Creative teams produce large volumes of content every week, and assets end up scattered across Google Drive, Dropbox, email attachments, and local drives. The meticulously-designed artwork for your big social media campaign gets stuck in an endless back-and-forth via email, and designers spend hours making tiny tweaks to the files that never get final sign-off, so they sit unused on your shared drive.
That’s when it’s clear your existing process for creating, organizing, and collaborating on design files isn’t working. Creative asset management prevents that chaos and keeps teams and projects moving.
What is creative asset management?
Creative asset management is the combination of software, workflows, and governance that helps teams store, organize, find, collaborate on, approve, and distribute brand assets at scale. These assets include:
- Images: photography, illustrations, graphics, and icons
- Videos: raw footage, edited cuts, motion graphics, and animations
- Design files: Figma, Sketch, or Adobe Creative Cloud files
- Brand elements: logos, color palettes, typography files, and brand marks
- Audio assets: music, sound effects, voice recordings, and podcasts
- Documents: brand guidelines, style guides, and marketing collateral.
Asset management is more than just file storage. Creative asset management uses structured metadata and tagging, clear version history, and granular permissions to make sure people can quickly find the right, approved file and use it correctly, without blockers or workarounds. It also provides workflows that move work from creation through to review, approval, and distribution.
Creative asset management vs. digital asset management
Creative and digital asset management are two terms that you’ll encounter when searching for this type of software. Put simply:
- Digital asset management (DAM) is the broader category — it’s any tool or system that organizations use to store, organize, and distribute digital files
- Creative asset management is the term for platforms more specifically designed for use by creative teams. It’s built for managing creative workflows and the production side of asset creation such as handling design files and supporting in-progress collaboration.
In practice, these terms often overlap and many teams use the terms interchangeably. When comparing vendors and platforms, the software category doesn’t matter as much as whether the platform supports both in-progress creation and the controlled distribution of finished, approved assets.
If you’re looking for asset management tools specifically designed for creative teams, look for tools that skew towards creative production, with strong collaboration, proofing, and versioning capabilities. Tools that are better suited to more general digital asset management focus on distribution through brand portals, robust permissions, and delivery into downstream tools.
You may also encounter other related terms during your research:
- Media asset management (MAM) often refers to tools that support video-heavy workflows and broadcast environments with complex formats and timelines
- Brand asset management (BAM) tools focus on brand consistency, guidelines, and controlled distribution of brand elements
- Marketing resource management (MRM) sits higher up in your tech stack, combining asset management with campaign planning, budgeting, and operational workflows.
Use cases for creative asset management tools
Stakeholders will use creative asset management tools in different ways, but its core value remains the same: it helps people find the right, approved assets when they need them, without delays or complications.
Creative and design teams
Designers, videographers, photographers, content creators, and other creative team members use creative asset management tools to:
- Organize work-in-progress files and keep clear version history across multiple iterations
- Share files for feedback and approvals with managers, brand teams, and leadership
- Access brand elements, templates, and guidelines directly from their design tools like Figma or Adobe Creative Cloud
- Easily find and reuse existing design materials instead of duplicating work that already exists.
Many design teams start using creative asset management tools when their existing asset management process becomes too much of a time drain. They lose hours every week fielding Slack requests for logo files, never-ending email threads with feedback and new versions of campaign artwork, and resending the same files over and over.
A strong creative asset management platform enables safe, reliable self-serve access so marketers and partners can find approved assets without pulling designers into every request.
Marketing teams
Marketers use asset management tools to:
- Find approved, on-brand assets to use in marketing campaigns, social media posts, emails, and content marketing
- Self-serve assets without waiting for designers to provide or create them
- Access the correct, current version of assets without worrying if they’re using an outdated file
- Localize and adapt assets for different markets, channels, and audiences while maintaining a consistent visual brand identity.
If all your marketing files live in shared drives and scattered folders, marketers resort to using outdated files or recreating assets that don’t meet your brand standards. This takes a lot of time and compromises your brand identity when off-brand assets go live. A good creative asset management platform makes it quick and easy for marketers to find and use approved assets independently, without support from creative or brand teams.
Brand and communications teams
For brand managers and comms teams, creative asset management tools help them:
- Maintain brand consistency across all touchpoints
- Control how brand assets are used internally and externally, through granular user permissions and central governance
- Connect creative tools to brand guidelines, so users understand how to use brand elements correctly in their designs
- Track usage and file access to ensure teams are using the latest, approved creative files.
