Brandkit vs Frontify
Caveat: I am the founder and CEO of Brandkit, so obviously I have a bias here. I've tried to be fair, but I know Brandkit inside and out and only know Frontify from their website, reviews, and feedback from people who've used it. If I've got something wrong, let me know.
Digital Asset Management (also known as DAM) has come a long way from "shared folder with better search." Brands now want one place for assets, guidelines, templates, and approvals — and they want it to actually get used, not just sit there.
Two platforms doing this well, in different ways, are Brandkit and Frontify.
Both go beyond plain DAM into wider brand management. But they're built for different kinds of teams, and different jobs to be done. Here's how they compare.
Brandkit: Built for Brands That Want to Be Shared
Brandkit started life in 1994 and has been rebuilt from the ground up to serve mid to large brands — especially place brands, tourism boards, destination marketing organisations, and government agencies.
Brandkit isn't just a DAM. It's a Brand Toolkit: a DAM, Brand Knowledge Library and CMS combined, designed to help brands get their story and their assets out to external people — partners, journalists, stakeholders, agencies — not just internal staff.
Brandkit is a strong choice if you need to distribute a lot of content to people outside your organisation, especially photography and video.
Key Features:
- Public-facing brand portals. Set up a public (or private) brand portal or toolkit that outsiders can browse and self-serve from, with no login needed.
- Knowledge Library. Alongside the Asset Library (your logos, photos, and video), Brandkit has a Knowledge Library for structured, machine-readable brand content — facts, messaging, guidelines, FAQs — so your brand knowledge is just as easy to find, share, and reuse as your files. It also means your brand content is ready to be picked up correctly by AI tools and search engines.
- Built-in CMS. Brandkit's CMS is tightly wired into the DAM, so pages, stories, and assets sit together and can be personalised.
- Fully customised Brand Portal UI. Every customer gets their own look, their own custom domain, and real flexibility in layout — not a themed template.
- Brand Guidelines. Auto-attaches PDF brand guidelines, or supports fully digital ones, alongside logos and templates.
- Advanced search. Multi-faceted search, configurable filters and tags, plus AI-assisted auto-tagging.
- Role-based permissions. Granular, scalable access control, including restricted access for external partners and SSO.
- Collaboration and access. Self-register, remote access, configurable roles and permissions, automatic licensing and terms acceptance, contribution workflows, and file transfers.
- Integrations. A private API plus Zapier-style middleware, direct integrations for SSO, file ingestion, CRM, and AI, plus native MCP server support — important for being usable by AI assistants and agents, not just human staff.
- Analytics. Built-in content analytics and reports, plus Plausible and Google Analytics integration.
- Enterprise-grade security. Encrypted storage, regular audits, and data residency options.
Frontify: Built for Brand Governance at Scale
Frontify is aimed squarely at mid-market and enterprise companies that need to keep a brand consistent across many teams, regions, and sub-brands. It's less about reaching outsiders and more about controlling how the brand looks and behaves everywhere it shows up internally.
Frontify is a strong choice if your main challenge is governance — keeping dozens of teams, offices, or agencies all using the same logos, templates, and rules, at scale.
Key Features:
- Brand guidelines and DAM in one place. Frontify unifies asset storage with interactive brand guidelines and templates, so assets and rules for using them live together.
- AI-powered organisation. Assets are tagged, given metadata, and checked for duplicates automatically as they come in.
- Editable templates. Non-designers can produce on-brand content from templates without touching the source files.
- Role-based permissions. Granular, scalable access control, including restricted access for external partners and SSO.
- Approval workflows. Structured review and sign-off before content goes out.
- Wide integration list. Native connections to Adobe Creative Cloud, Figma, Sketch, InDesign, Slack, Microsoft Office, and more.
- Enterprise-grade security. Encrypted storage, regular audits, and data residency options.
Choosing What's Right for Your Brand
Brandkit is the better fit if your brand's success depends on getting content into the hands of people outside your organisation — tourism trade partners, media, franchisees, stakeholders — and you want them to find, use, and share the right assets without needing to be trained on your software. It's also a natural fit if you want your DAM, your Knowledge Library, and your website content working as one system, not two — and if you care about your brand's facts and story being correctly understood by AI tools, not just humans.
Frontify is the better fit if your main problem is internal: too many teams, too many regions, too many versions of the logo floating around, and you need one governed system that keeps everyone in line, with strong permissions and approval chains.
Conclusion
Both Brandkit and Frontify go well beyond simple file storage, and both do it well — the right pick depends on who you're really building this for.
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Frontify is a brand governance platform with a strong DAM, built for enterprises that need consistency enforced across many teams and regions. Its templates, permissions, and approval workflows make it a solid pick for large organisations managing a lot of internal complexity.
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Brandkit is a Brand Toolkit with an integrated DAM, Knowledge Library and CMS, built for brands — especially place brands and public sector organisations — that need to equip external partners, stakeholders, and the media with approved content and approved knowledge, through a fully customisable, self-serve public brand portal.
As always, the right answer depends on your organisation, your audience, and how you want your brand to be found and used.
Additional comparisons
Brandkit vs Frontify
Brandkit vs Frontify: Brandkit is a Brand Toolkit (DAM + Knowledge Library + CMS) built for external sharing with public brand portals, a knowledge base, and AI-friendly content for partners and media. Frontify focuses on internal governance at scale, unifying DAM with brand guidelines, templates, and robust approvals for many teams. Choose Brandkit for external distribution and unified brand/story; choose Frontify for internal consistency and governance across large organizations.
