REPORT

The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset

Management For Customer Experience, Q1

2022
The 14 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
March 16, 2022

Nick Barber
with Linda Ivy-Rosser, Angela Lozada, Madison Bakalar

Summary
In our 27-criterion evaluation of digital asset management (DAM) for customer
experience (CX) providers, we identified the 14 most significant ones — Adobe, Aprimo,
Brandfolder, Bynder, Canto, CELUM, censhare, Digizuite, Hyland, MediaBeacon,
OpenText, Sitecore, Tenovos, and Widen — and researched, analyzed, and scored
them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps digital professionals
select the right one for their needs.
Topics

• DAM Is Fundamental To Manage The Content Deluge

• Evaluation Summary

• Vendor Offerings

• Vendor Profiles

• Evaluation Overview

• Supplemental Material
DAM Is Fundamental To Manage The Content Deluge

Brands and enterprises need rich media content to engage prospects and customers.

But this content doesn’t simply appear; organizations must go through key steps to

deploy it: ideation, creation, review and approval, storage and organization, delivery and

analysis, and, finally, archival. While DAM is a decades-old technology, there’s been

renewed interest to support the entire content lifecycle. In our survey of DAM customer

references, 50% had been using their DAM for two years or less. And nearly all

references (97%) said that their volume of content had increased over the past year.

This solidifies DAM as a content strategy cornerstone.

As a result of these trends, DAM customers should look for providers that:

• Fit into an integrated ecosystem. Smart organizations eliminate

silos between technologies and teams in service of creating a

seamless customer experience. In this Forrester Wave™, we

specifically look at integrations into agile content management

systems (CMSes), product information management (PIM) systems,

and creative toolsets because those are areas of consistent interest

— customer references cited CMS and PIM as the top two

technologies they integrate their DAM into. Integrations with third-

party AI providers to augment metadata extraction capabilities as

well as connections into analytics systems for enhanced content

performance insights are also important.

• Support the content lifecycle from upstream creative to

downstream delivery. DAM traditionally stores finished assets, but

 more and more organizations are using it to support work-in-progress

content. In Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2022, B2B marketing

decision-makers with management authority on content strategy and

operation cited investing in new technology to support productivity as

the top point of focus for their content strategy over the next 12

months. DAM vendors have responded by positioning their platform

further upstream in the creative process. This means support for

asset workflows, reviews and approvals, and connectors into creative

tools like Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva, and Microsoft Office.

• Build the foundation for content automation at scale. In the

future, humans won’t create all the content themselves. They’ll slowly

hand off that responsibility to machines, especially for rote and

mundane content creation. To make that future a reality, we must

centralize all enterprise marketing and brand content, enrich it with

multifaceted, business-specific metadata, and set up content models

and automation rules to populate them. Content automation at scale

will help brands meet omnichannel personalization goals and create

enhanced customer experiences.

Evaluation Summary

The Forrester Wave evaluation highlights Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders, and

Challengers. It’s an assessment of the top vendors in the market and does not
represent the entire vendor landscape. You’ll find more information about this market in

our DAM Now Tech report.

We intend this evaluation to be a starting point only and encourage clients to view

product evaluations and adapt criteria weightings using the Excel-based vendor

comparison tool (see Figure 1 and see Figure 2). Click the link at the beginning of this

report on Forrester.com to download the tool.

Figure 1 Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management For Customer Experience,

Q1 2022
Figure 2 Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management For Customer Experience

Scorecard, Q1 2022
Vendor Offerings

Forrester included 14 vendors in this assessment: Adobe, Aprimo, Brandfolder, Bynder,

Canto, CELUM, censhare, Digizuite, Hyland, MediaBeacon, OpenText, Sitecore,

Tenovos, and Widen (see Figure 3).

Figure 3 Evaluated Vendors And Product Information

Vendor Profiles

Our analysis uncovered the following strengths and weaknesses of individual vendors.

Leaders

• Aprimo leads with strong AI and workflow capabilities. The

Chicago-based marketing technology firm has been in the DAM

space since 2017 when it acquired its DAM product to complement

its marketing resource management capabilities. Aprimo’s product

vision, which is underpinned by AI and content atomization and aims

to support the full lifecycle of content performance — from creative

effort all the way through downstream performance — stands out. Its

well-defined market approach targets strong growth verticals like

consumer packaged goods, retail, financial services, and life

sciences. Aprimo has good growth and a platform that comes up

occasionally — but not often — in competitive enterprise deals.

Aprimo’s DAM product excels in AI metadata extraction capabilities

that include both industry starter packs for AI as well as the ability to

train AI to recognize business-specific content items. This is

differentiated in the market and provides value to clients that need to

enrich large libraries of content with more than just generic tags.

