A recurring claim about Air runs something like this: Air is good-looking and easy to use, but if you're replacing a full enterprise DAM — Bynder, Brandfolder, Aprimo — it will feel lightweight by comparison. Serious enterprise needs require a serious enterprise tool. 

This is a fair challenge to put to any platform, and the people raising it are usually doing the right thing: stress-testing whether a tool will hold up under real requirements.

Here's our direct answer.

The argument runs roughly like this: Enterprise DAMs are built for governance at scale. They handle deep metadata schemas, multi-brand and multi-tenant structures, complex permission hierarchies, digital rights management, and compliance-heavy archival. They have rigid taxonomies because rigid taxonomies are what large, regulated organizations actually need to manage thousands of assets across dozens of markets and partners.

Air, on the other hand, prioritizes speed and usability. Its boards-not-folders model and visual interface are great for creative teams moving quickly, but a buyer replacing a legacy or “enterprise” DAM may worry that Air will fall short on the structural and governance side. 

A team buying for a global enterprise with strict audit, rights, and brand-control requirements wants to know that the tool will not need to be supplemented with three other systems within a year.

Air solves a different problem than legacy enterprise DAMs, and the buyers who choose Air do so deliberately, with full visibility into what they're picking up and what they're trading.

• Air is a creative operations platform that handles the full arc of organizing, approving, and multiplying creative work, with storage and retrieval as one component among many.

• Enterprise security and governance are foundational to the platform: SOC 2 Type II, SAML-based SSO, custom roles and permissions, access-controlled libraries, and protected share links with expiration dates and email gating.

• Adoption holds up where legacy DAMs typically struggle. More than 125,000 creatives use Air daily, and teams report cutting asset management time roughly in half and saving 14+ hours per week.

• Enterprise customers including NBC, GAP, CAA, and Hims & Hers had every option available to them and chose Air over legacy DAMs because of what their teams actually needed: speed and usability without sacrificing governance.

What follows is the detail behind each of those points.

Taken at face value, Air and a legacy enterprise DAM look like two products in the same category competing on features. The four points below show why that framing misses what Air actually does.

Air is built for creative work in motion, legacy DAMs are built for archival storage

Legacy DAMs were designed to solve a specific historical problem: how do you store finished assets and retrieve them later? The architecture follows from that goal. Files go in, metadata gets attached, and a permissioned user pulls them back out when needed.

Air starts from a different premise. Most of the friction creative teams face shows up in the messy middle of creative work, where ideas move from raw concepts toward approved assets. This is where features like the following come into play:

• Boards allow a single file to live in multiple contexts without duplication.

• Pinned image comments and timestamped video annotations facilitate feedback.

• Kanban views track approval status.

• Version stacking keeps iterations from cluttering the workspace.

• AI features like creative intelligence, conversational search, video transcription, smart chapters, and facial recognition let people find content by what it actually contains rather than what someone remembered to name it.

Air Canvas extends this further. Where a legacy DAM ends at storage (an approved asset sits in a vault until someone retrieves it), Air Canvas picks up where the approval workflow leaves off. One approved design becomes dozens of on-brand variants: resized for every channel, backgrounds swapped, text updated without the source file, all applied in bulk. The creative library and the editing layer share the same governance controls, the same Brand Kit, and the same version history. This is what “one to many” looks like in practice, and it's the capability gap that most directly differentiates Air from systems built around storage and retrieval.

This is what we mean by "creative operations platform." The phrase describes a different unit of work the product is organized around — the work itself, in motion, with all of its handoffs and decisions intact.

Air delivers enterprise governance despite its lighter UX

Air supports the controls enterprise procurement teams expect:

1. Air supports SAML-based SSO for central provisioning via Okta, Azure AD, and other identity providers. 

2. Custom roles let admins define permission levels specific to their workspace. Access-controlled libraries partition content by brand, region, or business unit. 

3. Audit logs track who accessed what and when. 

4. Session timeouts, custom data backups, and expiration controls round out the security posture, and the platform holds SOC 2 Type II certification.

For external sharing, links can be password-protected, email-gated, time-limited, and set to auto-expire. CDN links also auto-update content wherever it has been published — useful when an enterprise team wants a single asset reflected accurately across every surface it lives on.

This is the governance layer enterprise procurement teams ask for, built in from the start.

Air gets used daily where legacy DAMs typically don't

The most common complaint about legacy enterprise DAMs is that they are over-built for the people who have to live in them every day. Implementation drags on for months. Onboarding requires extensive training. Adoption stalls.

