Digital Asset Management (DAM) is vital in today’s modern digital age. In a landscape where businesses are continually growing, scaling-up and becoming more digitized, DAM offers a solution to all their video, audio, image, document, and creative file requirements..
In this article, we look at the best digital asset management software, currently available, and weigh up the benefits of each.
What is Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software?
Digital assets are files such as images, videos, photos, documents and other media. In our current business environment, the demand for more media and more information is growing exponentially and that means businesses need a system that can handle all their digital assets, preferably within one simple-to-use location.
DAM software solves this dilemma – and one of the biggest issues facing project, marketing and operations managers across the globe – the overabundance of digital content. DAM lets managers upload, organize, manage, share, store, and track their digital assets efficiently, and all in one place.
What Are the Key Features of Digital Asset Management Software?
DAM allows users to access all of their digital assets – in real time, from anywhere in the world, and all on one device – using innovative upload, search, and sharing capabilities. This significantly improves a company’s ability to keep its digital assets organized and safe. Regular backups and syncing allows users to ensure that all digital assets are not only accessible but also safeguarded against any potential data loss and/or theft.
Project collaboration can be taken to the next level by giving all parties access to any particular asset, to leave comments, make annotations, give feedback or even edit and reformat the files, entirely within the software. The latest file is always available, ensuring that everyone is on the same page, and access to previous versions is simple to find and use.
DAM software lets you set up admins, to ensure that all files are allocated to the correct person, with unique allocation capabilities. It lets you choose which files should be shared with whom, while still letting you keep some files restricted from certain users, depending on their personal access preferences. Files can be archived in smart new ways and current files can be automated and streamlined to improve efficiency and productivity. Workflows can also be set up to help the users in a team collaborate effectively, in harmony and in real-time.
If you are a business that is looking for a complete solution to the problem of managing your digital assets, you could benefit significantly from the implementation of DAM software.
This all-in-one solution lets you ensure your files are safe, easy to access, and available to all your employees, under constant supervision. The full life cycle of your digital assets can be stored, tracked and monitored on one easy to use platform, which will help you to maintain consistency in your brand and operations.
Best 30+ Digital Asset Management Software
We’ve listed the best digital asset management software solutions and described how each one can benefit your business. It’s important to take your time to evaluate this list of digital asset management software and to consider how you might use it, before you decide to implement it into your business.
Papirfly
Papirfly is a platform that offers marketing teams a wide variety of tools to manage their digital assets. The tool makes it easy to share, collect and distribute your assets all in one place.
The DAM system from Papirfly allows you to control the availability and use of assets by setting clear guidelines for usage and reproduction. Additionally, it saves your team time and hassle by making it easy to find and download the assets they need.
With a well structured and updated asset library you can also make sure that only valid and approved assets are used, making it one of the best digital asset management software out there.
DemoUp Cliplister
DemoUp Cliplister is a powerful tool that allows you to say goodbye to the endless headaches of managing your media files. You can effortlessly organize, store, and distribute your digital assets with just a few clicks.
No more digging through folders or wasting time searching for that elusive file. It’s all right there at your fingertips!
But that’s not all.
DemoUp Cliplister takes your digital asset management to the next level. Want to enhance your product listings with stunning videos? Done. Need to seamlessly integrate your assets into various e-commerce platforms? Easy peasy.
DemoUp Cliplister enables the real-time media transfer between over 3,000 brands and 350 retailers worldwide. So you always have the most up-to-date product content everywhere, with just one click.
Canto
Canto is considered the best digital asset management software on the market. It empowers your business through its simple and highly-effective digital asset organization, its find and share capabilities, and by sharing brand assets. Thousands of marketing teams, worldwide, already trust Canto to organize their digital assets and keep them safe.
Canto’s most useful features include its easy tag system, collaboration over a bright and user-friendly interface and its ability to produce reports on the performance of each asset. Canto has over 25 years of experience in delivering its DAM tools to high profile clients, such as NASA, Mitsubishi, Ralph Lauren, and Harvard University.
Wiredrive
Wiredrive is an all-in-one solution for media management and business development. Those who are looking for professional and sophisticated multimedia presentation capabilities will favor Wiredrive over most of the other DAMs available on the market.