Aprimo also offers superior work-in-progress support, which is

essential in today’s remote, collaborative work environment and

approach to content creation. One customer reference said that

Aprimo’s “customer service and quick implementation approach were

 heavy factors in selection.” Aprimo has on-par capabilities in

scalability and security. It’s a good fit for companies in North America

and Europe that need a strong core repository augmented by

workflow capabilities to support the entire content lifecycle.

• Adobe leads with strong usability and integrations. Adobe, the

San Jose, California-based software juggernaut, offers a suite of

creative and digital experience products. It’s a visionary vendor with

a portfolio of complementary products that help deliver on the

promise of content atomization and scale. Adobe’s DAM stands to

benefit greatly from its recent acquisitions of Workfront and Frame.io.

It has a well-defined market approach that centers on retail but

includes high-tech, financial services, and healthcare and offers an

on-par approach to its planned enhancements and roadmap. While it

has a customer advisory board in place, customer references said

they wanted to influence the roadmap more. Adobe’s DAM excels in

search capabilities, which are flexible and robust enough to get users

to the right asset or right collection of assets with greater efficiency

than some other DAMs in this evaluation. Adobe also has solid

integration capabilities, especially within agile CMS — where it offers

integrations both inside and outside its own ecosystem — as well as

PIM. The extensibility of the platform is solid and is validated by

customer references, which is unique for a vendor with such a

complete stack. While Adobe integrates with its own Creative Cloud,

it stops short of fully native integrations beyond its own ecosystem.

 Adobe is a good fit for global companies in retail, travel, and media

that need strong enterprise platform integrations to power a content

supply chain.

• Bynder leads with strong usability and portal

capabilities. Founded in 2013, Bynder is an Amsterdam-based,

software-as-a-service (SaaS) DAM company with a well-defined

market approach that has grown to target enterprises in verticals like

consumer brands, healthcare, and technology. The company’s

market performance distinguishes it, with growth outpacing the

greater market and all its revenue attributed to its DAM product. This

helps Bynder remain disciplined in planning versus other companies

where DAM is a smaller component of overall revenue. The

company’s vision is on par with competitors, though it doesn’t yet

articulate how modular or atomic content is important to unlocking

scale and personalization efforts. Bynder’s product excels in its ease

of use, which has been a hallmark for the company for years. Its

intuitive and quick-to-deploy approach differentiates it versus some

DAM products that can take several months to deploy. The product

also has strong portal capabilities, which allow users to curate and

expose assets and style guides to both internal and external

stakeholders. One customer reference highlighted Bynder’s “support

team responsiveness and roadmap transparency” as areas that the

company has enhanced over the past two years. While the company

has plugged some gaps in its product, especially in the video space,
 it still lags other vendors in this evaluation when it comes to basic

DAM capabilities like digital rights management (DRM). Bynder is a

good fit for brand-forward companies that want an easy-to-use DAM

solution that they can deploy quickly.

• Widen leads with strong search and marketing

capabilities. Madison, Wisconsin-based Widen was recently bought

by digital experience vendor Acquia. With this purchase, Acquia

rounds out its digital experience platform (DXP) and fills the gap of

workflow and asset management capabilities. Widen offers a strong

roadmap of planned enhancements that are informed and tested by

customers that get to provide formalized feedback multiple times a

year during engagements with the vendor. The company offers the

ability for customers to upvote capabilities. It also offers a clear

commercial model and transparent pricing. Widen’s market approach

is broad but lacks the vertical specialization seen from Leaders in this

evaluation, and its vision doesn’t fully articulate the importance of

omnichannel content delivery. Widen offers superior capabilities with

its creative toolset integration, which supports traditional tools like

Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop as well as stock

photography libraries to augment in-house digital libraries. We expect

these additional creative integrations to become even more important

going forward as brands look to source content — and talent —

beyond their own walls. Widen also has solid digital rights

management capabilities, including integrations into third-party DRM

 applications. One customer reference highlighted Widen’s

implementation team, calling them “very thorough” and “not

overwhelming” in what could be a complex process. Widen lags

when it comes to 3D capabilities, which can be important in

unlocking scale via content variations. It’s a good fit for companies in

North America that want a full-service provider with a connection to a

broader DXP.

Strong Performers

• OpenText provides strong scalability and search but needs a

more complete vision.OpenText is a Waterloo, Ontario-based

software company that has been in the DAM space for more than two

decades. The company offers a portfolio of capabilities — from CMS

to contact center products. Its Media Management product’s market

approach targets the largest enterprises with its DAM product.

