Brandfolder vs Air: Which DAM should you choose for your ecommerce store?

If you’re managing a fast-moving ecommerce store, you’ve probably come across both Air and Brandfolder in your search for a digital asset management (DAM) system. They each claim to help you stay on top of your visual content, but when you dig a little deeper, their differences (and limitations) become clear.

But where does that leave your brand? In this article, we’ll compare Air and Brandfolder across core DAM features—and show you how Dash stacks up if you’re after something purpose-built for growing ecommerce businesses.

Brandfolder vs Air: TLDR

Trying to decide between Brandfolder and Air for your digital asset management needs? This summary breaks down how each tool stacks up—plus why Dash might be the better fit for your brand.

Brandfolder is a heavyweight DAM built for enterprise businesses. It’s packed with advanced features and workflow tools, but it comes with enterprise-level complexity and pricing to match. Plans start from around $1,600/month, which is overkill if you don’t need everything on offer.

Air sits at the other end of the spectrum. It’s more of a creative collaboration tool than a fully-fledged DAM. With plans starting at $250/month, it’s more affordable—but still lacks key features for deploying content to ecommerce stores or external partners.

Dash, on the other hand, is built specifically for growing ecommerce brands. You’ll get everything you need to organise, share, and publish content—without the enterprise bloat. Pricing starts at just £99/$139 per month and includes all features and unlimited users. If you're looking for a DAM that fits your budget and your workflows, Dash might be just what you’re looking for. ✨

What is Brandfolder digital asset management software?

Brandfolder is an enterprise digital asset management (DAM) platform used by large organisations like MasterCard and Autodesk. It’s built for businesses managing high volumes of assets across multiple departments, regions and stakeholders. These global teams often need layered permissions and complex approval chains.

It comes with advanced features like AI-powered tagging, detailed usage analytics, and integrations with over 100 third-party tools. If you’re running big, multi-team campaigns and need everything tightly structured, Brandfolder might offer what you’re looking for.

But Brandfolder’s enterprise focus comes at a price. It’s not just expensive (plans start from around $1,600 per month), it’s also packed with features that smaller ecommerce brands may never use. For growing businesses looking for speed, simplicity, and affordability, that level of complexity can get in the way.

If you need a DAM that helps you organise, share and publish content fast—without the enterprise bloat—it might be worth exploring a tool like Dash instead.

What is Air? 

Air describes itself as a creative operations tool for growing teams. And while it ticks some digital asset management (DAM) boxes, it’s not quite the full package—especially if you’re running an ecommerce brand.

At first glance, Air feels like a regular DAM. You can upload and organise your images, videos and audio files. And you can collaborate with your team using comments, time-stamped feedback, and Kanban-style boards. 

That makes it handy for early-stage teams managing lots of creative work. But when it comes to actually deploying content—say, to your Shopify store, marketing channels, or external partners—Air starts to show its limitations.

Let’s say you’ve got new product shots in Air. To get them into your store, you’ll need to manually download and reupload them. Doing that a few times might be fine—but doing it every time you launch a product? That adds up quickly.

With Dash, you can connect directly to Shopify, WooCommerce, and more. That means you can crop, resize, and drop product imagery into your listings right from your DAM—no downloading required. It’s built for speed, accuracy, and ecommerce workflows.

Want to dig deeper? Check out our Air alternatives article for a side-by-side look at how Air stacks up against Dash.

Brandfolder vs Air: Features

Now that you have a solid overview of these tools, let's see how their features compare. We also see how Dash, our ecommerce DAM, measures up to them. 

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Here’s some more detail about a few features that are key for ecommerce brands looking for a DAM tool: 

1. Guest uploads

Say you’re running a user-generated content campaign and need to receive images or videos from your customers. Instead of doing this via Drive or email, you can create a guest upload folder in Brandfolder and share the link with creators to submit assets directly to your DAM. It saves the time you would have spent downloading and re-uploading assets into your DAM manually. 

With Air, you’ll need to invite your customers to specific boards as ‘guests’ before they can share any images or videos with you. But here’s the catch: this feature is only available for Pro and Enterprise users. 

Dash, on the other hand, gives you all features for all users regardless of your plan, including guest uploads. You'll be able to review submissions and leave any comments before adding approved assets to your Dash. This way, you can automatically collect all your visual content in one place but still have full control over what's actually uploaded and used for your campaigns.  

