Air digital asset management alternatives: Which DAM is best for your brand?

If you’re looking for a digital asset management (DAM) system to help streamline your creative workflow, you’ve probably come across Air, (as they’re spending tonnes of VC-backed investment on questionable brand campaigns). 💅

It’s a popular choice for teams managing content production, offering project management features and a sleek interface.

But here’s the thing—Air is built for creative operations, not for getting your content out into the world. That’s where it falls short for ecommerce brands. If you need to share product images with retailers, deploy marketing assets across multiple channels, or collaborate with external partners, you may find yourself hitting frustrating limitations (unless you upgrade to a pricey plan). 😬

So, what are your options? In this article, we’ll break down Air’s pros and cons, explore alternative DAMs, and compare Air with Dash (that’s us!).  If you’re an ecommerce brand that needs a DAM that goes beyond creative workflows—helping you organise, distribute, and deploy your creative assets—we’ll show you how Dash stacks up.

Let’s dive in. 🚀

What is Air digital asset management? 

Launched in 2017, Air is a digital asset management (DAM) tool designed primarily for creative teams managing content production. It offers a visual, board-based system that helps you organise, review, and collaborate on assets throughout the creative process. While it’s good for helping you manage creative operations, Air lacks the key features of a full DAM system—such as advanced asset distribution and scalable external sharing options. This makes it a better fit for teams focused purely on content creation and approval processes, rather than ecommerce brands needing to deploy assets efficiently across multiple channels and partners.

Air's pros and cons 

To help you weigh up whether Air is the best digital asset management solution for your team, let’s look at some pros and cons. We’ve gathered this intel from online reviews and talking to our own customers who were considering Air alongside Dash as their DAM tool. 

Air's pros 

Here are some of the pros to picking Air for your content operations. 

• Organise assets in multiple views: Air is designed for creative teams managing content production, which is why its organisational structure is built around visual workflows. Instead of a traditional folder-based system, Air lets you organise assets—like images, videos, and audio files—using boards and sub-boards. 
  
  You can switch between Gallery, Table, or Kanban formats, depending on how you like to work. The Kanban view, in particular, is great for managing creative approvals—simply drag and drop assets between boards to track progress at a glance. This project-management-style approach makes sense for creative operations, where teams need to iterate quickly, review content in context, and move assets seamlessly through production stages.
  
  

• Smart search: Like any good DAM, you can search for assets using keywords and search terms. That’s because advanced search functionality automatically adds AI-generated keywords to your digital assets so they’re easier to find. You can use additional custom tags for increased asset visibility. 
  
  💡Dash also offers smart searching. Auto tags make it easy to search for the content of your images. Plus, our customer, RevAir, says it’s like “going shopping in Dash.” 🤩
  
  

• Easy-to-use interface: With Air, you get a visual-asset-first user interface. This translates into clear image previews and a mood board-like grid display. Dash also has a gorgeous user interface. In fact, most of our customers’ DAMs look like beautiful Pinterest feeds 😍 (just take a look at Gozney's home page).

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Air's cons

While Air offers useful features for creative teams, its focus on content production means it lacks some key digital asset management capabilities—especially for ecommerce brands that need to distribute content efficiently. If your team needs a DAM that not only helps organise assets but also makes it easy to share product images with retailers, deploy visuals across marketing channels, and streamline approvals, Air’s workflow may feel limiting. Let’s take a look at where it falls short.‍

• Limited integrations (especially for ecommerce deployment): Air connects with a handful of popular creative tools, but its integrations are still more geared towards creative operations than ecommerce deployment. So if your goal is to get assets live across your channels, including; updating product pages, launching ads, scheduling social, or feeding email marketing campaigns, you may still end up doing a lot of manual downloading from Air and re-uploading elsewhere.
  
  Air’s deeper automation and extensibility options—like Zapier and API access—sit at the Enterprise level, which can make it harder for smaller brands to plug Air neatly into their existing stack without upgrading.
  
  Dash, on the other hand, is built for both creating and deploying creative assets. Integrations are included on every plan (including Shopify), so your team can move faster from 'approved' to 'live' without extra steps.

