The best Frontify alternatives for your growing business

If you're evaluating Frontify, you're likely at a point where managing brand assets has become a real operational challenge. More product lines, more channels, more people needing access to the right content at the right time.

Frontify is a solid choice for brand managers who need a central place to manage guidelines and templates. But depending on how your team works, and how quickly you're growing , a dedicated digital asset management (DAM) tool may serve you better.

In this article, we'll walk through what Frontify does well, where its limitations tend to surface for ecommerce teams, and a handful of DAM alternatives worth comparing before you make a decision.

What is Frontify digital asset management?

Frontify is a cloud-based brand management platform that helps teams organise and maintain their brand assets from one central location. It's built primarily for brand managers who need to ensure  brand consistency.

Where Frontify differs from a traditional DAM is in its focus. It's designed around brand governance, making sure your visual identity stays consistent as your team grows. That makes it a strong fit for brand and marketing teams who are primarily working with brand assets.

If your needs extend beyond that like managing large volumes of product images, sharing assets with retailers, or deploying content directly to your ecommerce channels,  you'll likely find yourself looking for additional tools to fill the gaps.

Frontify’s pros and cons 

First, let's see what people love (and don't love) about Frontify.

Frontify pros

Brand guidelines

Frontify's brand guidelines are one of its genuine strengths. You can build interactive, web-based guidelines that are easy to update and share with teams and agencies. Unlike a static PDF, they stay live — any changes you make are immediately visible wherever they're shared. Frontify has also added an AI-powered Brand Assistant, which helps teams apply brand rules in context rather than just looking them up.

Brand templates

You can create digital, print, and video templates that give team members a solid starting point for producing on-brand content. If you're managing lots of contributors — or working regularly with external agencies — this is a practical way to ensure consistency without reviewing every asset manually.

Integrations

Frontify connects with a range of design and collaboration tools including Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office, and Slack, and offers an open API for custom integrations. There are around 50 integrations in total, covering most creative and workflow tools you'd expect.

Frontify cons 

Built primarily for brand governance

Frontify is designed around brand consistency — it works well when the main job is managing guidelines, templates, and approved assets. If your team's day-to-day involves moving large volumes of product images, campaign assets, and videos through a busy marketing workflow, you may find it starts to feel limiting. As one reviewer put it: "The brand management features are over-built for our needs; we pay for those features but don't use them at all."

Ecommerce tool compatibility is limited

Frontify's integrations lean heavily towards design and enterprise tools. For ecommerce teams, the list of native connections to the platforms they actually use day-to-day is fairly thin. If your operations depend on pushing assets directly into your storefront or syncing content across marketing channels, it's worth checking whether Frontify covers those workflows before committing — or whether you'd need to piece that together separately.

Image cropping and preparation

Getting assets ready for different channels is still a friction point. Frontify doesn't let you define exact crop areas for specific output sizes, which means teams often end up using a separate tool to finish the job. For anyone managing a large product catalogue, that's a workflow worth thinking about.

Lack of pricing transparency

Frontify doesn't publish fixed pricing, saying this allows them to tailor packages to each customer's needs. Frontify That's a reasonable approach for enterprise deals, but for teams trying to compare tools early in their decision-making, it means you'll need to go through a sales conversation before you can get a number. It's also worth noting that external agencies and freelancers count towards your monthly active user total Frontify — so if you regularly work with outside partners, your costs could be higher than initially expected.

The best Frontify alternatives 

If you're looking for a digital asset management tool for your brand, here are a few options worth checking out. 

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1. Dash: For small and growing ecommerce brands 

Dash is a digital asset management tool for ecommerce and DTC brands. It's designed around the day-to-day reality of marketing teams, and is a single source of truth for product images, campaign assets, and videos — and needing to get them to the right people quickly.

One standout feature for ecommerce teams is the native Shopify integration. You can bulk update product images directly from Dash to your Shopify store, cutting out the manual process of downloading assets and re-uploading them one by one. For brands managing large or frequently updated product catalogues, that's a meaningful time saving.

Other key features include AI-powered image search, custom tags, portals for sharing assets with retailers and external partners, guest upload links for freelancers and photographers, and a broad integration library covering ecommerce and marketing tools.