2. Portals 

A portal is a public-facing version of your DAM. You can share it with freelancers, retail partners or any regular collaborators who need access to your visual assets. Here, they’ll be able to search for what they need for your marketing campaigns directly, instead of asking you to send images as email attachments or share file links.

Branfolder offers portals ideal for setting up media kits, onboarding new team members and sharing event graphics. It’s unclear on their website whether portals come as the core package or if you’ll need to upgrade to a higher priced plan. 

Air doesn’t have portals, but you can add assets to a board and share it with any freelancers or partners. But remember, you need a Pro or Enterprise plan to pull this off. 

Dash, on the other hand, offers portals on every price plan. You’ll be able to create as many portals as you like, add a welcome message for your partners and control what assets they’re able to see. This works by selecting which folders they can view from your primary Dash. So if you add or remove content, it’ll update it in the portal. Your partners will be able to search for content using keywords and tags (just like a regular account) and they can crop and resize assets before they download. 

👉 Read how BrewDog uses Dash portals to share product images and content with bars and partners around the world. 

3. Boards 

Air includes boards, and there’s a good reason for that — it’s built for creative workflows. If you’re working on an ecommerce campaign, these Kanban-style boards help you track what’s in progress, what’s ready for review, and what’s been signed off.

Brandfolder doesn’t offer boards. That’s because focuses on asset storage and usage rather than the creative production side of things.
 

Dash doesn’t offer boards either — and that’s intentional. We're not trying to replace your project management tool. Instead, Dash is designed to be the place where your finalised assets live. It’s the central hub for organising, managing, and sharing visual content that’s ready to go live — whether that’s on your website, social channels, or marketplace listings.

That said, Dash still supports collaboration. You can leave comments directly on assets to give feedback to your team or external contributors. If you’re working with video content, you can also add time-stamped comments to highlight specific sections. Once an asset is signed off, Dash helps you keep it organised and easy to find, so your team can move fast when it’s time to launch.

A third option: How Dash’s features compare to Brandfolder and Air 

We’ve covered some key features that ecommerce brands need in a digital asset management system. But, as a DAM specifically designed for DTC brands, Dash offers lots of extra features you’ll find useful. Here are some highlights:  

• Shopify and WooCommerce integrations: Dash integrates directly with Shopify and WooCommerce. This allows you to access and use your product shots and other visual assets right in your store's backend — no more downloading and reuploading images to your ecommerce platform. 

• Image presets: You can preset image sizes for different social channels — like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. With this, you don't have to manually crop new images when it's time to use them. 

• AI auto-tagging: When you add an image to Dash, our AI scans and adds relevant tags to it — in addition to your custom tags — so it's easy to find when needed. 

And if you forget the exact tags or file name, you can search for assets in Dash based on their content  — for example, a chair or woman in a red dress. No need to worry about remembering what you saved the image as. 

Want more? Check out the full breakdown of Dash's digital asset management features.

Brandfolder vs Air: Pricing 

When you're choosing a digital asset management system, pricing matters. And not just the headline number—you need to look at what’s actually included, how pricing scales as your team grows, and whether you’ll be hit with surprise add-ons down the line.

Brandfolder pricing 

As I mentioned earlier, Brandfolder isn’t public about the cost of the DAM, however research shows it could cost around $1,600 per month. Yikes! To make it worse, you have to contact the sales team just to take a look round the system. This is a real time-waster for smaller businesses looking to implement and enjoy the ROI of a new DAM tool as quickly as possible. 

Despite the mysterious pricing structure, we can get a feel for how customers feel about the costs. Reviews suggest that many Brandfolder users feel that the DAM is too expensive, especially for smaller teams with leaner budgets. 

“Brandfolder’s price is a bit high for a company with a small marketing budget and few assets. I don't love that you get charged to add more than two admins’” — G2 Review. 

There’s also the issue of added costs. Many Brandfolder features aren't automatically included in your pricing plan which means you need to upgrade and pay more to access them — as this customer discovered. 

“Brandfolder is costly. I don't particularly appreciate how Brandfolder will present tools as solutions but in reality, you have to upgrade your plan type to get the actual benefit of that tool. For example, scheduling availability and expiring assets does not make the asset unavailable. It simply puts a red stripe on the asset container and the assets remain downloadable and can be shared. To prevent an asset from being shared, you need to upgrade your plan to have access to the View Only tool.” 

Enterprise businesses might not have an issue with shelling our thousands of dollars for Brandfolder and paying extra to access more features. But it’s a huge and unnecessary commitment for growing teams — especially when more affordable and less complex DAM alternatives exist. 