Before they start using an asset management tool, companies publish lots of unauthorized or outdated files, and assets get used incorrectly. So brand managers spend a lot of time on damage control — seeking out off-brand material and reworking it to meet brand standards, or manually reviewing designs from other departments. A good platform helps brand teams enforce standards and brand consistency without constant manual oversight, so it doesn’t slow down creative or brand departments.
External partners and agencies
Agencies, freelancers, franchisees, and other external partners use creative asset management tools to:
- Access the creative assets they need, without having full system access
- Download files in the formats and sizes they need
- Upload deliverables for review and approval
- Stay up-to-date when assets or brand materials are replaced or changed.
External partners frequently share files with your company, and in turn often need to access specific files like your brand guidelines, brand elements, and campaign plans. Without an asset management platform, they need to constantly request access via email, so their inboxes are cluttered with files. A creative asset platform gives them controlled access to the files they need through secure links, and the confidence that the files they see are current and approved for use.
How to evaluate creative asset management platforms
When comparing creative asset management platforms, many vendors offer similar features and functionality. So instead of comparing feature lists, look for a platform that helps drive adoption across the business, as the platform only delivers value if people use it.
Adoption and usability for all user types
Many asset management platforms fail because they’re built for administrators rather than everyday users. They make it easy for admins to monitor usage and control access, but hard for other users to successfully navigate the system.
Look for a platform that’s designed to be easy for all users to navigate. You can assess this by:
- Taking out a product trial and having users from different departments try it out to assess usability
- Asking about training provided by the vendor — is it customized for different user groups or only for admins?
- Looking for tools with an intuitive interface rather than a complex system of folder structures of metadata schemas
- Checking the options to customize user permissions, to control whether occasional users only get limited, straightforward access.
Your chosen creative asset management platform should serve both daily users (like marketers and designers) and occasional users (like sales or HR teams), without the need for extensive training or hand-holding. It should make it easy for everyone to find the files they need with confidence, otherwise adoption will stall and the system will deliver only limited value.
Search and discoverability
In your trial or product demo, check whether the system makes asset search and discoverability significantly quicker than finding assets in your existing system of shared drives. Check whether the platform can:
- Find relevant assets through natural language search, not just exact-match keywords
- Support filtering by asset type, date, campaign, brand, or custom attributes
- Use AI to auto-tag assets during the upload process to improve findability and reduce the manual work to organize and categorize new files.
Fast discovery and easy access means teams are happy searching your asset management platform for files, improving tool adoption as well as asset reuse.
Governance and permissions
You want a platform with customizable user permissions to support effective governance, protecting your brand without adding friction into users’ experience. In your demo ask to see how to:
- Create different user groups with different permission levels, based on roles, regions, or project
- Add, change, or revoke user permissions on an individual or group basis
- Connect the platform to your brand guidelines and creative templates to help enforce brand compliance
- Manage asset lifecycles, including version control, expiry, archiving, and rights management.
An asset management platform should make governance easy for system administrators and leadership teams, but almost invisible to the everyday user.
Integration depth
Look for a platform that offers native integrations with the creative tools your team already uses, rather than basic plug-ins. This is important because native integrations bring the full functionality of your creative asset management platform into the creative workflow, whereas plug-ins normally offer only limited functionality, and often break or require frequent updates to keep working.
Ask your vendor whether the platform:
- Offers native integrations with creative tools like Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva, and Sketch
- Connects to CMS, marketing automation, and content delivery systems
- Provides API access for custom integrations and workflow automations
- Has bi-directional syncing capabilities to keep assets updated across different tools and systems.
Scalability
A common mistake we see companies make is that they choose an asset management platform based on what they need today. They don’t take into account the company’s future growth plans and complexity, so they choose a platform that can’t scale with their business.
Look for a creative asset management platform that can:
- Support multiple brands within the same platform
- Handle large volumes of assets and users without affecting performance or load times
- Support content localization such as regional variations, market-specific assets, and regional brand portals
- Handle increasingly complex user permissions, groups, and asset governance as the organizational complexity grows.
Ask vendors about their biggest customers — how many users, the volume of creative assets, and how many sub-brands they manage within the platform. This will give you a good idea of how well the platform works at scale, even if your business doesn’t currently have the same volume of files to manage.