Pricing starts at £79/$99 per month and includes all features and unlimited users. You only pay more if you need additional storage or downloads, making it straightforward to budget for as you grow. You can try it free for 14 days without speaking to sales.

2. Canto: For mid-sized businesses

Canto is a digital asset management system designed to help businesses store, search, organise, and share digital content. It's a popular choice for large enterprises that need a structured way to manage brand assets across multiple teams and external partners.

It has some solid features including detailed reporting, which lets you compare assets and view top search terms across your library, which is useful for large teams spread across multiple markets. There's also a branding suite that lets you build a style guide directly from within the DAM.

That said, customer reviews flag a clunky interface and a significant learning curve. It also lacks some ecommerce-specific features, and pricing isn't transparent. However we recently got information from a brand reseraching DAM software that Canto wanted to charge them £9000 per year for 1TB of storage.

Read about Canto alternatives to see how this DAM compares to Dash. 

3. Air: For content operations

Think of Air as a project management tool for creatives. Air makes it easy for your team to collaborate as they work on creative assets. You get Kanban workflows, boards instead of folders, and a pretty user interface that makes your content shine. 

However, Air drops the ball when it comes to deploying content. It has limited integrations, and you'll likely have to download and re-upload assets to move them from Air to another platform. Also, many of its features, like the Zapier integration, are price-locked, so you'll need to pay more to access them — unlike what you get with Dash. 

Check out how Air digital asset management compares with Dash. 

4. Bynder: For large businesses 

Bynder is a digital asset management system that caters to enterprise-level businesses. It offers a wide range of features, including creative workflow management, brand templates, and analytics. 

Bynder's interface is easy to use and provides a central hub for managing all of your digital assets. However, it's pretty expensive, with pricing starting at $450 per month, making it unaffordable for small businesses. 

If you want to learn more about Bynder, look at some Bynder alternatives to see how it stacks up against other DAM tools.

5. Brandfolder: Also for enterprise businesses 

Like Bynder, Brandfolder helps enterprise businesses maintain consistent visuals across all channels so that everyone has access to the latest versions of their brand assets.

Brandfolder isn't transparent with its pricing. But a little birdie says it costs as much as $1,600 per feature. That might not be a substantial investment for a large business, but it's definitely heavy on the budget for smaller ecommerce brands. 

Find Brandfolder alternatives to see how its features stack up against other DAMs.  

6. Image Relay: Alternative to Canto for mid-sized businesses 

Image Relay combines product information management with core digital asset management features like a searchable library, custom branding, metadata editing, automatic file conversion, and version control. It also offers integrations with popular tools such as Adobe Creative Suite, Dropbox, and Slack. 

However, Image Relay's pricing can be quite high, with plans starting at $300 per month for basic features. To access more advanced features, you'll need to pay more and even book a demo with the team for its Market Delivery Platform. 

That said, it may be worth exploring if you have a large ecommerce marketplace with thousands of products. 

Discover Image Relay alternatives for more information about how this platform works. 

Dash vs Frontify: Features

Here are some more ways Dash and Frontify features compare to each other. 

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A digital asset management tool should give you all you need to organise, search and share your brand’s digital assets and marketing materials. As you can see from the table above, Frontify lacks many of these core features. Let’s take a look in more detail. 

‍Cropping and resizing images

Being able to crop and resize images for different marketing channels is a core part of any DAM workflow. In Frontify, admins can set up predefined download sizes and enable custom crop areas at a library level, which team members can then use when downloading assets. It's worth noting this needs to be configured by an admin first, so it's not available out of the box.

Dash handles this slightly differently. You can create custom crop presets that are available to the whole team without any additional setup, and adjust the crop area manually so nothing gets cut off. For teams regularly preparing assets for multiple channels — social, email, web — having those presets ready to go from day one saves a few extra steps.

Neither tool requires you to leave the platform to resize assets, which is the most important thing. The difference is mainly in how much configuration is needed to get there.

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You can create custom sizes and your own preset crops —ideal for using on your website. And your team members can then use these crops next time they download an image. The quicker you can crop assets and get them ready for your channels - the quicker you can launch your marketing campaigns. 

‍Sharing content with your resellers 

If you're working with a network of retailers or resellers, giving them reliable access to up-to-date assets is one of the more operationally fiddly parts of brand management.

