Digital asset management is a category invented for companies with thousands of assets, dozens of markets and a legal department. The vendors who define it — Bynder is the reference name — sell to exactly those companies, and their pricing reflects it. For a company of eight with a few thousand photographs, the category is the wrong size. The problem it addresses, though, is real at any size, and it shows up in three questions:
- Where is the good photo of the entrance? Not any photo — the one that was approved, the one in the right aspect ratio, the one without the old logo.
- Are we allowed to use it? Who took it, what did the licence say, does it expire, are the people in it still fine with being in it?
- Which version is on the website? The one somebody re-exported at 1,200 pixels in April, or the original?
Everything below is measured against those three questions. Feature lists are not.
Disclosure: Grünberg.Digital runs its own media library on the same hosting as the websites. It is the third column below. It answers the three questions for us; it would not for a company with a catalogue business.
1. Bynder: the enterprise platform as a category
Bynder publishes no price. Its pricing page says so in as many words: every customer has "a custom-made package tailored to their business needs and, therefore, a unique price point", and the page leads to a quote request and a demo (bynder.com/en/pricing, checked 22 September 2026). Its own guide to digital asset management costs, last updated 11 June 2026, contains no figures either and offers a non-binding quote instead. That is category-normal, and it means one thing for an SMB: the comparison cannot be done before a sales call. In our twelve-tools comparison the Bynder line is carried at zero for exactly that reason, with the note that it is very probably the most expensive item in the table.
What an enterprise platform does, and does extremely well, is the second question. Rights management is its core: Bynder documents automated expiry and embargo dates, a "limited usage" flag for licensed or internal-only assets, download approvals and watermarking, and the metadata model lets a company add its own fields for markets and channels. If you have three hundred licensed stock images across five countries, that is not a luxury. It is the only way not to get a lawyer's letter.
What it does not do is fit a company of eight. The onboarding is a project, the taxonomy is a workshop — even the hosting region has to be chosen before the environment is set up — and the integrations are with tools the SMB does not run. The honest summary: an enterprise platform answers all three questions perfectly, for a company that has the second one at a scale where the answer costs less than the mistake.
2. Canva: the library that came with the design tool
Canva Business is listed at $250 per person per year, Canva Pro at $144 per year for one person, and Enterprise at "Let's talk" (Canva pricing page, checked 22 September 2026). The Teams plan that older comparisons still quote is closed: Canva's help centre states that Teams "is no longer available for new sign-ups or upgrades", and Business has taken its place for new teams. For a company where three people make things and five have a seat because it was easier to add everyone, Business costs $2,000 a year for a design tool — and, almost incidentally, an image library. Three seats for the three people who actually design would be $750.
The library is genuinely useful. Business comes with 500 GB of storage and up to 100 brand kits with approvals, uploads can be organised in shared folders, the search works, and every design that was made from an image remembers which image it was. For the first question — where is the good photo — Canva is often the honest answer in a small company, because Canva is where the photo was last used.
Where it falls short is the second and third question. The approvals on the Business plan are about designs going out, not about the rights behind the images going in: nothing in Canva's plan comparison points to a photographer field, a licence scope or an expiry date per upload. And the version that leaves Canva is a re-export: resized, recompressed, occasionally with a template's colour correction baked in. The website ends up with the April export, the original stays in a folder nobody opens, and the third question has no answer. Canva is a workshop with a well-organised material shelf, not a warehouse.
One more thing that belongs in the cost line: the seat is the unit. Every person who needs to find an image pays as much as the person who makes something from it. In a company of eight that turns a library into the most expensive folder you own.
3. The folder with rules
The third option costs nothing and is usually what a company has already, badly. A shared folder on the drive — or a media library built on ordinary hosting, which is what we run — with three rules:
- One place. Originals go in, exports stay out. The website links the library's copy, the design tool imports from it, nobody keeps a private stash.
- A record per file. Photographer, source, licence, expiry, and a note on people in the picture. In a folder that is a sidecar text file or a spreadsheet; in a built library it is a form that has to be filled in before the file is usable.
- Somebody owns it. Not a department. A person, with an hour a month.
We built ours instead of buying an enterprise platform because the third rule was the one we could enforce and the second was the one we needed: a licence field that is mandatory, an expiry that the system shows before it passes, and a search across the descriptions. The descriptions themselves are written by a language model when the image is uploaded — one call per file, a few cents, and a text a person corrects rather than writes. That is the one place where a small library can do something the large platforms sell as a feature of their own, because the model reads our images and only ours.