Common evaluation mistakes to avoid
We’ve shared some of the key criteria to look for when comparing creative asset management systems, but it’s also important to know what not to do. Here’s a short list of common mistakes to avoid making when comparing platforms:
✗ Only using feature checklists to compare platforms
✓ Take product demos and free trials, using your own files and assets where possible
✗ Not involving end users in product trials or on demos, and only inviting admin users or leadership
✓ Invite users from different departments and with different skill levels to product demos and trials
✗ Not considering integration requirements until after purchase
✓ Before you speak to any vendors, make a list of essential tools you need the system to connect with
✗ Choosing a platform that only integrates with key creative tools via a plug-in, rather than full native integrations
✓ Ask the vendor about integration depth specifically
✗ Picking a tool based on price alone, overlooking total cost of ownership or potential cost-saving opportunities from different platforms
✓ Look at ongoing costs as well as set-up costs, and consider whether you’ll be able to consolidate multiple tools within your new system to achieve unexpected cost savings
✗ Not considering access and functionality for external users, like agencies, partners, or freelancers
✓ Ask vendors about access and permissions for external users, not just your internal teams
✗ Only considering what their company needs today and ignoring or underestimating the functionality they’ll need as the organization scales
✓ Ask vendors about functionality that will scale with your company, such as support for multiple brands, content localization, and how it handles large volumes of assets.
Top creative asset management platforms
There are lots of asset management tools on the market and each platform has its own distinct strengths. The best fit for your organization depends on your priorities. We’ve put together a short list of the top creative asset management platforms (yes, including Frontify) to help you compare them across adoption, search, governance, integrations, and scalability.
1. Frontify
Frontify combines creative asset management, brand guidelines, design templates, and creative workflows in one connected platform. It’s built to drive and streamline adoption, providing everyday users with an accessible branded portal experience, and a separate back-end for effective governance and administration.
It’s best for mid-market and enterprise organizations that want a platform that’ll be used across marketing, sales, regional teams, and external partners — not just the brand or creative teams.
Strengths:
- Straightforward user interface and easy-to-navigate platform
- Native integrations with design tools including Figma and Adobe
- Guidelines and templates that connect directly to creative assets
- AI-assisted tagging and smart filters to support quick search and findability
- Granular permissions that scale across regions, teams, and roles
- Scalable multi-brand architecture to grow with your business
Considerations:
- Companies looking for a pure creative asset management system without any brand management features may find some of the platform functionality is more than they need.
2. Air
Air is an approachable platform for teams to store and organize visual content. It offers transparent pricing and is perfectly positioned as a starter DAM for teams looking to improve their asset management, as an alternative to Dropbox or Google Drive. It also provides space for working together and allows you to manage collaboration, feedback, and approvals all in the same place
It’s best for smaller teams who want to move away from basic file storage, and are new to creative asset management.
Strengths:
- Beginner-friendly, visual interface
- Integrated collaboration features so teams can leave feedback, manage approvals, and track project progress within one centralized location
- Transparent pricing, perfect for budget-conscious organizations and smaller businesses.
Considerations:
- Air may lack the robust governance and permissions functionality that larger organizations need
- It offers limited scalability options, so complex enterprise or multi-brand businesses will likely outgrow the platform quite quickly.
3. Adobe Experience Manager Assets
Adobe Experience Manager Assets is an enterprise DAM that’s part of the Adobe ecosystem. It provides robust connections with Adobe Creative Cloud, as well as other integrations across the Adobe suite.
It’s best for large enterprises that are already heavily invested in the Adobe ecosystem, who need to add asset management into their tool stack.
Strengths:
- Deep native integration with Adobe Creative Cloud
- Integrations with the broader Adobe Experience Platform
- Enterprise-scale architecture so you won’t outgrow the system
Considerations:
- Works best together with other Adobe products which requires a significant commitment to the Adobe ecosystem
- Implementing this (as well as other Adobe products) is complex and often costly
- Can be overkill for organizations that don’t use other products within the Adobe Experience Platform
- If you use Adobe Creative Cloud, this isn’t necessarily the best option — other creative asset management tools also provide deep native integrations.
4. Bynder
Bynder is a cloud-based DAM provider with a platform that provides strong approval workflows, detailed reporting and analytics, and brand guidelines.
It’s best for large organizations and enterprise businesses with complex approval processes.
Strengths:
- Robust workflow and approval tools
- Detailed usage analytics and reporting capabilities
- Established enterprise presence — designed to operate at scale.
Considerations:
- Definitely more of a DAM than a creative asset management tool
- Can require significant resources and time during implementation to set up properly
- Complex tool that requires lots of training to build users’ confidence, which may reduce adoption for occasional users.
Manage your creative assets with Frontify
When shared drives, email threads, and long Slack conversations make it hard to manage your creative assets, it’s time for a different solution. Frontify brings asset management together with brand guidelines, templates, and creative workflows into a single platform designed for use across the entire organization, not just the design team.
Learn more about how Frontify can help your team centralize assets, templates, and guidelines, and make it easy for everyone to find and use those creative files. Book a demo to see it in action.
