Digital Asset Management
Tools and platforms for Digital Asset Management (DAM).
- Frame.io - is it really a DAM? Does it work for images as well as videos?
- NB: Frame was acquired by Adobe in 2021
- pics.io - $100/mo starting point
- https://www.iconik.io/
2025-07-04
Comparison table of the digital asset management (DAM) options evaluated by cost, ease of content creation, ease of access & sharing, and feature richness for media (esp. video/image). This is focused on use by non-profits with volunteers, where open access and low cost are priorities.
🗃 Digital Asset Management Tool Comparison
| Tool | Cost (esp. team access) | Ease of Creating New Assets | Access/Sharing (esp. open access) | Media Support (esp. images/video) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canva Pro | ✅ Free for non-profits (source) | ✅ Excellent, built-in templates | ✅ Good; invite by email or link, decent control | ✅ Excellent for images; limited video editing | Strong candidate; already in use |
| GitHub (w/ LFS) | ⚠️ Free but technical; LFS limited/quota | ❌ Not built for asset creation | ⚠️ Complicated for non-technical users | ⚠️ Poor for large video/image handling | Not ideal for this use case |
| Cloudflare R2 + custom frontend | ✅ Very low cost; scales well | ⚠️ Uploading UX poor unless frontend built | ✅ Can be open/public URLs | ✅ Good for serving, but no native editing | Useful for serving content, not managing it |
| Figma | ✅ Free for up to 3 users; Figma for Edu/Nonprofit plans available | ✅ Excellent for design assets | ⚠️ OK sharing, but not ideal for raw media repos | ❌ Poor for video; strong only for design files | Great for collaborative design, not raw asset mgmt |
| Brandfolder | ❌ Expensive; pricing not transparent | ⚠️ Limited creation tools | ✅ Excellent sharing, versioning, usage tracking | ✅ Strong for DAM, incl. video/images | Popular DAM tool; high-end features, not cost-effective |
| Bynder | ❌ Expensive; enterprise-focused | ⚠️ Focused on asset mgmt, not creation | ✅ Granular permissions, good public sharing | ✅ Strong DAM incl. versioning, video, usage rights | Overkill for your use case |
| Google Drive / Shared Drives | ✅ Free (esp. with nonprofit G Suite) | ⚠️ Not built for creation | ✅ Easy link sharing and permissions | ⚠️ Limited preview, no tagging/versioning | Functional, but not a dedicated DAM |
| Notion | ✅ Free for small teams, nonprofit plan available | ⚠️ Image/video editing limited | ✅ Easy sharing, embed possible | ❌ Poor video/image DAM support | More for documentation; not ideal here |
🏁 Recommendation
Primary Recommendation: Canva Pro for Nonprofits
- Already in use by your team.
- Offers excellent value (free), easy collaboration, and strong support for creating, organizing, and sharing assets.
- Integrates branding kits, folders, templates, and design tools in one place.
- Can host image/video libraries, though video editing is limited (basic trimming, audio, etc.).
Supplement with:
- Cloudflare R2 + simple static frontend (e.g., built with Hugo or FlowerShow): for a public-facing library or archive, especially if you want to host lots of images/videos cheaply and make them openly browsable.
- Optionally link to folders in R2 from Canva or Notion.
Raw
Okay, so I want to make a choice about a tool for storing our digital assets like images, videos, brand, I guess some materials, maybe even some kind of content, but that's not really so relevant. It's mainly images and videos and similar. And I'm trying to think of the kind of requirements I have. I think one is that it's easy for others to access, that we can basically give access to others beyond even our core team, to like many people. It's kind of open access. Obviously, adding should be controlled. I want the price to be cheap relatively or even free cost or very close, certainly to add additional team members because we're a non-profit organization with quite a few volunteers. You might even want to be able to kind of have edit access to some extent. And certainly, I want to have free open access to a lot of the materials for download and use. It would be cool if then using those materials to then make new images and assets is quite easy. In terms of the options that I can think of immediately at the top of my head, I'm thinking of like you could just for storage or asset management, you could roll your own. You could use like GitHub and store stuff in there. It's not so great for video. You have to use kind of GitHub LFS. It's kind of been getting quite geeky. But anyway, that's one option I just want to say. You could use R2. You could have a front end to R2 or something like that, which actually also now serves images and video and has a like you could auto embed images and stuff like that, that way. But again, I don't know the uploading experience is limited and things like that, I suspect. Then there's actual tools for this. There's things like Canva. I don't know, Figma potentially. I'm not sure Figma has much digital asset management, but I might be wrong. Yeah, I would imagine Canva really has this and we're already using Canva. I don't know what other tools. I'd like to maybe hear about two or three other tools that are well-known for like digital asset management, brand development, and so on. And I want to have a recommendation. I first of all, maybe kind of create like a little table of these options I'm describing with their kind of evaluation on the cost, on ease of using it to produce new content, the ease of usability, features, and then any other suggestions for tools like this.