• ‍Confusing AI roadmap: We know that many brands are adopting AI to help them manage their ecommerce stores, and this is a hot topic in the DAM world. Air has indicated that AI-powered features are in development, but beyond AI tagging, it’s unclear how customers can access these tools. According to their website, AI features—under the name ‘Paige’—are available through a design program, suggesting that only select users (likely on higher-tier plans) can access them.
  
  

• Pricey (once you need a team plan): Air’s entry-level Creator plan is $10/month, which looks super accessible… until you need more than one user. As soon as you’re working as a team, you’re jumping to:
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  • Pro: $500/month for 10 users
  • Business: $900/month for 15 users
  • Enterprise: custom pricing
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  That jump can feel steep for smaller ecommerce brands, especially if you’re scaling fast and more people (or external partners) need access. And while Air’s higher tiers include more flexibility and AI tooling, you’ll want to be sure those upgrades actually map to your day-to-day ecommerce workflows—not just “nice-to-have” creative ops features.Dash keeps pricing more predictable for growing teams. You don’t pay more just because more people need access . Instead, plans come with unlimited users, so you only scale up when you genuinely need more usage (like storage/downloads). No surprise jumps. 🙌
  
  

• External collaboration can get expensive fast: Air does allow you to share assets externally—either by inviting people to boards or sending share links—but access is closely tied to user seats and plan limits.
  
  If you regularly work with photographers, freelancers, agencies, retailers, or press contacts, this can get awkward (and pricey). Inviting people into boards often means managing permissions carefully and, in some cases, paying for more seats.
  
  As one user put it:
  
  “In Air, all user logins are paid seats. Many DAMs include guest accounts in the price that allow external users to view the workspace and download what they need. Air does not have that. We have a lot of media partners that need creatives, and currently, our workaround is to create a bunch of share links and add those to a landing page.”
  
  Air also doesn’t currently position itself around public, branded asset portals — the kind that let partners browse, search, and download approved content on their own, without ongoing admin from your team.
  
  For ecommerce brands working with lots of external partners, that friction adds up.
  
  Dash takes a different approach. You can:

• Share collections of assets pulled from anywhere in your library, which is ideal for team collaboration
• Send share links with expiry dates
• Create branded portals where retailers, press, or distributors can self-serve the latest approved assets — no login required
  
  It’s faster for your partners, and a lot less admin for your team. Scoot down to the Dash vs Air: Features section if you want to see portals in action.

Air digital asset management software alternatives 

Now you've got the scoop on Air's pros and cons, let's look at some of the most popular Air alternatives on the market (or skip this step and download our digital asset management comparison worksheet). ⏬

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1. Dash: The best DAM for ecommerce businesses 

Unlike Air, Dash is built to support both the creation and deployment of your visual content—making it the ideal choice for ecommerce and marketing teams that need to organise, find, and distribute assets quickly.

With AI-powered tagging, smart filters, and high-quality image previews, Dash makes it easy to store and retrieve your content. Whether you’re searching for last season’s campaign shots or the latest product images for your Shopify store, everything is intuitively organised and accessible in seconds.

But Dash doesn’t just help you store content—it helps you get it out into the world, fast. Features like a direct Shopify integration, image cropping, download presets, and public portals mean you can quickly format assets for social media, update product pages, or send visuals to retailers—without extra manual work.

And the best part? Dash offers straightforward, transparent pricing. Plans start at £79/$99 per month, giving you access to all features for unlimited users—so you’re never forced to upgrade just to unlock essential tools. You only pay for extra storage or downloads if you need them, making Dash a cost-effective DAM that scales with your business.

We’ll break down exactly how Dash compares to Air later in this article, but if you want to see it in action, take a look at our public portal and explore how Dash works for yourself.

2. Brandfolder: For enterprise businesses

Brandfolder is a digital asset management (DAM) system designed with enterprise businesses in mind. It offers extensive features that help large teams manage assets, maintain brand consistency, and track usage. For example, you can monitor downloads, see which assets are accessed most frequently, and manage user permissions across multiple teams.

