Your head of marketing just told you to "find a brand management tool." You Googled it. Frontify came up first — they've been around since 2013, serve Lufthansa and Nestlé, and their website looks like it costs more than your entire SaaS stack.

Then you saw the pricing: per monthly active user. No public prices. "Book a demo." You're a 15-person startup. You don't have time for a demo. You have a pitch deck due Friday.

We built brandMem because we've been in that exact situation. So here's what we wish someone had told us before we spent weeks evaluating enterprise tools that were never built for teams like ours.

The Pricing Problem Nobody Mentions

Frontify charges per Monthly Active User (MAU). Sounds reasonable until you realize what "active" means: anyone who logs in, even once, to check a brand color. Your intern opens the guidelines on Monday? That's a billable user.

No public pricing. "Book a demo." In our experience, that's enterprise code for "if you have to ask, you can't afford it." Third-party sources suggest plans start around $29/month for basic access — but for a team of 20 people actually using the platform? Capterra reviewers report $300-500/month ranges. And that scales up every time you hire.

brandMem pricing fits on a napkin:

Plan	Price	Users
Free	€0/month	3 members, 1 brand
Pro	€39/month	Unlimited members, 5 brands
Business	€99/month	Unlimited everything + agency hub

That's it. No MAU math. No "talk to sales." No six-month averaging formula to smooth out cost fluctuations (yes, Frontify actually does that — which tells you something about how unpredictable the bills get).

For a team of 20, Frontify costs roughly $460/month. brandMem costs €39/month. That's not a rounding error — it's a 12x difference.

The Onboarding Reality Check

Here's a scene we've heard too many times.

A marketing lead signs up for Frontify's 14-day trial. Day 1: the platform has a front-end and a back-end interface. That's already confusing. Day 3: they need to add team members, but permissions work at the individual library, project, and guideline level — not at the team level. Day 7: they still haven't migrated their existing assets. Day 14: trial expires. They go back to Google Drive.

Capterra reviewers describe onboarding as "2-3 weeks minimum" without content migration. With migration? Some report months. G2 reviewers call the permission system "a workaround."

We think brand management software should take less time to set up than to explain. brandMem onboarding works like this:

1. Sign up with your email.
2. Add your brand colors and upload your logo. (This takes 2 minutes.)
3. Send your team a link.

Done. No training sessions. No implementation consultant. No admin manual to read before your admin manual.

Where Frontify Actually Wins (And We'll Admit It)

We're not going to pretend brandMem does everything Frontify does. It doesn't.

Frontify has 100+ integrations — Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office, Slack, and more. Their Brand SDK lets technical teams build custom content blocks. Their DAM is mature, with advanced taxonomy and governance workflows built for organizations managing thousands of assets across dozens of departments.

If you're running a brand team at a Fortune 500 company, with 2,000 employees who need access to 50,000 assets across 12 regions — Frontify was built for exactly that complexity.

We weren't. And that's on purpose.

Where brandMem Wins (And Why It Matters for You)

brandMem was built for the other 95% of companies — the ones with 5-100 people, a handful of brand assets, and zero desire to spend three months onboarding a tool.

A free tier that's actually free. Not a 14-day trial. Not "free for 1 user." Free with 3 team members, 1 brand, and core features. Forever. Most teams start here and upgrade when they need more brands.

Agency collaboration, built in. If you work with agencies — or if you are an agency — brandMem has a multi-tenant hub where you manage all your clients from one dashboard. Frontify doesn't have this. You'd need separate accounts or complex permission structures.

No split-brain UI. One interface. Not a "front-end for viewing" and a "back-end for editing" that confuse every new user.

Every file format. Including Adobe Illustrator (.ai) files, which Frontify doesn't support natively. If your designers work with vectors, that gap hurts.

The Real Question

This isn't about which tool has more features. Frontify wins that comparison by sheer volume — they've had 13 years to build.

The real question is: do you need all of that?

If your brand team has a dedicated manager, an enterprise budget, and months to spend on implementation — use Frontify. Seriously. It's a good product for that use case.

But if you're a startup founder who needs brand consistency this week, a marketing team that wants to stop playing brand police, or an agency that's tired of managing client assets across 47 different Google Drive folders — Frontify isn't built for you. And charging you per user for the privilege of accessing your own brand guidelines is, frankly, a tax on collaboration.

One More Thing

We built brandMem because we were the team Googling "Frontify alternative" at 11pm, looking for something that didn't require a sales call, a procurement process, and a six-figure budget. We wanted something that worked in minutes, cost what a team lunch costs, and got out of the way.

If that sounds like you — try it. Free plan, no credit card, no 14-day countdown ticking in the corner. If it doesn't fit, you'll know in 5 minutes, not 5 weeks.

If you need the enterprise machine, we respect that. Go with Frontify. No hard feelings.

---