The Best Brandfolder Alternatives for Digital Asset management
(2024 review, pricing & open demos)
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The thing I hear most about Brandfolder is that it's a great product, if you can get it to work. If you're reading this, It seems you’ve tried Brandfolder, and couldn't get it to work. Maybe organizing your assets took too much time, or it was difficult for your entire team to use it well, or it just become too expensive as your team grew.
Indeed, Brandfolder has lots of great features, but if they’re not cutting it for you anymore, here are a few alternatives you might want to consider:
✓ Tagbox
✓ Canto
✓ Bynder
✓ Filecamp
✓ Playbook
In this article, I'll talk about the pros and cons of using Brandfolder; I'll offer first-hand experience in comparing it to other alternaitives, and share some open workspaces from each product that I found on the web, which can really help, since most of them are demo-only, and do not allow you to freely explore on your own.
brandfolder - overview & pricing
Before we discuss alternatives, let’s examine a few reasons why you might be looking for an alternative to Brandfolder. Brandfolder was founded in 2012, and acquired by Smartsheet in 2020. As such, it is an established brand in the DAM market.
Brandfolder is unique in that they help manage not only media and files, but also the brand guidelines such as fonts and colors. This indicates their focus on large retail and tech organizations. They also offer users a great interface for finding their assets.
While finding assets is a relatively good experience, some people found difficulties in the admin side of things. Here are some common drawback we hear:
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Why You Need A brandfolder Alternative
❌ Organizing assets
Adding and organizing content is definitely the main drawback of using Brandfolder. During upload, you will need to manually tag each asset individually. While they claim to have auto-tagging, it doesn't connect to the organization's taxonomy, and instead creates a multitude of irrelevant tags that causes more trouble than it's worth.
❌ Advanced search
Users can easily search for the basics - by the name of the file, or added tags. But if you're looking for something specific like images of a particular person, or by image text - you might find the platform lacking. This is especially crucial since, as mentioned above, Brandfolder is designed primarily for retail companies. These companies often need to organize product images, which usually have labels that include the the name of the product, and extra information such as package size, taste or smell, and other data that you won't be able to search for in Brandfolder.
❌ Pricing
While Brandfolder doesn’t make its pricing transparent on their site, according to a number of online sources, their pricing starts at around $450/month for a single user with basic storage, and can easily climb to $3,000/month as teams grow in users and storage.
Tagbox.io - a DAM with a touch of magic
Like Brandfolder, Tagbox.io is also designed with retail companies in mind. The newest of the bunch, Tagbox prides itself on using AI to automate many of the tedious tasks that are required to maintain a DAM, saving DAM administrators hours of work, and making it easier for teams to stay consistent.
Search and filters
While tagging is important for staying organized, you can’t always predict how people will be looking for assets. This is where a powerful search comes into play.
Brandfolder offers good general search, which works well if you know exactly what you're looking for. But, as shown in the video above, if you're looking for something that wasn't specifically mentioned in the file name, or if you make a small typo or simply spell a word differently, you might find no results for your search. This is especially important if you work with outsourced contractors and agencies, who might not be familiar with your internal terminology
Tagbox, on the other hand, actively searches within your content, so that you can find assets whether they’re tagged or not. Tagbox is also one of the only companies that offers text-in-image search, allowing, for example, to quickly find images of brands by their label.
See Tagbox's search in action:
Tagging
TAs mentioned above, tagging in Brandfolder is a somewhat tedious, manual job. Tagbox, on the other hand, have auto-tagging that connectes to your team's taxonomy and terminology, and advanced tools that help you manage those tags to make sure things don't get messy as your content grows.
Pricing
Tagbox’s pricing is transparent and available on its website. It has 4 different plans:
Solo Plan (free): 1,000 items and 3 users.
Studio Plan ($150/month): 5,000 items and 3 users.
Company Plan ($250/month): from 10,000 items with unlimited users, with expansion options.
Enterprise Plan: (custom pricing) includes platform customizations, dedicated integrations, and more.
Feature comparison
up and running in a week
Setting up a Digital Asset Management platformcan take months.
At Tagbox, we understand that a productivity tool is supposed to, well, help productivity, which is why our data migration team would love to help get organized within just one week of signing up.
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Brandfolder vs. canto
Brandfolder and Canto are both established DAM brands.
While some of the functionality seems similar. Brandfolders targets retail companies, and has additional functionality for specifically organizing brand guidelines such as fonts and colors. Canto. On the other hand, it is more suitable for Academic institutions and non-profits.
Pricing is relatively similar. Neither platform officially publishes its pricing policy, and according to online resources, you can expect a quote in the $3,000-$10,000 month, depending on your specific requirements.
In terms of usability, we personally like Brandfolder’s design and user experience over that of Canto, which is a bit dated.
Canto Demo
Brandfolder vs. bynder
Bynder is another one of the veteran players in the DAM market, offering all the core functionality, as well as many integrations.
Bynder is considered to be the more expensive of the group, and thus mostly suitable for very large organizations with high customization needs.
In both cases, the platforms include very basic AI assistance, with auto-tagging that is rarely used, and no advanced search options such as text-in-image search.
We’ve also noticed that Bynder’s platform tends to be a lot slower, which can be annoying if you use it often. As the features are largely similar, the decision will likely come down to pricing and personal interface preferences, as well as the skills of the salesperson you happened to get.
Bynder Demo
Brandfolder vs. filecamp
Filecamp is a low-cost DAM, going at a flat pricing of $59 for their 50GB plan.
However, while they advertise the cover most expected DAM functionality, we’ve found that it is rarely the case.
The good news is that, since it is one of the only self-service platforms out there, you can try and be disappointed yourself. In fact, even though it presents itself as a DAM, its main organization structure uses folders, so in our view, it’s more comparable to a low-cost Dropbox or Google Drive.
With less-than-basic search and tagging, we would not recommend it, especially compared to other reasonably priced options such as Tagbox and Playbook.
Filecamp demo
Brandfolder vs. play book
Playbook is one of the newest players in the DAM market, and might be worth exploring if you’re a designer looking for a low-cost DAM with good basic functionality.
Similar to Brandfolder, Playbook's interface is fun and more design-oriented.
However, Playbook lacks advanced features such as tag management and even basic filters, and they mostly rely on search for asset discovery. Similarly, there is no approval process or workflow management in Playbook.
Frequently
Asked
Questions
Who should use Brandfolder?
Brandfolder is most suitable for large retail & tech organizations, with large budgets and at least one team member that will be fully dedicated to managing the assets within the platform.
How much does brandfolder cost?
While they don’t make their pricing public, we estimate their pricing at around $3,000-$10,000 / month, depending on your specific storage requirements and number of users. Other competitors, such as Tagbox and Filecamp, are available for around $50 - $1,000 / month.
What are the top alternatives to brandfolder?
The top alternatives to Brandfolder include Tagbox.io, Bynder, Canto, Filecamp, and Playbook.
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