While these features may be useful for large-scale organisations with complex workflows, Brandfolder comes with a steep learning curve and a high price tag. For smaller and mid-sized businesses, it can feel like buying a mansion when you only need a well-designed, functional space.

Dash, on the other hand, offers a scalable and intuitive DAM that works just as well for growing brands as it does for larger teams, without unnecessary complexity or cost.

If you're considering Brandfolder but want a more flexible and cost-effective solution, check out Brandfolder alternatives for a deep look into how this digital asset management system works.

3. Bynder: Also for large organisations 

Like Brandfolder, Bynder is designed for large businesses with big teams and complex workflows. It comes with a long list of features—from creative workflow management to brand templates and multi-language support. That’s great if you’re running a huge corporation with strict brand guidelines, but for DTC brands that need a fast, flexible DAM, it’s probably overkill.

Bynder’s pricing is high, and its asset library feels clunky and outdated. If you’re a small or mid-sized ecommerce brand, you’ll likely find it too complicated and time-consuming for everyday use. Large brands can afford the long onboarding process, but for businesses that need to get content organised and out into the world fast, Bynder just doesn’t make sense.

We've covered more about Bynder's features and alternatives on our blog. 

4. Frontify: For brand management 

Frontify is a brand management tool designed to help teams organize brand assets, create templates, and build brand guidelines. It’s useful for maintaining brand consistency, but its DAM features are limited, making it harder to organize and retrieve assets efficiently.

Frontify isn’t transparent about pricing, and costs are reportedly based on monthly active users, which can make budgeting unpredictable. If you need a full-featured DAM to store, search, and distribute marketing assets, consider alternatives like Dash.

You can learn more in our article about Frontify digital asset management alternatives. 

5. Canto: For mid-sized businesses 

Canto's platform offers advanced features such as metadata management, version control, and user permissions to ensure businesses can manage and control their digital assets effectively.

Although Canto isn't clear about its pricing on its website, third-party sites say the platform costs about $600 per month. We delved into the nuts and bolts of how this digital asset management system works in our Canto alternatives article.

Dash vs. Air: Which DAM is best for ecommerce brands? 

Now we’ve covered Air’s pros and cons, and considered some alternatives, let's dig into how Air stacks up against Dash (that’s us!) We’ll look at how Air and Dash manage various ecommerce workflows, as well as their pricing strategies, so you can be confident you’re picking the best DAM for your brand.

TL;DR: Air vs Dash (Quick comparison)

If you’re short on time, here’s the simple breakdown:

• Best for creative operations and content production workflows: Air
• Best for ecommerce brands that need to distribute and deploy assets fast: Dash
• Best for sharing assets with retailers, press, and external partners: Dash
• Best if you want portals for self-serve asset access: Dash
• Best for internal approval processes, boards, and creative project organisation: Air
• Best value for growing teams (no per-user pricing): Dash

Dash vs. Air: Which will support your workflow the best?

When we speak to new customers, we often hear that they’ve also considered Air as their digital asset management tool. It makes sense—both Dash and Air have similar price points and a design-first approach to the UI. In other words, they both look great.

But that’s where the similarities end. Choosing the right DAM isn’t just about looks—it’s about how well it fits into your workflow. If you’re an ecommerce marketer, brand manager, or designer, it’s important to consider where you need the most support and which tool will actually make your job easier.

To help with this, our Product Manager, Emily, has interviewed marketers and creatives at DTC brands to understand their daily workflows. From this we’ve learnt: 

Air is built for creative teams focused on content production. It uses a board-based system to visually organise assets, making it easy to manage projects from brainstorming to final approval. However, it’s less effective when it comes to deploying assets—meaning if you need to distribute content to retailers, partners, or marketing channels, you may find it limiting.
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Dash, on the other hand, is built for ecommerce brands that need a DAM solution to do more than just approve, store assets and organise files. It helps teams deploy content efficiently with AI-powered search, download presets, public portals, and integrations with Shopify and Hootsuite. That means, once an asset is approved, it’s ready to go live wherever it’s needed.

With this in mind, let’s dig into some specific features in the workflows so you can make an informed decision for your brand. 

