Bynder vs. Frontify: Understanding their differences

DAM Comparison Guide

Bynder

Marketing Team

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Frontify vs. Bynder: Key differences
What should you consider when exploring a new DAM solution?

Bynder vs. Frontify: Key differences

While Bynder is a pure-play DAM, vendors like Frontify focus on solving a different problem. In Frontify’s case, they take a ‘brand guidelines first’ approach; leading with their brand management software, which is geared towards brand creatives and designers based in generally smaller companies.

It should be noted that Bynder is a market-leading DAM according to global market research organization, Forrester; achieving the highest possible score in 10 categories this year, including ‘AI and automation’, ‘scalability and composability’, and ‘strategic creativity.’

What’s more, Bynder ranks as the number-one DAM vendor in the G2 Enterprise Grid® Report for Digital Asset Management, Fall 2024, boasting a 99% customer satisfaction score for two years running.

Let’s now take a look at some different DAM requirements in more detail.

AI

Bynder launched its first AI capability — auto-tagging — back in 2016 to help customers scale their asset management. While Frontify also utilizes auto-tagging, Bynder's powerful AI goes further by providing multiple capabilities for content creation, management, and search.

Bynder’s DAM offers AI-powered search features that allow the user to:

Swiftly extract and tag text within images — for more precise and relevant search results
Easily locate any similar-looking assets
Use AI-generated transcripts to find video and audio files — without metadata
Identify, tag, and find images of specific individuals in your DAM with Face Recognition capabilities
Conduct an image search by using a URL or image file as a reference point

What’s more, Text-in-image search and Speech-to-text search help users manage content by automatically tagging assets with the extracted text or speech, which saves time and money.

For example, by leveraging Bynder’s AI Search capabilities, Siemens Healthineers has already saved €3.5M+ in costs through its ability to reuse assets again and again — rather than continually purchasing new assets externally.

Users can also organize, categorize, and manage high volumes of content at scale by utilizing:

AI-based tagging
Automated metaproperty behaviors
Bynder’s ability to identify duplicate files — helping to keep asset libraries clutter-free

Asset organization and management

Bynder and Frontify approach asset organization and management in different ways. Frontify (and other Frontify alternatives) operate a folder structure, which might be easier to set up, but ultimately leads to a rigid, less scalable storage system that’s harder to manage.

On the other hand, Bynder uses taxonomy; a highly flexible, scalable, and efficient way of storing, searching, and locating digital assets.

In a folder structure, each asset must live in one specific folder within a set structure, which limits its discoverability. However, a taxonomic structure allows for the classification of multiple asset attributes (metadata, categories, tags) without the restrictions of a hierarchical structure.

In a taxonomic structure, searches are more powerful and results are more precise because searches can be based on multiple criteria.

In contrast, a folder-based search is generally limited to file names, and searches take far longer and become less effective as folder numbers grow. Users also tend to adopt time-consuming ‘workaround’ habits with folders, such as memorizing folder paths.

Overall, taxonomy is the more powerful, future-proof approach for managing digital assets; and is particularly suited to organizations that are growing and need ease of scalability.

Brand governance

A solution with built-in brand guidelines helps enforce brand consistency and ensures that all assets adhere to established brand standards. While Frontify can help users achieve levels of brand consistency through its design templates and customizable guidelines, it offers far fewer customization options compared to Bynder.

By contrast, Bynder provides extensive customization options and emphasizes brand governance across different channels and assets. One way Bynder does this is through its usage rights and user permissions capabilities — they help provide a solid governance framework for users and can scale with customers.

Bynder also offers Content Experiences (CX) for User Community (previously ‘Brand Guidelines’), which empowers brands to align the use of digital assets across multiple teams and fully utilize only previously approved DAM assets.

Content operations reimagined

With Bynder, brands can transform their content operations using AI-enhanced content creation tools, automated workflows, and customizable templates. By streamlining production and eliminating content silos, Bynder enables faster collaboration and ensures consistent, on-brand content delivery. This way, teams can scale content creation, accelerate time-to-market, and maximize ROI by enhancing content reuse.