Frontify handles this through invite links to specific folders, projects, or libraries, with options for password protection and access expiry. One thing to be aware of is that partners need to be invited individually to each guideline, project, or library they need access to and there's no way to grant access to everything in one go. For a small number of partners that's manageable, but as your retailer network grows it can become time-consuming to maintain.

Dash approaches this through portals. These are dedicated spaces you can set up for individual retailers, each showing only the folders and assets relevant to them. When you add new content to those folders, the portal updates automatically, so partners always have access to the latest versions without you having to resend anything. You can also add a personal message to each portal, which is a small touch that goes a long way with external partners.

If you're managing a handful of retail relationships, Frontify's shared links will probably do the job. If you're scaling that network, the portal approach tends to hold up better as the number of partners grows.

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🥰 Read how ecommerce brands, Haws, use portals to help 100+ retailers sell their products. 

‍Interactive brand guidelines 

Brand guidelines are where Frontify is genuinely strong. You can build interactive, web-based guidelines that cover everything from logo usage and typography to tone of voice and print templates. They stay live and editable, so any updates are immediately reflected wherever they're shared — with internal teams, agencies, or external partners. Frontify has also added an AI-powered Brand Assistant that helps teams apply brand rules contextually, rather than just looking them up.

For brands that need a serious, scalable brand governance tool, Frontify is a credible option here.

Dash takes a different approach. Rather than building brand guidelines natively, it integrates with Corebook° — a dedicated brand book tool that sits alongside your DAM. You build your guidelines in Corebook, pulling assets directly from Dash, and share them as a live, editable brand book. It's a slightly different workflow, but the end result is comparable — a branded, interactive set of guidelines that stays up to date as your assets change.

The honest difference is that if brand governance is your primary need, Frontify's native offering is more fully featured. If you need brand guidelines alongside a broader set of DAM capabilities, the Dash and Corebook combination covers both without compromise.

Dash vs Frontify: Pricing

Cost is one of the most important considerations for choosing a DAM, especially when you're a growing brand with a limited budget. 

Frontify isn't transparent about its pricing, which is a pretty common issue in the DAM space. You'll need to contact the sales team for a quote to know how much you'll be paying. 

However, you can try the platform for free for 30 days to see if it works for you before making any financial commitment. While this is supposed to help you make a decision quickly, it can be counterproductive. Imagine spending so much time setting up and loving Frontify only to discover you can't afford it at the end of the day — that's a lot of time wasted! 

Also, G2 reviews suggest that the platform is expensive. They say the price is based on the number of monthly active users, which can be complex. 

‍“The complexity of the product makes it hard to get an overview of the price model. And it is hard to divide it by the size of the company since other aspects will come into consideration as well.” 

How much does Dash cost?

We know how important cost is for small and growing businesses, so we’re very upfront about Dash’s pricing. We want you to know how much you’ll be spending with Dash so you can make an informed decision for your business. 

Dash offers four pricing plans starting at £79/$109 per month. Each plan gives you access to all of Dash's features for unlimited users. That way, you don't have to upgrade to a higher tier to access new features. You only pay more if you need more storage or want to increase your monthly downloads. 

This pricing structure works well for our customers. They say: “Dash’s pricing model is very clear and much more flexible and competitive than other options available.”

🤑 Check out our article to see how much DAM return on investment you’ll get with Dash. 

Dash vs Frontify: User experience 

A good DAM can be the difference between quickly uploading new product images to your Shopify store and spending hours searching for the latest campaign assets on the morning of an important product launch. 

Frontify user experience

As a growing ecommerce business, the last thing you want is to be stuck with a digital asset management tool that's hard to use. Unfortunately, that could be what you'll experience if you choose Frontify. 

Reviews suggest that the user experience is clunky and gets more complicated as you explore additional features. For example, this user struggled to search for stored digital assets because Frontify counts empty folders as items. And this one couldn’t set up permissions to restrict content access. 

Frontify can have a steep learning curve, especially for users who aren’t tech-savvy. It takes time to get the hang of the platform, so you might not reap the benefits of a new DAM for a while. This user’s experience explains it best. 

‍“There was a learning curve in using Frontify, but it worked well after some trial and error. We did have training initially for the team, plus there were articles and some videos on how to use the platform that helped. People with less technical capabilities should get their platform customised by an external party.”

