Gartner’s Top 19 Digital Asset Management (DMA) Solutions

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated on January 26, 2024 to reflect changes in Gartner’s list.

Online marketing is an essential tool for modern businesses. Marketing across multiple social media platforms, email and other digital avenues presents fresh challenges for brand owners. Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions can help make common challenges such as localization, rights management and maintaining a consistent brand identity easier for growing brands to cope with.

Even small business owners can now conduct campaigns with a reach that big brands would have envied in the 1990s. They can reach more customers, collect more data and have more touchpoints and assets. DAM software helps creatives and marketing teams keep track of those assets. There are many solutions available, from free and open source platforms suited to smaller teams, to enterprise-level solutions offering support, management, hosting and API integrations that make each department’s job that little bit easier.

According to one study by Research and Markets, the global digital asset management market is expected to be worth more than $8.1 billion by 2026 — a significant leap from the $2.9 billion valuation in 2020. Brands who run ad campaigns, have podcasts, share video content and run online streams need to be able to keep track of their content.

What Is Enterprise Digital Asset Management?

Enterprise digital asset management solutions allow organizations that deal with media-rich content to create, manage, archive, repurpose and manipulate digital media assets. Those assets could be images, videos, 3D assets or documents. It organizes digital assets based on associated metadata that contains a unique description to each asset, making it more searchable, reusable and manageable.

Digital asset management software can also be used to control which employees have access to specific assets. Asset management also helps organizations avoid issues with duplication, where people recreate existing work because they couldn’t find the original asset.

DAM has played a significant role in brand management by ensuring teams have access to the correct brand materials at all times. This helps to facilitate brand consistency across the organization and across external touchpoints. In addition, DAM can help an organization to keep their digital assets secure, safe organized. When relevant assets are stored in a central location in the cloud, they’re accessible to workers from around the world. Marketing managers can easily keep track of assets’ usage for rights management purposes.

Related Article: Why Customer Experience Pros Should Care About DAM

What Is the Value of DAM?

When used correctly, these systems can increase productivity: Each person can focus on the core part of their job, whether that’s the production or distribution of assets, while also staying updated about each step in the workflow. For instance, DAM can help content creators attribute the correct source in their materials, public relations staff find the best images to use with their press releases and graphic designers find new assets for their work. When a campaign is ready to go, a marketer can search for the resource they need in the DAM. They can then distribute it to the relevant marketing channels.

There are free DAM platforms; however, they often lack important features used by enterprises. If you want to build a strong brand, it’s important to use the right tools.In this article, we take a look at 19 enterprise DAM solutions reviewed and rated by Gartner. 

Acquia acquired Widen in 2021 and the Widen Collective now goes by Acquia DAM, which is available as a standalone product or as an integration with Acquia DXP. Acquia offers a combined DAM and PIM platform with automated content lifecycle management and enterprise governance control. Acquia DAM allows users to curate groups of assets for different teams and provides self-service access to finalized content.

Acquia DAM is a SaaS-based platform used by a number of large brands, including Crayola, Dyson and LG. Like many other enterprise offerings, its features include searching, sharing and collaboration tools, as well as workflow automation. The platform also offers brand management tools to help marketing executives stay in control of their image across multiple channels.

Adobe’s DAM,Adobe Experience Manager Assets, enables you to manage all content and digital assets on a single platform. It also works to streamline collaborative processes, which will allow marketers and creatives to work together more effectively. Equipped with AI capabilities and data-driven insights, the toolidentifies which content is achieving a high ROI.

It integrates smoothly with the rest of the company’s tools, including Adobe Creative Cloud, and works well for high volume asset management. Digital assets are stored in the cloud, offering security, redundancy and ease of storage and management. When coupled with the Adobe Workfront tool,it offers powerful integration and workflow features. Workfront includes numerous planning and collaboration features for various departments, and the Workfront Library serves as a digital content hub.

Workfront Library puts organizations in control of every step of the lifecycle of their digital assets, from creation to inclusion in marketing and social media campaigns. When used alongside other Creative Cloud tools, every team member benefits from a seamless working experience.

Aprimo’s software as a service (SaaS) digital asset management system acts as an asset repository that can automate the delivery of approved, brand-compliant content. It comes with ideation capabilities that help to streamline both content ideation and content planning. Also, you can connect Aprimo to third-party systems like web content management, ecommerce, Adobe Creative Cloud, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and product information management. 

Aprimo lets companies monitor content design, creation and distribution in one easy to use tool. This means managers always know how much content costs to create and how well that content performs for the organization. There’s no need to be a tech expert to get the most out of Aprimo. All of the information your team members need is right there on their dashboard.

Brandfolder by Smartsheet is an enterprise-grade platform for secure collaboration, including digital asset management. Unlike some other platforms that focus exclusively on managing creative assets, Smartsheet’s ecosystem offers tools to monitor marketing campaigns, calculate campaign ROI, assign tasks to different team members and generally unify marketing efforts.

The platform promises enterprise-grade security and governance controls to ensure compliance with local data security and privacy standards. Integration with Adobe and other popular creativity tools means designers can work in the way they prefer, while still ensuring other team members are kept in the loop.

Bynder aims to provide a central storage point for digital assets. It leverages AWS global services to enable scalability and performance. The system can handle a huge variety of files and makes searching for content easy. Users can search tags, metadata and even inside PDF documents to find what they need. The file preview feature lets users view digital content without having to download it first.

Bynder has publishing on demand features that give users access to a smart template tool which helps to create branded materials. It can support a variety of asset types, meaning it’s suitable for business cards, advertisements and banners. To cater to a variety of users with varying levels of expertise, it offers intuitive workflow options. The search interface can be customized to meet an individual organization’s needs.

Canto is a digital asset management platform used by many big brands, including Domino’s, Rolex and Birkenstock. The platform offers time-saving smart sharing features to help marketers and creatives create new content quickly and easily. Assets can be tagged and categorized, and it’s easy to view metadata about each file without having to drill through complex menus.

Canto comes with a gallery-style interface where you can preview visual content. Administrators can define user roles by admin, contributor and consumer and each role comes with their predefined permissions and capabilities. The platform’s dashboard is easy-to-use, and you can run various reports to see which content is performing well.

Related Article: Beyond the Hype: Real-World Impact of Generative AI in Content Management

CELUM’s DAM solution provides a platform where users can upload, search, manage and share files. It is compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and integrates with a variety of other platforms and applications. The agile collaboration system streamlines each step of creating assets and using them for marketing and branding campaigns. There are several different pricing structures available to support companies of various sizes.