and the right assets pop up.

Dash also auto-tags your images. And you can search for assets using the content of the images, not only tags. For example, if your image contains a chair, you can search for “chair” and Dash will provide all the images with that object — making you find assets faster. 

Cons of Adobe DAM

While Adobe DAM has some interesting benefits, it also has significant drawbacks: 

• It’s clunky: AEM is like trying to retrofit your top-of-the-line 80s car to keep up with today’s faster, sleeker models — it can work, but it often feels clunky and out of step with modern needs. The user interface is difficult to understand, and it relies on old frameworks, making it super difficult to implement the simplest changes. 

“AEM is an ancient platform wrapped up in a modern "touch UI," and you can tell. Throughout the product, there are still references to the previous branding and old UIs that have gotten a half-assed replacement — forcing you to use both. It is absolutely clunky, with a terrible and slow dev experience.”

• It’s expensive: While Adobe DAM isn’t transparent about its pricing, multiple reviews suggest it costs thousands of dollars, with some businesses paying up to $200,000. This might make sense for enterprise organisations that need all of Adobe’s complex workflows, but it’s overkill for smaller businesses — especially when DAMs like Dash cost far less and offer a much better experience. 

Adobe Experience Manager alternatives 

Not a fan of all the limits and complexity that come with AEM? Try these alternative solutions. 

{{dam-comparison="/blog-components"}}

1. Dash: for digital asset management

First on our list is Dash (that’s us!). It’s a digital asset management system built for growing ecommerce businesses. Dash makes it super easy to organise, manage and deploy images and videos to different channels. 

When you upload a new image to Dash, it scans and adds the relevant tags so you can find it quickly later. Dash also integrates with Hootsuite, Shopify, and WooCommerce, allowing you to deploy your visual assets to different channels in a few clicks. 

Dash is super affordable because we know you’re working with a smaller budget. For £79/$109 a month, you can enjoy all our DAM features for unlimited users.

2. Storyblok: for ecommerce content management 

Storyblok is a modern content management system for ecommerce businesses. It's best used for online stores selling on multiple platforms at the same time. 

When you make content changes in Storyblok (like uploading new images), they will automatically be reflected on your website, mobile app, and other channels you sell. This is a huge time saver that keeps your brand consistent across the board. 

Storyblok has a free plan. However, its paid packages start at $99 per month. 

3. Sitecore: for digital experience management 

Sitecore is the DXP alternative to Adobe Experience Manager. It also offers an integrated DAM solution that lets you organise and deploy visual content to different channels. In addition, it has several customisation features that can help you personalise the shopping experience on your ecommerce store. 

Like AEM, Sitecore doesn’t have any public pricing information. However, our research shows that it costs around $80,000 a year. 🤯

Adobe DAM vs Dash

Let’s see how Dash and Adobe DAM compare, especially for ecommerce businesses.

1. Features

As you can see, Dash measures up nicely to Adobe in terms of DAM features. We also provide additional capabilities tailored to the specific needs of ecommerce businesses like:

• Online brand guidelines: Using the Dash and Corebook integration, you can create an interactive brand book that’s always up-to-date with your latest brand materials — instead of a boring PDF style guide. That way, your team and external collaborators, like freelancers and retailers, always have access to the latest information on how to use your logo, colours, and fonts, for a consistent brand presentation. 

Take one of our customers, Kinetics, for example. Initially, they used a PDF style guide, but none of their partners paid attention to it. Now, with Dash and Corebook, they have interactive brand guidelines that are easy to reference, accessible and always up to date. Here’s what it looks like. 

• Guest uploads: Let's say you're working with multiple designers and photographers for a campaign. You don't want to give them direct access to your DAM, but still need a simple way to receive, approve, and use these images and videos. That's where guest uploads come in. 
  
  You'll be able to share a special link that lets them upload their photos to a separate folder in your Dash. From there, you can review and approve submissions before adding them to Dash where the rest of your team can see and use them. Here's a video explaining how you can work with external creators in Dash. ✨

• WooCommerce and Shopify integration: If you have a WooCommerce or Shopify store, you’ll be able to access all your product images and videos directly in your online store backend. You won’t have to waste time downloading and reuploading visual content from your DAM for use in your product listing or website. You can also create pre-set image sizes, so anyone on your team can easily upload images into product listings the right dimensions without cropping or resizing them manually. 