Bynder offers two robust solutions for scaling digital content creation, Studio and Content Workflow. Studio empowers users to quickly create on-brand content—images, videos, or GIFs—using brand-approved templates. By automating repetitive tasks through batch creation and resizing, Studio enables teams to scale content production without sacrificing quality. Content Workflow, on the other hand, facilitates collaboration, reduces production time, and enables structured content creation at scale. With AI-enhanced written content creation, teams can create high-quality content faster while ensuring a secure and organized process.

To streamline workflows, Bynder's Asset Workflow solution manages digital assets from ideation to delivery. This feature allows teams to brief, proof, and approve assets through configurable workflows, ensuring compliance and brand consistency. Approved content is automatically stored within the content library and accessible across the organization when and where needed.

By contrast, Frontify’s product includes a native workflow ability for content creation activities, but other essential aspects of content operations would require a third-party integration and additional effort.

Distribution

Using the Bynder DAM as the foundation, Bynder’s Content Experiences (CX) for Omnichannel enables brands to deliver targeted, optimized content for downstream platforms; driving better digital content experiences, engagement levels, and conversion rates.

CX for Omnichannel enables users to accelerate their content’s time to market by speeding up the image optimization process, automating traditionally manual tasks (such as image background removal), and delivering the right format, to the right channel, at the right time.

Composability

Bynder currently provides access to over 100 integrations, and its open and composable architecture can seamlessly plug into many other best-of-breed technologies.

Integrating Bynder with the systems and platforms your organization already uses (e.g. PIM, CRM, etc.) provides yet another way to level up your martech stack.

Frontify's integration ecosystem is limited to design, creative, CMS, and productivity, with no PIM, eCommerce, or analytics integration capability.

Customer onboarding and support

Unlike Frontify and some Frontify alternatives, Bynder has an in-house onboarding service with over 125+ onboarding staff to ensure that new customers hit the ground running; with a different customer-dedicated Bynder team providing specialist support depending on their onboarding phase.

First, a dedicated team sets up your DAM. Once launched, the customer success team steps in to offer consultative guidance. This includes providing updates on any new Bynder DAM innovations.

The ongoing customer support team provides fast, knowledgeable, personalized assistance via the client portal — whenever you need it.

As your business grows, you can keep relying on our customer-dedicated support. They’ll be on hand to advise and guide you through an efficient scale-up process for your marketing operations.

What should you consider when exploring a new DAM solution?

A large part of selecting the right DAM solution comes down to being able to identify the specific capabilities that will align perfectly with your organization’s needs.

Download Bynder’s DAM Comparison Guide

We suggest that you conduct your vendor assessment while paying close attention to these key factors:

Security: Prioritize a platform that embodies robust security measures and can demonstrate that it can safeguard your valuable digital assets. Look for features like encryption, compliance certifications, secure file-sharing, and access controls to guarantee data protection.

Granular control over access and usage rights means that sensitive assets are protected and users are granted the appropriate permissions for their roles.
User-friendliness: Opt for a DAM solution that aligns with the intended end users’ proficiency levels. An intuitive interface will automatically enhance adoption levels and ensure efficient collaboration across your organization.
Composability: A DAM that has an open, composable architecture is more likely to seamlessly integrate with the tools in your existing martech stack. This makes for a smoother digital transformation and helps maximize performance and utilization levels.
In addition, try to look ahead regarding any integrations that your team may need in the coming years. Be sure to spend some time exploring each vendor’s integration libraries to see whether they offer the plug-in applications you may need to future-proof your organization’s marketing operations.
Customization: Assess and compare how configurable each DAM vendor’s offering is. A platform that offers many customization options allows better tailoring to meet the specific needs of your brand. For example, the ability to create custom users and roles within workflows can facilitate a more cohesive user experience.
Organization and search capabilities: Look for a DAM that allows users to confidently and quickly locate and access the assets they need by harnessing powerful AI-driven search functions.

Also, check how the DAM facilitates the practice of ‘version control.’ You want to make sure that your team is always accessing the latest, most accurate versions of digital assets to prevent errors and maintain brand consistency.
Collaboration: Consider whether the DAM solution will ensure seamless collaboration across your teams. For example, does it offer any kind of moderation feature to help provide control over the quality of assets? Is there robust user permissioning? And do workflows incorporate review and approval steps to help teams collaborate more efficiently?