Let’s see how Air compares. 

Air pricing 

Air is much cheaper than Brandfolder and starts at $300 per month. This seems like a better option at first glance, but remember, it's only built for managing creative workflows. You won't be able to share or use your visual assets easily in marketing channels. 

Another issue with Air is that it locks important features into expensive plans, so you have to upgrade to access them — similar to Brandfolder. For example, the Adobe Creative Cloud integration is only available on the Pro plan. And the Figma integration is restricted to Enterprise users. 

You also need to add users to your Air workspace to share assets with them directly. That doesn't sound like a problem until you realise you need to pay for every extra seat once you exhaust what's provided for on your plan. 

For example, the $300 per month plan only allows five members. If you want to share assets with a sixth person, you'll need to pay another $300 for an extra seat. Pricing like this quickly racks up for teams that need to share assets with lots of freelancers and retail partners. And Air customers aren’t too excited about it. 

“I wish you didn't have to purchase a seat just to log into the platform. I am able to share links with anyone, but since we have so many assets, it would be much simpler to allow anyone access to the platform, and then paid seats will only be for those who need edit permissions.”. 

Dash pricing 

Dash gives you the best of both worlds: an actual digital asset management software with award-wining UX and affordable pricing. It’s cheaper than Air and Brandfolder, and you don’t have to deal with complexities like paid add-ons for new features.  

Let's get into the details.

Dash has four pricing plans, starting at $139/£99 per month. There's no free plan, but we offer a 14-day free trial. So, you get to try Dash and see if we're a good fit for your needs before making any commitments. That's something you won't get with Brandfolder. 

Dash’s features are available for unlimited users, regardless of pricing tier. You don't have to pay extra for new seats or upgrade to a more expensive plan to access more advanced DAM features. Pricing tiers are separated by storage capacity, and you can purchase extra storage anytime. 

This pricing structure works great for growing businesses. You get all the DAM features you need to organise, manage, and deploy your digital assets at a reasonable price. Plus, it’ll give you some great ROI - just like it has with the haircare brand, RevAir. Here’s what Kim, the brand’s CCO, has to say: 

“For what it costs per month, I easily get ten times the return in productivity from my team members, in addition to happier team members and better quality work.”

Air vs Brandfolder: Customer support 

Support is one of the most important things to consider when choosing a DAM for your ecommerce business. If something goes wrong, you need to be sure you can get the right help on time. 

Brandfolder drops the ball here. Several customer reviews suggest that support requests can go unanswered for days. And while there's a live support option, it's mostly unavailable. 

“Sometimes my requests take longer than 48 hours for a response. They do make up for the delay. When I do get a hold of support, they go above and beyond to help me. I only wish they were more responsive when I raised the flag” — G2 Review. 

Air, on the other hand, provides timely and reliable customer support. But the downside is that it has limited support options on its free and lower plans. You’ll need to upgrade to a higher tier if you want to speak with a support agent face-to-face. 

Dash also offers reliable customer support. You can contact us anytime via in-app chat or request to speak with a member of our team. We’re always happy to jump on a call to help you resolve any issues. Plus, you don’t have to pay extra to speak with us (looking at you, Air 😏). 

Here's how Abi, Brand Manager at COAT Paints, describes their experience with Dash’s support team. 

“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.”

Air vs Brandfolder: User interface and experience

As you already know, Air is a visual workspace for creative teams. It's easy to use and doesn't require any complex technical skills. 

Brandfolder’s user interface, however, doesn’t do your images justice. For example, some users complain about the thumbnail sizes. They are too small, don't fill up the entire space, and look pixelated. This makes it difficult to identify images from thumbnails.

Beyond that, the user experience feels clunky due to the complexity and sheer number of features. New users struggle with relatively simple tasks like searching for assets or applying filters. Even though Brandfolder provides onboarding support, it still takes some time to learn how to use this tool effectively. 

“Our adoption rate is low and slow. We have had multiple rounds of optimisation with the assets, but many team members still struggle. The UI, especially on mobile, is clunky for the team to use. They have a hard time understanding how to search and filter. Many of our sales team avoid it since their search terms don't return the results they expect, and customer support is limited to the admins. The AI tagging is also not helpful at all.” — G2 Review. 

The good thing is that Dash’s user interface is much more like Air than Brandfolder. It’s really beautiful — like a well-curated Pinterest board. Here's an example from our customer, Passenger. 