Wiredrive makes searching for your digital assets simple, by using filters such as category, date, multiple keywords, and specific tags. Users are able to track the full life cycle of each digital asset, to see how both it is performing and the behavior of those who view it.. It also makes collaboration simple by allowing all parties to access a particular asset under specific access controls, and gives them the ability to comment, approve, edit content and share assets with ease.
Image Relay
Image Relay sets itself apart from other DAMs through its ability to create asset profiles. It lets you create profiles for specific assets, further helping to improve the organization of your files. Image Relay makes it easy to organize vast numbers of files, in one easy-to-use space.
Image Relay Access also simplifies access to files, allowing all departments in your business to find what they need and quickly. This saves a lot of time, while boosting the performance and productivity of your team. No more calling other departments for specific images or videos; you can find them all within seconds, and all within the Image Relay software.
IntelligenceBank
IntelligenceBank is a centralized, shared system that is dedicated to driving content marketing. Its key strength is its simple and user-friendly interface. IntelligenceBank streamlines the process of content collaboration, making it easy for all internal and external parties to access and edit content. Marketing agencies will benefit the most from its strong content capabilities.
Conversations, annotations and access control make managing content simple and efficient. Those managing a large number of images or videos will benefit from IntelligenceBank’s AI tagging system, which develops keywords for its users, thus saving the time spent in manual tagging and letting employees focus more on their key responsibilities. All changes can be synced to an email notification system, so that users are always up to date with the latest changes from anywhere in the world.
Bynder
Many big companies back Bynder, including Spotify, Canon, and Puma. This increasingly popular DAM software is helping businesses automate their workflows, including revisions, and adding annotations and customizable approval paths.
The thing that makes Bynder one of the best digital asset management software is its built-in brand developer tool, which includes templates that let companies create beautiful, creative artwork. It’s also easy to integrate with most popular third-party apps, including Google Analytics, Magento, Contentful and it even includes a number of nifty in-house integrations.
Asset Bank
If you are looking for a solution that is web-based as well as on-premises end-to-end, then Asset Bank is one of the few companies that can help you. Their DAM is full of smart and useful features, such as bulk uploading, duplicate detection, multiple lightboxes, and advanced download – all of which let users customize existing files by changing the formats and modifying the quality. You can then download the customized files as separate files to your computer.
Those in marketing will be overjoyed with Asset Bank’s built-in content management software. It helps you to improve your workflows and to reach new levels of work efficiency throughout your business. Additionally, Asset Bank’s 24/7, self-service access enables you and your colleagues to work effectively from anywhere in the world.
Cloudinary
Aptly named for its successful use of a completely cloud-based system, Cloudinary is an end-to-end DAM software that has been making a buzz recently. Cloudinary uses AI to automate a lot of its key functions, making the user’s life a lot easier. Their AI can tag images by color, faces, or even objects, to help store your files better.
Cloudinary offers a unified approach to creating content and sharing it with your customers in one easy-to-use platform. This is useful in a world where customer’s online behaviors and habits are constantly changing. Cloudinary offers simple management of a complete asset life style, from creation to consumption.
Widen Collective
Widen Collective comes with five integrated applications that cover brand management, video management, and creative operations. These are then integrated with over 30 apps including project management, marketing, and sales tools.
This enterprise-grade DAM software tool is a breath of fresh air when compared to traditional library asset software. It allows users to share their content easily, with anyone of their choosing, across the entire web. It also includes perceptive analytics that allow a business to observe its workflow efficiency.
Portfolio by Extensis
Portfolio by Extensis is sleek, modern and minimalist. This DAM aims to offer its users a simple but powerful interface that does only what it needs to do. Creating, storing, finding, sharing, editing, and publishing of multimedia content are all made very simple in Portfolio.
The software uses Smart Automation,which lets you organize your assets, add keywords, and create workflows with ease. The software is easily customizable to your needs, whether you’re a marketer, designer, or operations manager. ‘Flexible Organization’ increases the software’s usability further by helping you to define catalogs and folders, based on the specific needs of your company.
Panopto
Panopto is the best video digital asset management software out there. It works much like a private version of YouTube, where companies and educational institutes are able to upload, host, and share videos from all over the world. It makes the recording and editing of videos easy and all is made possible through the Panopto software itself. Those with businesses that rely on video can benefit from its supported large-scale live streaming service.
One nifty feature in Panopto is the advanced search tool, which allows you to find videos based on keywords that are spoken or displayed within a video. Type in ‘corporate responsibility’ and you will be given a list of all the videos on your network where someone has either mentioned that keyword or it was displayed in text. This feature is really useful for editors and video makers.