Dash vs Air: Features 

To put it simply; Dash’s designed to help ecommerce teams get their visual content out into the wild, fast. It's a single source of truth for all your visual content. Air, on the other hand, is focused on helping teams fine-tune their creative operations. 

Here’s a quick comparison table showing what you get with Dash vs Air. 

Getting assets into your DAM 

For most DTC brands, content creation is a major part of your work. Whether you’re managing product photo shoots or collaborating with influencers on new social content—you need a way to effectively collect all these assets into your DAM. 

Both Air and Dash offer ways for admins and users to easily upload content into your workspace. But you’ll need to take it one step further and offer a way for creators outside of your team to send in new assets. Here’s how each tool compares: 

• In Air, there’s no simple way to let external creators submit files without adding them as users. If a photographer, freelancer, or influencer needs to upload assets, you’ll have to manually add them as a user to your board, which may require paying for an extra seat if you're on a lower-tier plan. If you don’t want to add them as a user, you’ll need to rely on external file-sharing tools like Dropbox or Google Drive as a clunky workaround. For brands working with multiple contributors, this setup adds unnecessary admin work and costs.
  
  
• Unlike Air, Dash makes it easy to collect assets from external creators without paying for extra user seats. With guest upload links, you can invite photographers, influencers, and freelancers to submit content without needing a login.

Here’s how it works:

1. Send a unique upload link to your creator. They can upload assets directly to your Dash workspace, no account required.
2. Assets go to a holding area, where your team can review and approve them before they’re added to your DAM.
3. Once approved, you decide where assets go, selecting the right folders and tagging them for easy retrieval.

This means you stay in control of your content and only approved files make it into your DAM. 🙌

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Organising your assets 

Both Dash and Air allow you to tag and categorise assets using a combination of manual tags, AI-generated auto-tags, and custom fields. However, Dash provides a more structured and scalable approach, making it better suited for ecommerce brands managing large libraries of product and marketing assets. 

How Air organises assets

Air uses boards and sub-boards to organise content, making it easy to group assets visually. For tagging, Air offers:

• AI-generated auto-tags, which scan content and apply relevant keywords.
• Manual tagging, so users can add custom labels.
• Custom fields, allowing teams to categorise assets with additional metadata like project names or campaign details.

This setup is useful for tracking creative projects but can become awkward for teams that need to store and retrieve a high volume of assets—like product images, campaign visuals, and retailer-ready content.

How Dash organises assets

Dash is built for long-term asset management, giving ecommerce teams a structured system to organise and find content quickly. Instead of relying on boards, Dash offers:

• Clear folder structures that let you save assets in multiple locations without duplication  
• AI-powered auto-tagging, automatically detecting relevant keywords.
• Manual tagging, so teams can apply specific terms relevant to their workflows.
• Custom fields, allowing assets to be categorised by product name, SKU, campaign, or retailer.
• Filters and metadata, making it easier to structure assets in a way that scales with your business.

For a glimpse at a real-life Dash, this video shows how RevAir organises their haircare product assets.

Feedback and approval 

Air and Dash make it easy to collaborate on assets and gather feedback from your team.

In Air, you can annotate assets and add timestamps to videos. Team members can leave comments, and notifications ensure the right people are alerted when feedback is added. You can (as we mentioned) also share a ‘board’ publicly, allowing external partners to contribute their comments.

Dash offers a similar workflow with added flexibility. Depending on permissions, team members can upload assets to a holding area. If an image or video asset needs adjustments, you can leave comments, add timestamps, and request an improved version. Once it’s ready, simply click ‘approve’ to make it live in Dash.

Sharing assets 

Sharing assets is a key feature of any DAM platform. While both Air and Dash offer ways to share content with team members and external collaborators, Air’s sharing process can feel restrictive—especially if you need to share a curated selection of assets from different projects.

Sharing in Air

In Air, the primary way to share assets is through boards. These boards act as public spaces where external teams can view and download assets—but there are a few limitations:

• You must manually add each person as a board member to grant access, which is time-consuming if you’re working with multiple partners, retailers or press contacts.
  
