The Top 10 Digital Asset Management Software Providers (Reviewed)

Last Updated on December 25, 2020

Are you looking for the best digital asset management solutions? Having a digital asset management software can help your business grow significantly.

Digital asset management (DAM) software catalogues and maintains repositories of media files such as photos, audio files, and video files. By applying metadata taxonomies to assets, users are able to group, search, and distribute files. DAM solutions often come with other features such as powerful import and export functionality, versioning, preview and thumbnail views of assets optimized for processing speed, and automatic conversion of files to different file types or file sizes.

DAM systems are often implemented by marketing and operations teams across various industries for help in defining and managing their online brands. These products can also be used to reduce the duplication of an organization’s assets, maintain up-to-date collections, and control security of assets with role-based permissions. Some businesses assign specific individuals as DAM administrators or “librarians” to oversee these assets and ensure they follow established brand-specific guidelines.

Many DAM products integrate with other management software like those in our Enterprise Content Management category and Web Content Management category, as well as with various other creative software including website builders and content marketing software tools.

RECOMMENDED: The Top 5 Real Estate Asset Management Software Providers (Reviewed)

DAM software market has grown rapidly in recent years, with dozens of options to choose from, making it difficult to find the right solution for your business. To help you choose the best digital asset management software solution for your business, we have researched and analyzed over 20 providers. Below is our pick of the top 10 digital asset management software providers.

The Top 10 Digital Asset Management Software Providers

1. Widen Collective

Widen Collective is a cloud-based digital asset management solution designed to support the content lifecycle from creation to distribution. Widen serves mid-to-large organizations with a data-driven platform, the Widen Collective. Widen’s six integrated applications encompass digital asset management, product information management, and marketing resource management solutions, integrating with over 50 apps from creative suites to project management, AI, and marketing and sales tools. Power your content management needs with award-inning tools and service beyond compare.

Some tech companies implement their software, wave goodbye, and wish you luck. The Widen customer experience is a total service approach that never, ever quits. Our experts are like blockers who step in the way of 300-pound problems so you can get to the end zone. We’re DAM black belts. In 1997, we released one of the earliest digital asset management systems. To this day, we’re still focused on advancing DAM. That kind of longevity and dedication is rare in the martech industry.

We create, use, and dream DAM like it’s an art form (which we think it is). We’ve been in business since 1948. From the peak of print to the rise of digital to the frontiers of immersive media, we’ve adapted to all the seismic shifts in communication. Because we’ve seen it all, we’re quick to spot the future – and driven to tap its full potential. We put value over being first.

2. PhotoShelter for Brands

Your team needs to share photos and videos quickly and constantly to tell your brand’s story – but the old ways of managing your files can’t keep up. With PhotoShelter for Brands, formerly known as Libris, you’ll be able to move creative files from point A to point B instantly and unlock the possibilities of your brand’s most powerful moments.

3. Brandfolder

Brandfolder is a visually-elegant and user-friendly Digital Asset Management software that allows marketers and creatives across industries to maximize their brand management potential. Brandfolder is more than just storage for your digital assets; with our solution’s cloud-first architecture, users can organize, manipulate, distribute, and analyze their most important digital collateral from a single source of truth.

With advanced AI-powered smart search, asset editing and manipulation, annotated workflow with approvals and notifications, and actionable brand insights, Brandfolder’s feature suite amplifies cross-team collaboration and productivity and empowers external users to access the content they need with unprecedented ease.

4. Canto

Canto helps unlock your team and unleash your brand with the simplest, yet most powerful DAM system on the market. Marketing teams across all industries trust Canto to organize, secure and share visual brand assets with ease. It gives your team the power to easily tag, collaborate and report on company-wide digital assets in a visual environment. Canto has over 25 years of experience in the digital asset management industry and thousands of brands around the world rely on us to centralize their rich media libraries.

Canto makes team collaboration easy with a simple-to-use visual interface and intuitive features, like automatic file organization, watermarking and copyright license management. Upload, download, store and share assets from a central branded environment. Easily search for your brand assets with the help of custom metadata fields. Ensure brand consistency and secure content with permission-based access and branded portals. Simplify and extend workflows with prebuilt connectors to Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, WordPress, DropBox, Box, Slack, Facebook, Google Drive, Pinterest and Twitter. Or custom build your own integration with our Canto API. Access content in Canto from any browser or device with our highly-mobile friendly responsive UI.

5. Bynder

Bynder helps over a million creative, branding, and marketing professionals accelerate the creation of video and other content, get the right assets to the people and systems that need them, and ensure brand compliance. Bynder is used by brands like Puma, Spotify, TED, and Five Guys to get content and campaigns to market faster and accelerate the end-to-end creative content lifecycle.

Bynder’s DAM is easy-to-use, yet rich in functionality, enabling you to save time and cut out the hassle when working with media and collaborating with colleagues. Because working with digital files has become the standard for marketing operations, we have made usability Bynder’s most stand-out feature.