Publitio
Publitio is a cloud-based Media Asset Management system that provides storage, processing, and delivery of images, videos & rich-media files for modern web apps. Publitio acts as CDN that can handle hundreds of millions of requests by design. Lightning-fast loading, availability, and deliverability of media assets, come from their partnerships with the best cloud providers in the industry.
Integration is smooth for any kind of CMS since they support REST API, SDK and recently published Publitio WordPress Plugin as well.
URL-based transformations can make your media assets dynamic. It will allow you to perform image or video resizing, cropping, merging, overlay, watermark, rotations or format conversions. A plethora of features for non-coders and editors that love to organize and bring their media library to the next level. Did we mention that they offer a free plan as well?
Libris DAM
Libris DAM focuses on the management and sharing of photos and videos. This is made possible through Libris DAM’s strong graphics engine, which allows users to change and edit features inside the program itself, such as the photo resolution, file format, color space, and much more. Creative and marketing agencies would benefit significantly from these powerful features.
One particularly nice touch, for businesses handling large numbers of files, is the duplicate deletion feature, making Libris DAM one of the best digital asset management software on the market. You’ll never have to worry about which file is the most up-to-date version ever again.
Another nice touch is the lightbox feature that does not require users to download individual files, but rather it allows them to see each file in real time within the software.
Daminion
Daminion likes to keep things simple. It is easy-to-use and is a powerful piece of digital asset management software. It supports almost all file types and formats, including raster, vector, camera, and raw formats. All file information is kept secure, including copyright and the rights to use in the metadata. You also get the choice between the Daminion cloud version or the Daminion local version.
Your assets are easily stored and managed with quick search tools, including search by tags, operators, advanced search or saved searches. The access controls are also secure, which helps to prevent any accidents or malicious action.
MerlinOne
MerlinOne lets users upload, store, manage, edit, and share assets with ease. Its one-click publishing feature allows you to share assets via social media, CRM, email, and other channels with simplicity.
Users can batch edit their digital assets in the thousands, using MerlinOne’s quick and responsive software, and within any browser, anywhere in the world. Photographers will especially like MerlinOne’s interface and fast bulk edit capabilities. It even has an integration option with Adobe Creative Suite for master editing – all within the software.
Brandfolder
Brandfolder relies on its simplicity to set itself apart from the competition. It is a no thrills DAM platform that lets users easily upload, share, store, analyze, and organize an unlimited number of files – all from one simple location. It also boasts powerful DAM tools that help you organize and scale your business.
A few nice touches from Brandfolder include multiple levels of security, an easy bulk load drag and drop feature, and it’s guest upload capability. Brandfolder simplifies collaboration between all parties, with smart set permissions, while retaining the security of your data assets. You can even set up a portal for exclusive use by your external partners, where they can upload, analyze and comment on works within your projects.
Syndigo Content Experience Hub
Syndigo Content Experience Hub has been created as one simple platform, where retailers, distributors, and manufacturers can access all their specific product data and digital assets. This DAM lets retailers ensure that all their sales channels remain consistent, with the same information, keeping sales teams efficient and working within the company’s best practices.
All of this gives retailers the ability to market their products much faster, while maintaining their company’s brand and high standards.
This is a simple solution to all your content creation, validation, enrichment, syndication, and analysis needs.
iPresent
iPresent offers sales teams turnkey options at an affordable price, allowing you to launch your new sales applications in just a couple of hours. Upload and distribute sales collateral and analyze sales content consumption with ease. Customized and interactive presentations are simple to create – all within the software – letting your sales team go out and win over new clients.
You can access iPresent from anywhere in the world, both online and offline, giving you a superior ability to create sales applications and presentations remotely.
MediaValet
MediaValet is used by the likes of Hard Rock Cafe, Experian, and Playa Hotels & Resorts. These clients all benefit from MediaValet’s cloud-based DAM, which helps their marketing teams manage, collaborate, and distribute their digital assets with ease.
This DAM centralizes your digital assets, including marketing material, video, content, and other media files. You can get immediate access from anywhere in the world, to get the resources your team needs to make them more efficient. MediaValet empowers your sales and channels teams to find the latest versions of all content related to any project currently active.