  
• If you only want to share a handful of assets with an external stakeholder, you may have to resort to creating multiple share links, leading to a disorganised and inefficient file-sharing process.

For ecommerce teams managing a high volume of product and campaign assets, this setup can become frustrating and inefficient.

Sharing in Dash 

Dash, on the other hand, is designed to make external sharing seamless and scalable. You can share content instantly—without adding users or creating duplicates. Here’s how:

• Collections: Select assets from anywhere in your library and group them into a shareable collection without moving or duplicating files. This is perfect for PR teams, retailers, or agencies who need access to specific content. Plus, team members can collaborate on collections, so you work together to find the best selection of assets for your campaigns. 

• Share links: Generate single or bulk share links to send assets to external teams. You can set expiry dates for time-sensitive campaigns or keep them live indefinitely.
  
  

• Portals: This is one of Dash’s most-loved features! Portals let you create a branded, public-facing asset hub where retailers, press, or partners can browse and download approved assets without needing a login. You can also add a passcode for extra security.

💡 See it in action: BrewDog uses Dash’s portals to give bars and partners worldwide instant access to the latest brand assets. 🍻

Getting content ready for your channels 

One of the biggest perks of digital asset management is the ability to quickly prep images and videos for your marketing channels. It’s something Dash customers love—especially when it comes to resizing images with ease.

In Dash, you can resize images before downloading, choosing from a range of social media presets or setting custom dimensions for web banners, email headers, and more. This saves marketing teams and social media managers loads of time, allowing them to get visuals ready for social without constantly relying on a designer.

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Unfortunately, Air can still feel limiting when it comes to ecommerce-style content deployment. While it includes some basic editing, it’s not built around the kind of channel-ready workflows marketers rely on — like quick resizing for different placements, downloadable presets, and getting multiple formats out the door fast. So you may still find yourself downloading assets and finishing the job in other tools. Not exactly ideal when you’re racing to launch a product campaign and need digital content ready for every channel. 😅

Dash vs Air: Integrations

Bringing a new tool into your tech stack should improve your workflows, not hinder them. That’s why many DAM tools integrate with other SaaS products to help you work more efficiently. 

As we mentioned earlier, Air is focused on creative workflows rather than core DAM. So you’ll find their integrations limiting for your DTC brand. Here’s a list of what Air offers: 
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Air integrations

• Figma 
• Zapier 
• Canva 
• Adobe Premier Pro 
• Slack 
• CDN links
• Slack
• Public API (Enterprise plans only)
• Zapier (Enterprise plans only)

On the other hand, we’ve built Dash to connect with some core ecommerce tools like Shopify and WooCommerce. Here’s a full list of our integrations: 

Dash integrations 

• Shopify
• WooCommerce
• Canva
• Hootsuite 
• Slack 
• Corebook 
• Microsoft Office 
• WordPress
• Adobe Creative Cloud 
• Dropbox and Google Drive

Dash vs Air: feature comparison summary 

In summary, Air is a great tool for creative teams who need features like timestamps, versioning, and visual organisation. But it lacks essential asset deployment features that ecommerce brands rely on. For example, it doesn’t include image presets for resizing content for social media or public portals for easy retailer access.

Dash, on the other hand, is built to help teams move from content creation to content deployment—fast. 🚀

We never lock away features, so you'll get all the Dash features we just mentioned for £79/$99 per month. Speaking of whic… 

Dash vs. Air: Pricing

Like many DAMs on the market, Air is more expensive than Dash, with features locked behind higher-tier plans. If you need access to key capabilities—like external sharing, advanced integrations, or more storage—you’ll likely have to upgrade to an expensive plan or request a custom enterprise quote.

Let’s break it down.

Air’s pricing and plans

Like many DAMs on the market, Air is more expensive than Dash, with features locked behind higher-tier plans. If you need access to key capabilities—like external sharing, advanced integrations, or more storage—you’ll likely have to upgrade to an expensive plan or request a custom enterprise quote.

Let’s break it down.