• Collections and Permissions – share and distribute your content with peace of mind Share your media files without wasting precious time on working with ZIP files, chaotic email transfers, and unsecured file transfer tools.
• Creative Workflow – streamline your content creation from the first draft to final approval With Bynder’s Creative Workflow, you can easily collaborate and communicate with both internal departments and external agencies, so you can speed up content creation from start to finish while making sure reviews and approvals are clear and straightforward for everyone. – Digital Brand Templates
• empower the marketer, free the designer Bynder’s Digital Brand Templates helps marketing teams create more on-brand content faster by transforming creative files from Photoshop and Sketch into reusable digital templates.
• Print Brand Templates – create branded content in minutes, not hours With Bynder’s Print Brand Templates, anyone in your team can be a designer and create content that aligns with your brand guidelines, so you can ditch the complicated and expensive design tools and save time and money. – Digital Brand Guidelines – make sure your brand story is always consistent Consistency is the key to a strong brand. With the Bynder’s Brand Guidelines, you can create and edit a configurable set of guidelines describing your brand story, and make important elements such as fonts, logos, and tone of voice accessible for everyone.
• Video Brand Studio – Meet the exploding demand for video with an integrated solution to create, adapt, manage, distribute, and analyze video assets. Create on-brand videos without any editing skills with Bynder’s Video Brand Studio. Efficiently create sets of related videos to meet the needs of each market, channel, audience, format and testing strategy. Scale the video creation process using templates, batch creation tools, and data-driven creation using external data feeds. – Advanced Analytics
• Get meaningful insights into asset usage and performance Bynder Analytics gives you the data you need to drill down into the details and measure the performance and usage of digital assets in the portal for straightforward KPI evaluation.
• Integrate with your existing tech stack Eliminate the downloads, uploads, and emails. Get more from your digital content by integrating Bynder and connecting your technology ecosystem using our pre-built tools. For integrations not available in our marketplace, you can build tailored integrations using our API and Software Development Kits. Show Less

6. Image Relay

Digital asset management with Image Relay will put an end to scattered assets, annoying file requests, frustrating searches, broken sharing tools, and give you back time for your favorite things. Some of the world’s most recognized brands rely on Image Relay to upload, organize, monitor, manage, and distribute their files from one centralized, secure, easy-to-use spot in the cloud.

7. monday.com

monday.com is a cloud-based Work OS, where teams create workflow apps in minutes to run their processes, projects, and everyday work. Teams shape their workflows and projects, code-free, with a platform that adapts to shifting needs quickly, liberates teams from manual grunt work, and connects teams in a collaborative work space. The platform’s features include: customizable workflow templates to manage anything your way, time tracking to meet important deadlines, automations to eliminate manual work, dashboards to gain valuable insights and know where things stand at a glance, and integrations with popular tools and apps to streamline processes. More than 100,000 companies around the world use monday.com to free their teams to move faster and let them focus on the work that requires their talents.

8. IntelligenceBank Digital Asset Management

IntelligenceBank is the industry leading Enterprise DAM platform for streamlining processes around your marketing content and protecting your brand and compliance requirements. Our beautifully designed platform simplifies managing creative projects as well as sharing, distributing and reporting on brand assets. With lightning-fast search, custom brand portals, project management and calendars, online creative briefs, web to print templates, brand guidelines and killer workflow for creative approvals: IntelligenceBank makes creative content management a seamless process and enables you to produce and distribute creative faster than ever before. Our flexible pricing model means we can tailor packages for all types of businesses – Enterprise, Mid-Tier and Small Business. Contact us to see why companies such as Hertz, KFC, Carlsberg and 400 other brands love IntelligenceBank.

9. Syndigo Content Experience Hub

Syndigo’s Content Experience Hub Platform allows retailers, distributors and manufacturers to access all of their product data and digital assets from one single location. With this product suppliers and manufacturers can now be sure all their sales channels have the same rich product information. Through the standardized content, retailers can now consume far more data than ever before. Allowing for a faster speed to market and an expansion of product lines in-store and online.

10. ImageKit

ImageKit.io is a complete image management and delivery solution for websites and apps to deliver high-quality visuals without compromising performance. Whether you are operating an e-commerce store or a content website or a travel website, with ImageKit, you can:

• Simplify your image management and delivery process with a smart image CDN built to work with your existing infrastructure.
• Plug-in your existing storage or CMS/DAM instantly to leverage ImageKit’s image delivery features within minutes
• Manage your media assets with an integrated media library to upload, search, and organize your files. – Get modern image delivery features like WebP images, smart cropping, high-DPR images instantly. – Perform real-time image optimizations and transformations like resizing, smart cropping, watermarking, and much more.
• Deliver high-quality image experience based on the user’s device and bandwidth every time. – Reduce your page weight by over 30%, which will result in an overall reduction in bandwidth consumption.
• Improve the PageSpeed Insights score. With a global image content delivery network spread across 200 edge delivery locations and 6 processing locations, ImageKit serves robust image management & delivery solution for over 15000 companies & developers across the globe.