Brandworkz
Brandworkz is an innovative cloud-based DAM that allows you to simplify and streamline the management of your brand assets. Because marketing agencies are experiencing exponential growth in their digital assets, their need is pressing for a no-fuss content management system, such as Brandworkz.
Brandworkz’s best features include the ability to publish content to any platform with the click of a button – including software editing, brand guidelines for all employees to follow, a nifty logo finder, workflow & annotation tools, and smart reporting & analysis.
pCloud
pCloud is a simple but brilliant content management tool that allows you to store, edit and share your digital assets from anywhere in the world using any device. It’s a great DAM for companies that rely on an international team.
pCloud makes sharing digital assets with members of your team, freelancers, and clients easy, through its special access permission settings. This DAM is super user-friendly with an unbreakable secure virtual drive that helps to protect all of your digital assets. pCloud’s existing clients include giants, such as Coca-Cola, Uber, Twitter, and Nike.
OpenAsset
OpenAsset is perfect for project managers, engineers, architects, and real estate firms. This DAM was specifically designed with project managers in mind, and aims to make their lives easier. Marketing collateral and documents are made simple and the tool supports the creation of documents at scale using InDesign, PowerPoint or Word.
Customizable image specs allow you to use images more efficiently. Keep images ready to use at any time, whether it’s on your website, or in an email or company presentations. OpenAsset is the best digital asset management software for any project manager, as if it offers an unrivaled centralized system that means you’re always ready and able to tackle anything, in any particular project.
Aprimo Digital Asset Management
Aprimo Digital Asset Management gives you easy optimization of all your marketing materials, operation, assets, and content resources. Using this DAM, you can survey the life cycle of all your digital assets, improve their velocity, and get them to market much more quickly.
This DAM supports any file type and gives you in-depth content insights that will realize a better ROI on each digital asset. Sharing content is easy with just the click of a button and you can set specific access controls, so clients can join in on reviews, analysis, feedback, and the approval of content. Aprimo Digital Asset Management’s clients include Myer Corporation and Ubisoft.
CELUM
CELUM is one of the leading cloud software developers out there. Their innovative DAM is best suited to marketers that are looking to regain full control over their digital assets. Trusted by clients, such as 3M, CLAAS, and HABA, CELUM is a one-stop-shop for all your marketing department’s content needs, including storage, uploading, sharing, editing, shared access, and quick search capability.
Managing global brands is made easy with the CELUM Next-Gen digital Asset Management software, which helps you ensure your customer’s demands are met on time. It increases your team’s efficiency, and allows you to integrate content with your entire marketing & eCommerce ecosystem.
Oracle Content and Experience Cloud
The Oracle Content and Experience Cloud is a cloud-based content hub that drives Omni-content management and speeds up content delivery. Its Universal Asset Hub is a centralized platform, offered by Oracle, that keeps all your files – including images, videos, documents, and recordings – all in one safe place. The Omni-channel feature is very useful for marketing teams that need to separate content management from content delivery. This means you can pick your front-end tech, while preserving your back-end.
The nifty “smart authoring” feature lets users benefit from AI tagging on their files, which saves your team members the time they would usually spend doing this manually. The system generates keywords automatically and promises improved personalized experiences.
ResourceSpace
ResourceSpace is a simple web-based DAM that enables the easy organization and sharing of multimedia files. Users have the ability to re-brand the platform to align with their own brand image, which keeps your branding consistent throughout your business. Access controls are practical and easy to set up, allowing content to be viewed, edited, and shared by anyone you allow, including your clients and freelancers.
Searching for a digital asset is fast, with lots of nifty filters that make finding the perfect image or video a simple task. Workflows can be built, shared, and viewed by all parties, which keeps your content projects on track and on time. All of this can be analyzed using the reporting system, which details how well each data asset is performing. What’s more, integrating ResourceSpace with your favorite external applications is simple.
Amplifi
Amplifi is all about accurate, consistent, and accessible data for your team. This DAM helps you create content strategies, predict ROI’s, and define your data strategy and roadmap. Amplifi makes the delivery of content flexible, providing a delivery model that is proven to be successful and that adds maximum potential to each data asset.
Amplifi also makes scaling your business up easier. Increase your MDM footprint across your entire enterprise, and continue to evolve, by allowing Amplifi to update your tools consistently, ensuring you stay on top of the game.