Dash is also super easy to set up and use, with little or no learning curve. You can search for assets based on their exact content. Plus, our AI adds automatic tags to images and videos to help you find them later. Beyond that, our DAM integrates with many ecommerce tools, including Hootsuite, Shopify, and WooCommerce, so you can deploy assets where you need them. 

Here’s how one customer describes their experience using Dash. 

“Dash is very intuitive and user-friendly. There was almost no learning curve, and I could get going almost immediately. The interface is sleek and uncluttered, which helps me easily organise, search, and retrieve assets quickly. Being able to edit the fields and tag options also totally cut down on my jerking around, especially with such a large number of images and videos.” 

Air vs Brandfolder: Onboarding 

Onboarding is something many people overlook when choosing a DAM — and that’s a big mistake. The last thing you want is to pay for a tool only to realise it has a complex setup or steep learning curve that slows you down.

Think about it. You invest in a DAM to organise and manage your visual assets, not to spend weeks just figuring out how to use it. If it takes too long to get up and running, it’ll delay your team’s productivity and push back your ROI.

That’s why it’s so important to consider onboarding time and support before committing to any DAM.

Let’s compare onboarding for Brandfolder, Air and Dash. 

Brandfolder onboarding 

Brandfolder has a complex onboarding process because of its numerous features and steep learning curve. While they provide implementation support and training, it still takes a lot of time for customers to ramp up and start using the DAM tool to maximum capacity. In fact, G2 data shows it takes, on average, 2 months to onboard with Brandfolder. 

In some instances, customers are forced to hire an internal Brandfolder expert to provide ongoing support and training during the learning phase. 

“We had a pretty complicated setup. It took a ton of time to set up Branfolder properly in a way that made sense for our business. And I had to constantly train teammates on the right way to add assets.”. 

Air onboarding 

Air’s onboarding process may be quicker than Brandfolder’s, but ithas several shortcomings. Some users say they didn’t actually receive any onboarding support for months. Others had to hire or train an internal expert just to figure out the platform’s features and troubleshoot issues.

And here’s the catch: Air doesn’t offer onboarding support on all plans. It’s only available if you’re on the Pro or Enterprise tier. And if you want a dedicated support manager, you’ll have to upgrade to the Enterprise tier. If you’re on a lower plan and need help getting started, you’re on your own. 

For a tool designed to help you manage and organise your creative work, this lack of accessible support can be frustrating, especially for smaller teams that don’t have the resources to bring in extra help.

Dash onboarding 

As a Dash customer, you’ll get full onboarding support no matter your pricing tier. Because Dash is built specifically for ecommerce brands, our team knows exactly how to structure your DAM to fit your business. We’ll help you set up fields for your products, organise folders efficiently, and ensure your team is ready to hit the ground running from day one.

We’ve found that many times, customers don’t even need our help getting set up because of how easy Dash is to use. But if you do need assistance migrating assets from Google Drive or Dropbox, just let us know. Our team will be happy to help.

We also offer self-service resources, including onboarding guides and help docs, so you can get started quickly and confidently.

The best part? It only takes a month to get up and running with Dash - that’s half the time of Brandfolder! 

Which DAM is best for your ecommerce store? 

Neither Air nor Brandfolder really delivers on what a growing ecommerce brand needs from a DAM software solution.

Brandfolder might be packed with features, but it’s complex and expensive—better suited to enterprise teams with deep pockets and specialist support. Air can be more budget-friendly, but it’s missing key features for deploying assets or sharing them outside your organisation. If you're trying to run a fast-moving ecommerce store, both tools will end up slowing you down.

That’s where Dash comes in.

We’ve built Dash to make managing and using your content as easy as possible. You’ll get everything you need to power your ecommerce workflows, including:

• Fast, AI-powered search so you can find the right content in seconds
  
  
• Feedback tools and version control to help you approve assets quickly
  
  
• Public portals for sharing content with retailers, agencies, or press
  
  
• Guest uploads to collect UGC and influencer content—no user seat required
  
  
• Direct integrations with Shopify and WooCommerce to update product listings fast
  
  
• Hootsuite and social presets to help you deploy content to your channels
  
  
• Unlimited users on every plan so your whole team can get stuck in
  
  

And the best bit? Dash keeps pricing simple and flexible. No locked features. No surprise charges for extra users. No long-term contracts. Just a super-useful DAM that works the way your ecommerce team does.

Want to see for yourself? Try Dash free for 14 days—no credit card required. ✨