Dash user experience

Let’s see how Dash compares. 

Growing ecommerce businesses can't afford to waste time with a complex digital asset management tool. That's why we made Dash really easy to set up and use.

The quick onboarding process means you’ll be up and running quickly. You can search for the content of your images which makes assets easier to find. You also get beautiful image previews — like the one below —instead of boring folder thumbnails.

Take a look at what one of our customers, Forthglade, has to say about using our DAM software: 

‍“For the cost, Dash is really competitive. We’ve got people in the business who haven’t used a DAM system before, so Dash’s simple usability and UX were major selling points. It meant it was really easy to get everyone using the system quickly and effectively.”

Dash vs Frontify: Integrations

Integrations are worth looking at carefully, because the value of a DAM isn't just in storing assets — it's in how easily those assets can move into the tools your team actually uses day to day.

Frontify

Frontify's integration library is broad, with around 50 connections covering design, enterprise, and creative collaboration tools. Highlights include Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office, and Slack, along with an open API for custom integrations. Frontify It's a strong list if your workflow is primarily design-led or enterprise-focused.

Where it's thinner is on the ecommerce side. There's no native connection to storefront or social publishing tools, so teams that need to move product images into their store listings or push content to marketing channels will likely need to handle those steps separately — either manually or through a custom API build.

Dash

Dash has native integrations across ecommerce, design, marketing, storage, and workflow — including Shopify, WooCommerce, Canva, Figma, Adobe tools, Google Drive, Dropbox, Hootsuite, WordPress, Slack, and Zapier. Frontify All integrations are included across all plans, with the exception of Adobe CC and Microsoft Office which require a LinkrUI subscription to connect. The Brand Identity

The Shopify and WooCommerce integrations let you pull product images directly into store listings without downloading and re-uploading files. Frontify The Hootsuite integration lets you drop assets directly into scheduled social posts G2, and Zapier opens up connections to thousands of additional apps without any custom development. The Brand Identity

The practical difference for ecommerce teams is that Dash is built around the tools used to actually deploy content, not just create and store it. Frontify covers the creative stack well; Dash covers the full journey from asset to channel.

How to pick the right digital asset management software for your brand

There are a couple of things to consider as you choose a DAM for your ecommerce business. 

• Your needs: Whether you pick Frontify or Dash will depend on your needs. If you need a way to manage your brand assets and build templates from a central location, Frontify could be the winner. But, if you need a DAM system that lets you search for assets, share with retailers and deploy to your marketing channels, you’re better off with Dash. 

• Feature set: Look for features that cater to the unique needs of your ecommerce business. Our DTC customers find these Dash features really valuable:  

• Portals: For sharing up-to-date product images and other digital assets with people outside your team. 

• Guest uploads: Where freelance videographers, designers, and photographers can submit visual assets directly to your DAM for approval — without having a Dash account. 

• Online brand guidelines: No more PDFs. Create editable brand guidelines with our Corebook integration and share them with your team in one click. 

• Your budget: Large brands with generous budgets can splurge thousands of dollars on a DAM tool. But if you have a limited budget, you'll need to choose a digital asset management software solution that gives you the best value for money. Starting from  £79/$1399 per month, Dash is an affordable option.

• Learning curve: The last thing you want is to spend weeks learning how a DAM tool works instead of doing things that make money for your business. That's why you need a plug-and-play digital asset management platform that's up and running quickly. 

• Expertise: You can choose a complex DAM if you have a tech-savvy team. If not, choose a plug-and-play DAM software tool that everyone on your team can understand and use easily. 

If you're looking for a brand management tool, Frontify might be worth exploring. But if you need affordable DAM software that just works, you should definitely check out Dash 😍. Don’t just take our word for it — here’s a glowing review from one of our customers: 

‍“If you just want to store, organize, and quickly retrieve your assets, Dash does that quite nicely. Once deployed, onboarding is incredibly easy. You know how the iOS on your phone is intuitive? That's very much the case with Dash. Getting up and running takes very little time. The system is flexible, so it grows with you as your asset library grows. Finding and retrieving assets is about as easy and seamless as it gets.”

That sums it up. Try Dash for free , and let us know what you think.