Pics.io
Pics.io is a cloud-based solution for digital asset management. It offers superior management, sharing and delivery of your content, no matter what file type you are working with. Pics.io is built on top of Google Drive, which allows for easy universal sharing and access, back be all the security of Google.
One of the biggest advantages of Pics.io is its seamless integration with other online tools, such as Zapier, Slack, Google Drive, and Adobe CC. This lets your team streamline their content management, to be more efficient and focused on deliverables. Tagging media is made easy, access controls are simple to set, and you can enjoy unlimited storage (limited only by your Google Drive account).
Phraseanet
Phraseanet is an open-source solution for digital asset management that stores, searches, manages, shares, and publishes your content. The major advantage of Phraseanet is its superior search function, “Elasticsearch”, which makes finding your files, among millions of others, a piece of cake.
Phraseanet is minimalist in appearance, simple to use, and works effectively. It’s backed by a huge catalog of great applications and plug-ins that enhance your DAM to the next level and further increase the efficiency of your team.
Tweak
Tweak offers a DAM that has been built to accelerate your brand and leverage your digital assets. It does all the things you would expect from a DAM, including easy storing, editing, tagging, and sharing of your content files. Tweak is well-reviewed by its customers and has won a number of awards for its DAM.
Marketing teams benefit from unlimited user capability, easy integration with brand management & automation, and defined access to expand collaboration on projects. Projects can even be added to a special waiting room for approval, so teams have a much better overview of the status of each piece of content.
BONUS: Filestage
Filestage isn’t a pure digital asset management software but assorts well with all kinds of digital asset management tools. Filestage is a content review and proofing tool which means you’ll never need to collaborate on email again. Its simple user interface is designed to allow superior collaboration through simple usability with real time capacity.
We all know about the complexity involved in sharing revisions of work via emails. It is easy to miss important emails, notes, and revisions, which can waste time and money, not to mention cause agitation among your collaborators. Once implemented in Filestage, new projects are easy to set up by adding the working files, whether they are videos, images or documents. Creatives can upload the work and share it with their colleagues and clients with the click of just one button.
How to Choose the Best Solution for Your Needs
It’s easy to pick a DAM simply based on its popularity or because of the big profile companies that are already using it themselves. However, this is a poor strategy for selecting the best DAM for your business. Before making any decision, you need to focus on the following areas of your business and to check the digital asset management software reviews online. Don’t forget you can always reread the digital asset management software comparisons in our article, above.
Content Creation & Origination
If your company creates its content in-house, you may prefer to use a tightly integrated creative system such as Adobe Suite. If you have your content created for you by a third party, a DAM is preferable for keeping track of and following the life cycle of each digital asset.
Who Uses it?
Creative users will need aDAM that is transparent where the version control is easy and access controls can be set. Casual users will more likely need a simple DAM, which allows them to search for content easily and come in and out whenever they please from anywhere in the world. Content librarians will require a much richer and more complex DAM that gives them superior searchability.
Workflow & Collaboration
It is important to understand how your content will flow through your DAM, so that you can select a DAM with a workflow that suits the speed and capacity of your team. Having a complex workflow is not useful if you don’t need one and can have the actual effect making you less organized.
Think about how your team collaborates, both internally and externally, and evaluate prospective DAM’s to see if they match your style of collaboration. Some teams may want limited collaborative functionality, whereas other teams may want all parties to have free and easy access at all times.
Integration & Delivery
Modern businesses require seamless integration with many different tools. If your business already relies on a number of applications and tools, it’s worth implementing a DAM that integrates with them. Salesforce, Google Suite, InDesign, Adobe Suite, Slack, Magento, and social media platforms – plus many more – can all be integrated with your DAM, depending on which one to choose. Make sure you choose the one that supports all of your current applications and the tools that your team loves.
Making the Decision
When your business is in the process of deciding on a DAM, or you’re presenting your chosen DAM to your managers for consideration, you’ll need to consider all the above points and present the advantages of each. How will this DAM improve efficiency? How will it save the business money? How long will it take to set up? Will it disrupt the business and if so, for how long? What ROI can the company expect and when?
Conclusion
We hope that this guide has guided you towards the best digital asset management software for your company and its content needs.
You’re not alone in this decision – the creation, uploading, sharing, editing, and overall management of files is becoming an increasingly tough job for digitized companies worldwide. However, it’s well worth spending some time, to find the correct piece of DAM for your specific needs.