Air’s pricing and plans

Air uses a tiered pricing model with plans that scale based on storage + number of users. At a glance, the pricing is clearer than it used to be, but for ecommerce teams, the jump between tiers is still… dramatic. 😬

Here’s how Air’s current plans break down:

Creator: $10/month (1 user)

This is Air’s starter plan aimed at individuals. It includes 1 TB of cloud storage, internal comments and annotations, content collection forms, imports from Google Drive/Dropbox/Box, and “Conversational Search” listed as coming soon.

• Pro: $500/month (10 users)
  
  Pro is where Air becomes more of a team tool. You get 3 TB storage, more control over share links (permissions), plus extras like Slack integrations and basic editing.

• Business: $900/month (15 users)
  
  Business is positioned as the AI-powered plan. It includes 5 TB storage, and adds AI features like AI enrichment for docs/images/video, smart tags and AI summaries.  Plus custom object recognition marked as coming soon.

• Enterprise: Custom pricing
  
  Enterprise adds larger-scale controls like custom storage and user limits, libraries for granular access control, SSO (SAML), analytics/reporting, Zapier integration, public API + custom integrations, longer deletion recovery, and dedicated onboarding + customer success support.

What this means in practice

Air’s pricing makes a lot of sense if you’re a creative team that wants a beautiful system for managing production. But for ecommerce brands, you may find that the features you need to scale—like stronger sharing controls, integrations, and AI tooling—sit behind very high monthly tiers.

And because pricing is based around a fixed user count per plan (and then expands from there), costs can rise quickly as soon as more people and external stakeholders need access.

At Dash, we keep the pricing simple and scalable: unlimited users, clear plans, and you only pay more if your needs grow (like storage/downloads), not just because your team got bigger. 🙌

Dash’s pricing and plans

Dash keeps pricing straightforward and, crucially, you don’t pay per user. Every plan includes unlimited users and all integrations, so you’re not forced to upgrade just to connect Shopify (or your other tools). 🙌

Plans scale based on downloads and storage, which tends to be a much fairer way to grow for ecommerce teams:

• Start up: £79/month

250 downloads/month, 250GB storage to start

• Growing brand: £299/month

1000 downloads/month, 1000GB storage to start

• Established brand: £549/month

3000 downloads/month, 3000GB storage to start

• Enterprise: from £999/month

Unlimited downloads/month, 5000GB storage to start

Need more storage? You can add it for £7/month per extra 50GB.

So instead of pricing going up because you added a new marketer, designer, agency, or retail partner, Dash scales based on how much you actually use, while still giving you the integrations you need to deploy assets fast.

Dash vs Air: User interface and experience 

Both Dash and Air really shine here. 

In one Air user's words, “What I like best about Air is its undeniable beauty, both in its design and user interface. Everything is so sleek and visually appealing, making it a pleasure to use.”

Plus, Air doesn't sacrifice design for functionality. It's really easy to use. Boards and images come with clear previews that show off the beauty of your digital files. On top of that, you can add the same asset to separate boards without duplicating it. This way, it's much easier to organise your images, videos and audio files.

Dash measures up to Air easily. It’s designed with big thumbnails and visual tags, so it's really easy for teams to see what they need right away. This is especially important for BrewDog who have lots of external partners browsing their portals. Being able to instantly see the product they need means they don’t need to spend ages trawling through files.   

Need more convincing? This user on G2 (a software comparison site) says it best: 

“Dash has a simple yet modern interface that makes searching for files a breeze. Searching for files is speedy, with minimal loading times, so everything feels easily accessible. The tagging of files is impressive as they're automatically generated on upload, making life easier.” 

Here's a screenshot of what a home page in Dash looks like. Reminds you of a beautiful Pinterest page, right? 😍

New: Dash vs Air: Getting started 

As we’ve mentioned, both Air and Dash have intuitive interfaces, making it easy to get started. But for many brands new to DAM, a little extra support goes a long way—whether that’s setting up folder structures, creating fields for specific product lines, or making the most of key features.

With Air, onboarding support is only available on the Pro or Enterprise plan. If you need a dedicated support manager or help migrating your assets, you’ll have to upgrade to the Enterprise tier.