Governance only works if the people creating, approving, and using assets actually adopt the system. A DAM that sits unused while teams revert to Slack threads and shared drives produces exactly the inconsistency the governance model was meant to prevent. Air's adoption profile is the inverse — a system creative teams reach for unprompted, which is what allows the governance layer to do its job.

Enterprise customers chose Air over legacy DAMs after evaluating both

Customers like NBC, GAP, CAA, and Hims & Hers are among the enterprise teams that chose Air over legacy options. The pattern is consistent: they wanted a system creative teams would actually adopt, governance that satisfied IT and security review, and a platform that could keep pace with the volume at which their teams produce work — not one that creates a backlog while teams work around it.

The clearest version of this story comes from Vivian Health, a healthcare jobs marketplace whose creative team evaluated Bynder and Brandfolder directly before landing on Air. Their Art Director, Rishad Amarkhel, described the search this way:

"So, we began our search for a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. We looked into several options like Brandfolder and Bynder, but Air stood out. It offered a different approach as a creative operations platform."

What changed for Vivian's team after the switch was less about features in isolation and more about how the platform reshaped their day-to-day. Amarkhel pointed to Air becoming "the single source of truth for brand assets, from logos to product imagery and brand guidelines," and to how the marketing team gained the ability to "create boards and share assets with external agencies independently. It eliminated the hassle of permissions and made our marketing operations more efficient."

The same pattern shows up in third-party reviews from teams who switched from heavier systems. A food and beverage company employee moving from Canto wrote that Air was "WAY better. Canto was slow, bulky, terrible interface, super expensive, overly engineered for our purposes." 

A marketing administrator moving from Acquia DAM (Widen) cited "ease of use, modern interface, price." A non-profit administrator coming from PhotoShelter wrote that Air "does essentially the same thing for a fraction of the price."

These are organizations that had access to traditional DAMs and walked away from them — and the reasons they walked away are precisely the worries some buyers raise about Air's lighter footprint, viewed from the other side.

If your primary requirement is the deepest possible rights-management schema, multi-tenant licensing-by-territory governance, or compliance archival as a primary use case, a legacy enterprise DAM may be the better fit, and we'd rather say so than oversell. 

But if your primary requirement is a system creative teams will actually use to move work from raw concept through approved asset — with the governance, security, and access controls a serious organization needs — Air is built for that.

The fastest way to know which side of that line you fall on is a conversation. Book a demo and walk through your specific requirements with our team.

Is Air SOC 2 certified?

Yes. Air holds SOC 2 Type II certification. The platform encrypts data in transit and at rest (SSL and AES-256), conducts annual independent penetration tests through NCC Group, and maintains real-time security monitoring. Data is backed up across multiple regions with daily database snapshots.

Does Air support SAML SSO and identity provider integration?

Yes, on Enterprise plans. Air supports SAML-based Single Sign-On with central provisioning through identity providers including Okta and Azure AD. Admins can enforce SAML SSO so that all users on verified domains must authenticate through the organization's IDP — blocking direct login through Google SSO, Apple SSO, or the Air login page. Air does not store passwords for accounts managed through SSO.

What are the main things Air doesn't do that an enterprise DAM does?

Air is transparent about this. If your primary requirement is deep digital rights management with licensing-by-territory schemas, multi-tenant governance for dozens of business units operating independently, or compliance-heavy archival as the primary use case — a legacy enterprise DAM may be a better fit. Air is purpose-built for the creative workflow layer: organizing, reviewing, approving, and scaling assets. The governance controls it provides (SOC 2, SSO, custom permissions, audit logs, access-controlled libraries) are enterprise-grade, but the product is not architected for the archival and rights-management depth that pharmaceutical, financial, or highly regulated media enterprises sometimes require. We'd rather say this clearly than oversell.

How does Air compare to Bynder or Brandfolder specifically?

Teams that have evaluated both consistently land on the same distinction: Bynder and Brandfolder are storage-and-retrieval systems with strong governance. Air covers governance but is built around creative work in motion — approvals, version control, AI-powered findability, and now Canvas for scaling approved assets. The teams that choose Air tend to be those where creative velocity matters as much as compliance; the teams that stay with Bynder or Brandfolder tend to have compliance archival as a primary driver. Several teams — including Vivian Health, whose Art Director evaluated both Brandfolder and Bynder before choosing Air — describe the distinction as "a different approach as a creative operations platform."

Do enterprise teams at Air get dedicated onboarding support?

Yes. Air's Enterprise plan includes custom migration assistance from legacy systems including Bynder, Brandfolder, Canto, Frame.io, and others. Enterprise customers get dedicated onboarding support and ongoing guidance from a workflow expert to structure and scale their setup. Implementation is significantly faster than legacy DAM deployments — one of the reasons teams frequently cite when explaining why they left those systems.