2. Integrations 

AEM syncs with many of the apps in the Adobe ecosystem, including Experience Cloud, Analytics and Creative Cloud. However, it doesn’t support as many third-party applications. And for the few it does, setting up the integration is quite difficult — as this user noted. 

“Adobe Experience Manager does not play nice with non-Adobe software. God forbid you try to integrate with Salesforce. Double whammy.”

Chances are your ecommerce business relies on one or more non-Adobe apps. Maybe you use Hootsuite for social media scheduling or Canva to whip up quick and simple designs. In any case, you might struggle to connect these apps to your digital asset management system due to AEM’s rigid integration setup. 

With Dash, however, you can integrate with some key ecommerce tools. For example, our HootSuite integration lets you post images and videos from your DAM to your social media channels directly. And if you use Canva for designs, you’ll be able to export templates, infographics and images to your Dash for use easily. 

Dash also integrates with Adobe Creative Cloud, so you can enjoy a smooth creative workflow without the unnecessary restrictions and complexities that come with AEM. Plus, our Zapier connection lets you connect your Dash with many other applications. 

3. Pricing 

There's no pricing information for Adobe Experience Manager on its website. If you're a growing ecommerce business, this is already a beige flag as you need transparent pricing information to make the right DAM decision quickly. 

However, we did some digging and discovered that AEM charges licensing fees which depend on several factors like the number of users, deployment scale, how much customisation you require, and so on. 

On average, the licensing fees start at $30,000 per year — some businesses pay $200,000 or more. Then comes the costs for implementation and DAM customisation which range between $100,000 and $500,000. 

Larger businesses might be able to justify spending so much on a DAM. But for a growing business with a smaller budget, it’s not worth it. You’ll end up paying for features you don’t need — and spending almost all of your time on technical configurations. 

Things are very different with Dash. First, we don’t hide information about how much our DAM costs. Instead, you’ll find a detailed breakdown of all our pricing plans on our website. 

👉 We’ve even built out a DAM pricing guide explaining how much digital asset management costs and what influences how much you pay. 

We also don’t charge any licensing or implementation fees, or lock you into strict contracts. You choose a monthly or annual subscription plan that you can cancel at any time.

Now to the actual numbers. Dash’s pricing starts from £79/month or $109/month. With this, everyone on your team gets access to all of our features, including auto-tagging, customisations, portals for external collaborators, and so much more. 

We don’t lock important features in higher tiers to make you pay more. Even if you’re on our cheapest plan, you’ll get everything Dash offers for organising and managing assets for your ecommerce business.  

The best part is you get to try Dash for free to see if we’re a good fit before making any commitments. AEM, on the other hand, doesn’t offer any free trial. You’re pretty much taking a leap of faith and hoping things work out. 

Is Adobe Experience Manager the right DAM for you? 

Honestly, it depends on your specific needs and ecommerce business setup. AEM might be a good DAM choice if: 

• Most of your ecommerce workflow runs on Adobe tools. 

• You’re tired of juggling multiple platforms, and need a one-size-fits-all solution for your ecommerce business. With AEM, you can have a DAM, content management system, and digital signage tool, among others, in one platform. 

• You have in-house technical expertise always available to handle setup, maintenance and configuration. 

However, if you're a growing ecommerce business looking for a simple and affordable way to organise, manage, and deploy your visual content, AEM might not be the best fit. It can be a bloated, complicated, and expensive tool that could hold your business back. The sheer amount of features, plus time and cost, required to set up and use the software outweigh its benefits for your business.

That’s where an ecommerce DAM like Dash comes in. For only £79/month or $109/month, you get the core features required to manage and use visual assets as a growing ecommerce business, including auto-tagging, version control and approval workflows. Dash also integrates with Adobe and Canva so you don’t need to fork out for tools like AEM.

Want to test things out for yourself? Try Dash for free for 14 days — we won’t even ask for your credit card information.