With Dash, onboarding support is free—no matter what plan you’re on. Because Dash is built for ecommerce brands, our team understands exactly how to structure your DAM so it works for your business. We’ll help you set up fields for your products, organise folders effectively, and ensure your team is set up for success from day one. We also offer free migration support to seamlessly transfer your assets from your old system into your new Dash.

Check out our getting started guide for more information. 

New: Dash vs Air: Customer support  

We’re super proud to say that our team consistently gets high praise for their customer support. As a small business, we know how important it is that our users can prompt answers to their questions so they can get back to their jobs. Take COAT Paints, who sometimes reach out to our customer support team for advice. Abi, the Brand Manager says: 

“The Dash team is incredibly responsive to any queries and always quick to find a solution. In my experience, no other platform has matched the level of customer service that Dash provides.”

The best part? Customer support is free on any Dash plan. Our in-app chat lets you reach our team quickly, and if you need extra help, our customer success managers are always happy to jump on a call to walk you through any issues.

With Air, while Live Chat is available on all plans, you’ll need to upgrade to a higher tier if you want the option to speak to someone face-to-face.

How Air and Dash are funded

Air was founded in 2017 and has raised over $70M in funding. As a VC-backed company, they can offer lower entry pricing, but costs can quickly increase once you’re locked into their software. Plus, they have the cash to splash on questionable marketing campaigns. 👀

Dash, on the other hand, is owned by Bright, a small business with over 20 years of experience in the industry. As a privately-funded, independently-owned company, we focus on building the best possible product—without pressure from shareholders or investors. We also understand how crucial DAM is for growing businesses, which is why we remain committed to transparent, affordable pricing that aligns with the market. 

What's the right DAM software for you? 

Finding the right digital asset management (DAM) tool for your team comes down to a few key factors. Here’s what to consider when weighing up your options:

1. Your use case: what do you need your DAM to do?

Different DAMs serve different purposes, so it’s important to consider who will be using your DAM and what you need it to achieve.

• Air is built for creative operations, helping teams manage content production and approvals. If your main priority is refining creative workflows, it might work for you.
  
  
• Dash, on the other hand, is designed for ecommerce and marketing teams who need to store, organise, and deploy assets efficiently. If you need a DAM that helps get content out into the world—whether that’s retailers, social media, or marketing campaigns—Dash is the better choice.

2. Your budget: what can you afford?

Pricing is a big factor when choosing a DAM.

• Air and Dash offer affordable plans for small and growing businesses, though Air locks key features behind higher-tier plans.
  
  
• Enterprise-focused DAMs like Bynder and Brandfolder come with a high price tag and are often overkill for ecommerce brands that don’t need complex admin tools.
• Dash offers transparent, scalable pricing with all features included, so you’re not forced to upgrade just to unlock essential tools.

3. Onboarding and ease of use: how quickly can you get started?

As a small or mid-sized team, you need a DAM that delivers value fast—not one that takes weeks to implement.

• Dash is plug-and-play, meaning you can start uploading and organising assets right away. If you need help, we offer free onboarding support on all plans to guide you through setup, folder structures, and tagging strategies.
  
  
• Air only provides onboarding support on Pro and Enterprise plans, which means smaller teams may be left figuring things out on their own.

4. Customer support: will you get help when you need it?

A DAM should make your life easier, not create frustrating delays when you need support.

• Air offers live chat support, but if you need face-to-face help or a dedicated success manager, you’ll have to upgrade to a higher-tier plan.
• Dash provides fast, reliable customer support for all users. Our in-app chat connects you to a real person, usually within 10 minutes during UK business hours. If you need more help, we’re happy to jump on a call to walk you through any issues.

Ultimately, the best digital asset management software for you is one that caters to your specific business needs effectively. Say you're looking for a simple way to streamline content operations for your creative team, then Air might be the right choice. 

But if you want a powerful digital asset management platform that will simplify your content workflows and offer core DAM software features at an affordable price, you can't go wrong with Dash. 

Brands like Beavertown already use Dash to streamline creative operations and easily deploy a wide range of relevant assets  — and they're loving it! 

Now, it's your turn. Try Dash for free and join hundreds of growing DTC brands around the world.