Digital Asset Management Software Features

While digital asset management systems will have myriad features depending on the individual product in question, these are the basic features that all, or nearly all, DAM software will have.

Importing and exporting: Allows users to import and export their digital assets into the DAM system. When an asset is imported, the user can manually tag and catalog it, or the system will do so automatically using metadata.

• Indexing and search: Allows users to easily find their assets via a searchable index that sorts media by its content or metadata. Users can return to their cataloged assets and find them using the aforementioned criteria.
• Access control: Provides varying levels of access to content based on predetermined but fluctuating roles. While all digital asset management systems will include the previously mentioned features, these functions are featured in many offerings, but not all of them. In some cases, these features are becoming more popular with time, especially in the case of metadata and versioning.
• Metadata: Automatically adds descriptive metadata such as file size and upload date, can extract XMP, IPTC and EXIF metadata, has standard metadata fields like keywords, and allows the definition of custom fields and vocabulary.
• Versioning: Keeps track of incrementally changing versions of the same asset.
• File preview: Allows user to preview large image files and video storyboards.
• File transformation: Automatically or manually converts files into different sizes or file formats within the system.
• Workflow management: Creates rules that automate processes, such as converting assets into certain file types or routing projects to certain users for review and approval.

Who Uses Digital Asset Management Software?

Organizations in many different industries implement DAM solutions each with their own requirements and parameters. News organizations will likely need a product with powerful editing capabilities (especially for photographs) and definable workflows for approvals. A marketing department will likely look for an easy-to-use product that can transform all creative marketing materials into different file types and sizes and that can share assets outside of the organization. A government institution will have greater focus on security and permission structure.

Many DAM products specialize in providing certain industry solutions and claim to be optimized for those specific use cases. Other products specialize in certain functionalities, or they offer a flexible platform to customize your own solution. Your industry’s standards are a great reference point to begin defining a list of critical features.

Teams that handle digital asset management software include:

• Creative teams: Creative teams can begin the ideation process collaboratively within many DAM systems, and some even provide tools that allow them to design assets as well. After the assets have been designed, they can be imported into software. Metadata is then applied to these assets for them to be found later by operations teams and marketers once they need them.
• Operations: Many large companies will have operational staff handle their digital asset management system to further ensure clear taxonomies and correct versioning. Some operations teams even have dedicated members who handle digital asset management system curation.
• Marketers: Marketing teams can pull brand assets from the DAM system at any time to any supported device or software. The powerful export capability of DAM solutions allows users to then pull these assets on to web pages, presentations, or in print.

Why Use Digital Asset Management Software?

Organizations are adopting DAM systems so that users can quickly navigate their digital libraries and find the assets they need. There is no reason to purchase a DAM product unless you will be able to structure your collection into an easy and logical schema that works for your firm and your users. There are many factors that affect the usefulness of a digital asset management tool.

• Metadata: The metadata structure must be flexible or robust enough to effectively organize your assets. Automating and streamlining metadata collection and being able to define custom fields and an internal taxonomy will all contribute to a well organized library.
• Permissions: Likely, not everyone at your organization needs access to every asset, and the more sensitive the assets, the more strict your security permissions need to be. This becomes even more important when sharing assets outside of your organization. Having a granular permissions structure will keep each user perusing the assets that pertain to them and limit needless searching and filtering.
• Interface: A perfect organizational schema is moot if the program’s navigational interface can’t make use of it. A user should be able to intuitively filter, search, and scroll through assets and easily view pertinent details and useful thumbnails.
• Ensured correct versioning: Teams don’t want to fumble around a content management system in search of the updated version of a video or presentation. Digital asset management systems can host multiple versions of an asset, allowing users to select which they want to export for use.
• Mobility: Companies conduct business everywhere, from their home office to overseas, and most work can happen over a video call. A well-managed digital asset management system means a team has access to the right materials from anywhere at any time.
• Ease of navigation: Metadata content search makes finding a company’s assets a breeze, with most DAM systems also providing file previews and thumbnails, easing the process even further.
• Workflow efficiency: Digital asset management software can automate the workflow of an asset by automatically changing files types, sending notifications to relevant parties for review, or applying metadata taxonomy before file storage.
• Brand management: A digital asset management system facilitates brand consistency by ensuring that operations teams and marketers have access to the correct branded assets when they need them.
• Time effective: With a streamlined digital filing system, employees are able to turn their attention to more heavily weighted job tasks. Some DAM software even allow for task automation so employees spend less time performing mundane duties.
• Waste reduction: DAM software helps reduce material paper waste by offering a digital repository for documents and files. This also reduces the amount of physical space that companies would otherwise require to house thousands of documents.
• Integrations: Digital assets rarely exist in isolation. They’re put to use for creative projects, web pages, reports, proposal documents, and sales materials. Likewise, your DAM tool exists in a larger ecosystem of digital tools that your users are taking advantage of. Useful APIs and out-of-the-box integrations help users be more productive by linking their tools and workflows together. Be sure to investigate which DAM products will cooperate with the software you have already implemented for your teams.