What do you dislike about Brandfolder?
Ease of use / user experience
One of the biggest issues is usability. Brandfolder offers multiple ways to organize content — tags, labels, filters, custom fields, and collections. On paper, these sound helpful. In practice, they are duplicative, confusing, and buried within the interface. Despite training, our users find the taxonomy overwhelming and just bypass it entirely, defaulting to the global search bar. Unfortunately, the search functionality is weak and ineffective, so all of the administrative work around tagging, labeling, and custom fields essentially goes to waste. We invested significant time building automations that tied these systems together (e.g., custom fields automatically generating tags and labels), but Brandfolder now only offers the automation feature on the Enterprise plan — and it's table stakes for their competitors to offer that feature on lower plans. Now our team has to maintain this duplicative taxonomy manually, which feels like a time sink that delivers limited benefit because end users ignore it. We’ve tried to use Portals to simplify the user experience, but Portals only help in very limited contexts. For the majority of our users, the core UI remains confusing and inefficient, and finding assets is still harder than it should be.
Customer support and account management
Customer support has been another persistent pain point. In four years, we have not had a single account rep stay with us for more than a few months. Every time we reach out, we’re told our rep is no longer with the company, and we’re reassigned yet again. The new rep almost always starts by trying to sell us on Smartsheet, despite our repeatedly stating that Smartsheet is not an option for our organization. This constant turnover signals instability inside Brandfolder and makes it impossible to build a productive relationship. It also means we spend time re-explaining our account history and needs to a revolving door of reps who aren’t aware of prior conversations.
PrintUI templating add-on
By far our biggest frustration has been the PrintUI templating tool, which was initially an add-on we opted in to. Over the years, it’s become increasingly buggy and is now essentially unusable. Our users dislike it so much they refuse to adopt it. It slows down workflows, creates bottlenecks, and has become a liability rather than a solution. In the age of Canva, there is no reason someone would want to use a tool like PrintUI instead.
We escalated many bugs to support, and with one recurring bug, we escalated it so many times over a year that we were finally told by Brandfolder that they had withdrawn support for PrintUI entirely and would no longer implement bug fixes. This was particularly egregious because we had just paid for additional templates under the impression that the product would continue to be supported and eventually fixed. To add insult to injury, another even described PrintUI as being run by “two old guys in a basement,” which was apparently their way of explaining its poor quality. That level of dismissiveness toward a product they were actively selling us was shocking.
Brandfolder’s proposed replacement, the “Content Automation” tool, was presented as a modern upgrade. But in demos, it was only marginally better than PrintUI, came with a much higher cost, and still didn’t solve our needs. We decided not to switch. However, when renewal came around, Brandfolder changed their pricing model and forced us to continue paying for PrintUI as part of our plan, even though the product is essentially dead.
Renewal and pricing experience
Our most recent renewal was very frustrating. We went into the conversation expecting a standard renewal process and were blindsided when the Brandfolder team told us we had been receiving a “steep discount” for years — something that had not been properly disclosed. They then announced that these discounts would be expiring, and our plan would be shifting into a new, more expensive “enterprise” bucket (which we didn’t even realize we were in). The proposed package was significantly more expensive, and although they offered temporary discounts to soften the blow, the increase was still substantial.
When we asked about cheaper plans, the reps admitted there were other tiers but could not clearly articulate what those included or how they differed from what we had. We were left to do the work ourselves to figure out what downgrading would mean in terms of lost functionality. The negotiation felt unnecessarily opaque and high-pressure, with a big push to lock us into a one-, two-, or three-year plan at a much higher cost. We ultimately downgraded to a smaller plan, but it still costs more than what we were paying previously, and it no longer meets our needs.
Lack of innovation
Finally, the pace of innovation has been disappointing. In the four years we’ve been with Brandfolder, the core product hasn’t meaningfully changed. Competitors are launching AI-driven features, building more efficient workflows, improving their interfaces, and innovating in digital asset management. Brandfolder, by contrast, seems stagnant. Our impression is that after being acquired by Smartsheet, the focus has shifted away from improving Brandfolder as a standalone product.
Overall
Between the poor UI, ineffective taxonomy, unusable PrintUI templating, constant rep turnover, opaque and costly renewals, and lack of innovation, we’ve been thoroughly disappointed. We are actively exploring competitors and plan to move off the platform soon. For anyone in creative operations evaluating DAM solutions, I would strongly caution against Brandfolder. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
