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Air vs. Frontify: Compare Creative Operations and Brand Management
Frontify is where an approved brand lives: guidelines, assets, and the rules that keep everything on-brand. Air is where the creative work happens before and after that point: organizing assets in production, getting them approved, and multiplying one approved asset into everything you need across channels. Same creative org, two different jobs.
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Supporting high-performance creative teams
Why choose Air over Frontify
Frontify is a strong brand management platform. It’s branded itself as brand intelligence for the AI era, a single home for guidelines, brand assets, and the governance that keeps outputs on-brand, and it's genuinely good at that job. Air solves a different problem. It's a creative platform built around the work itself: the files moving through versions, feedback, and approvals, and the approved assets teams need to adapt and scale. If your hardest problem is governing an established brand, Frontify fits. If it's producing and multiplying creative at volume, that's Air.
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Frontify is organized around the brand. Air is organized around the work
Frontify centers on the approved brand: guidelines, portals, and the assets teams distribute once they're final. Air centers on the production process that creates those assets: intake, versions, feedback, and sign-off, all attached to the asset itself. One keeps an approved brand consistent; the other keeps creative work moving from first draft to final cut.
Every iteration in one place, with a clear approved state
Frontify manages and distributes finished brand assets. Air is built for everything leading up to "finished": version stacking automatically keeps each new iteration on top of the original, comments and annotations stay pinned to the exact spot on an image or moment in a video, and the approved version is always obvious, so teams stop hunting through "final" files to find what's current.
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Turn one approved asset into everything you need
This is where the two platforms diverge most. Frontify's templates lock brand rules so teams create on-brand content from set formats. Air's Canvas takes an approved asset and produces the variations a campaign actually needs: resize and reframe for every channel, remove or replace backgrounds, clear stray objects, and generate new versions. All without round-tripping to a designer or the source file. Frontify keeps output on-brand; Air helps you make more of it.
Compare Air vs Frontify
Both platforms serve creative and brand teams, and plenty of organizations run both. The question is which problem you're solving: governing an approved brand, or producing and scaling the creative work behind it.
Air
Frontify
How Air compares to Frontify in real workflows
Frontify and Air are often shortlisted together, which makes sense: both touch creative and brand teams, and both have leaned into AI. But once you look at the day-to-day work, they're solving different problems. The clearest way to choose is to start with what Frontify does genuinely well, then look at where a creative production team's needs begin to sit outside that.
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What Frontify is built for
Frontify is a brand management platform, and a capable one. It gives an organization a single home for brand guidelines, portals, and approved assets, with the governance and permissions to keep everything consistent across markets and partners. Its recent AI work reinforces that focus: the Brand Assistant answers guideline questions and helps people create on-brand content. For brand-governance-first teams, especially large enterprises protecting a well-defined brand, it’s a real strength and the job Frontify is designed around.
Where that leaves a gap for production teams
Governing an approved brand and producing creative at volume are different jobs. Brand governance assumes the asset already exists and is final; creative production is everything before that point, and a lot of what comes after. Teams shipping a high volume of content need to manage work-in-progress, not just finished files: which version is current, what feedback shaped it, what's been approved, and how to turn one approved asset into the dozens of variations a campaign needs. That's the work a brand platform isn't built to run.
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What a creative operations platform does differently
Air is built for that production layer, and it's organized around how the work actually moves:
Organize: assets live in visual boards, not rigid folders, and conversational AI search finds them by what's in them: objects, colors, text, even spoken dialogue in video.
Approve: version stacking keeps every iteration on the original, annotations stay pinned to the exact spot or timecode, and Kanban views move work from in progress to approved with the context attached.
Multiply: Canvas takes an approved asset and scales it: resize and reframe for each channel, remove backgrounds or stray objects, and generate new variations without going back to the source file or the design team.
That arc: organize, approve, multiply, is the work that happens before a brand platform ever sees a finished asset, and it's where production teams spend most of their time.
The proof is in the hours teams get back
When the production layer works, the time savings are concrete. At Pattern, Associate Creative Director Daniel Batten went from spending 12–15 hours a week wrangling assets in Dropbox to roughly 1–2 hours a week in Air. At Candid, the lead brand designer's time spent finding assets for other people dropped from around 20% of her week to about 2%. Those are the gains that show up when a team can find, approve, and reuse work without it becoming someone's full-time job.
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Who should use each platform
Frontify is the better fit if your primary problem is brand governance: keeping a defined brand consistent across markets, partners, and channels, with guidelines and approved assets in one authoritative place.
Air is the better fit if your primary problem is creative production: managing versions, approvals, search, and reuse for a high volume of work, and scaling approved assets across every channel.
And the two aren't mutually exclusive. Organizations can govern the brand in Frontify and run the creative work in Air. The honest question is which job is your bottleneck.
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Keep your brand governed wherever it lives. Add Air to run the creative work behind it and turn every approved asset into something you can scale.
Air vs Frontify FAQs
Frontify is a brand management platform built around guidelines, brand portals, and governing an approved brand. Air is a creative operations platform built around the work itself: organizing assets in production, approving them, and multiplying approved work across channels. One governs the brand; the other runs the creative process behind it.
Not necessarily. If your main need is brand governance, Frontify is purpose-built for that. If it's managing creative production and scaling output, that's Air. Many organizations run both, governing the brand in Frontify and producing the work in Air.
High-volume creative and marketing production teams: creative directors, brand and marketing managers, and creative ops leads. These are the kind of people who need versions, approvals, search, and reuse in one place, and who want to scale approved assets without pulling designers into every request.
Air has transparent, published pricing with a free plan, self-serve signup, and unlimited users on every plan. Frontify is quote-based and sales-led, with pricing based on monthly active users (MAUs), and external agencies and freelancers who log in count toward that total, which can add up for teams that work with a lot of outside collaborators.
Both platforms are AI-forward, but the AI does different work. Frontify's AI is built around brand governance: answering guideline questions and keeping outputs on-brand. Air's AI is built around production: conversational search across your library and Canvas, which adapts and scales approved assets into channel-ready variations.
Real teams, real results
See how creative teams use Air to move faster, stay aligned, and get their best work out the door.
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