Where the folder — with or without a built front end — loses:
- Approval workflows do not exist. "Approved" is whoever uploaded it saying so.
- Multi-market rights do not exist. One licence field, one expiry. If you have images cleared for Germany but not Austria, you have outgrown this.
- Video is a different problem. A library on shared hosting without a transcoding tool cannot make a poster frame from a video. Either a service does it, or moving image stays out — a decision we are currently making ourselves, and one that belongs to the owner of rule three, not to the tool.
- Nobody sells it to you, which means nobody trains your team on it either.
4. The comparison on the three questions
- Can anyone find it? — Bynder: yes, after the taxonomy workshop. Canva: yes, if it was last used in Canva. Folder with rules: yes, if rule one is kept; with a built library, by description search.
- Does anyone know whether the licence is valid? — Bynder: yes, per asset, with expiry and embargo dates and usage restrictions. Canva: no licence record per upload. Folder: only if rule two is kept; a built library can make the field mandatory.
- Which version is on the website? — Bynder: the library's, via integration or CDN. Canva: an export, of unknown lineage. Folder: the library's, if the website links there.
- Cost, company of eight, per year — Bynder: no published price; request a quote. Canva Business: $250 per person per year, $2,000 for eight seats or $750 for three. Folder: nothing beyond storage; a built library: a developer's few days once, hosting you already pay, an hour a month of ownership.
- Where the data lives — Bynder: a hosting region chosen at setup, Frankfurt among them. Canva: the United States, according to its privacy page; an EU data-residency setting exists only on Enterprise and education plans. Folder: wherever your drive or hosting is — for us, Germany.
- Who it fits — Bynder: companies with licensed stock at scale and more than one market. Canva: companies whose images live and die in social posts. Folder or built library: companies with a few thousand of their own images and one person willing to own them.
Prices are list prices in US dollars from the vendors' own pages, checked on 22 September 2026, without taxes; local prices in euros differ.
5. Verdict: the answer is the second question
Almost every SMB we see asks the first question — where is the photo — and buys a tool for it. The first question is cheap. Any of the three options answers it, and so does a folder with a naming convention.
The question that costs money is the second one, and it is the one nobody asks until a photographer's invoice or a rights-holder's letter arrives. Buy or build for the licence record, not for the search. If that record needs markets, expiry dates and approval chains, the enterprise platform is the right size and the sales call is worth having. If it needs one field per file that somebody actually fills in, a folder with rules — or a small library that makes the field mandatory — is the right size, and the money stays in the budget.
And whatever you choose: the tool where the photo was made is not the place where the photo lives. Canva is a workshop. The warehouse is somewhere else.
Would you like to know which of the three your image collection actually needs? Book a free initial consultation — we will look at how many images you have, where they are, and how many of them you could prove you are allowed to use.
6. FAQ: image management in small companies
What does digital asset management cost for a small company?
The leading vendors, Bynder among them, publish no prices and quote per company after a sales conversation; Bynder's pricing page states that every customer gets a custom package and a unique price. For an SMB the practical answer is: more than the problem costs, unless the company manages licensed images across several markets. A folder with rules or a small self-hosted library covers a few thousand of a company's own images at the cost of storage and one person's time.
Is Canva a media library?
Canva includes shared folders, brand kits and search, and on the Business plan ($250 per person per year, 500 GB of storage) approvals for designs. For many small companies it is where images are found in practice. It does not keep a licence record per upload — no photographer, scope or expiry — and what leaves Canva is a re-export rather than the original. It works as a workshop, not as the place where originals and rights are kept.
Does Canva Teams still exist?
Not for new customers. Canva's help centre says Teams is no longer available for new sign-ups or upgrades; existing subscribers keep their plan. New teams sign up for Canva Business, which is priced per person.
What should a licence record contain?
Photographer or source, licence type and scope (web, print, advertising), expiry date if any, and a note on identifiable people and their consent. Whether that lives in an enterprise platform, a spreadsheet next to the folder or a mandatory form in a small library matters less than whether it is filled in every time.
Can a self-hosted library handle video?
Storing video is easy; making a poster frame or a preview from it needs a transcoding tool that ordinary shared hosting does not provide. Either a separate service does that step, or video stays outside the library. Decide that before the first videos land somewhere else and a second collection begins.