OpenText has traditionally targeted customers in North America and

Europe but is beginning to see traction in APAC and the Middle East

via its partner resellers. It has had on-par performance despite the

headwinds facing complex enterprise software. While OpenText is

solid from a strategic standpoint, it lacks a complete vision around

upstream and downstream analytics. OpenText’s product offers

superior capabilities in security and scalability. It has clients with

robust implementations of the product at a global scale, and its

customer references had more than 2 million assets each in their

DAMs. This positions OpenText to take advantage of content

 demands from global organizations. From a security standpoint,

OpenText is one of the few vendors in this evaluation with a strong

portfolio of certifications. One customer reference, highlighting

scalability, said that it stored more than 10 million assets across

dozens of business units without issue. However, OpenText comes

up short on PIM integrations and lacks a productized integration into

a leading PIM system, which is key for customers with deep

commerce needs. It’s a good fit for large, global enterprises that

require scale in addition to strong core DAM capabilities.

• Sitecore offers strong metadata and DRM but needs better

integrations. Sitecore is a San Francisco-based digital experience

company known for its DXP and agile CMS. It bought Stylelabs in

2018, which became its Content Hub DAM product. Sitecore offers a

well-defined market approach that targets manufacturing, healthcare,

and financial services organizations from midmarket to large

enterprises. Forrester anticipates strong DAM growth in these

verticals as they double down on content. Sitecore’s DAM also has

solid performance, well outpacing the market — which we estimate is

growing 15% year over year — and offering a solid contribution to

overall company revenue. Sitecore has been in the digital experience

space for decades, but its vision doesn’t fully articulate content

atomization and automation to deliver scale. Sitecore offers superior

capabilities in AI for metadata extraction, which has become

increasingly important for large enterprises as they centralize content

 and require metadata enrichment to drive search and reuse.

Sitecore’s AI capabilities can enrich large libraries of content and

provide differentiated, business-specific content intelligence.

Customer references gave positive feedback on the support they

received from Sitecore, noting that the vendor offered quick

responses for service and support issues. However, Sitecore’s PIM

integrations lag other vendors in this evaluation. It’s a good fit for

companies looking for a midmarket or enterprise DAM in verticals

that would benefit from a product that is closely aligned with adjacent

digital experience (DX) software apps.

• Brandfolder has solid scalability and portal features but weaker

ideation capabilities.Brandfolder is a Denver-based, SaaS-born

DAM that was recently acquired by collaborative work

management vendor Smartsheet. The company has been gaining

momentum and recognition in the market. It offers a strong partner

ecosystem, with its DAM listed on Google and HubSpot

marketplaces and with partners reselling and co-selling the product

and white-label arrangements. These initiatives and sales motions

speak to the maturity of its partner strategy. Brandfolder’s vision

highlights the importance of full content lifecycle support, but it

comes up short on content ideation and delivery. Brandfolder offers

superior capabilities for scalability, which is unique for a vendor of its

size. Its platform supports large enterprise deployments, with

customer references that back up its scalability claims. It also has

 differentiated capabilities when it comes to portals, which house

assets in addition to brand and style guidelines to create consistency

across the organization. Customer references gave Brandfolder

stellar marks on responsiveness to urgent problems, noting that the

company consistently replied in less than an hour. However,

Brandfolder doesn’t shine when it comes to PIM integrations or

healthcare-specific capabilities, which are neither productized nor

advanced. It’s a good fit for midmarket to enterprise clients that need

a scalable platform and complementary collaborative work

management capabilities but don’t require PIM or healthcare-specific

functionality.

• Tenovos has strong content generation capabilities but weak

workflow. Tenovos is a New York-based SaaS DAM founded in

2018 by a team of software industry veterans who set out to build a

better mousetrap. It has built good market momentum and offers a

strong, focused market approach targeting large B2C and direct-to-

consumer (DTC) brands in North America and Europe. Tenovos lags

competitors on performance; despite strong growth, the company

isn’t yet profitable. Additionally, Tenovos’ partner ecosystem needs to

mature and currently lacks listings on key marketplaces. Tenovos

offers superior capabilities in intelligent content generation, which is

foundational to delivering content at scale (e.g., automated

permutations of content and autocrop to areas of interest). This is

important to its target market of retailers that must be able to

 syndicate brand and product content to omnichannel endpoints.

Tenovos also has strong enterprise platform integrations in agile

CMS and PIM. One customer reference highlighted its speed of

deployment: “We were able to deploy the tool fairly quickly, which

isn’t always the case with complex and interconnected enterprise

software.” Tenovos lags its competitors in workflow and approval

capabilities, with a model that isn’t as mature or flexible as others in

this evaluation. It’s a good fit for retail and DTC brands that need a

quick-to-deploy DAM and are willing to provide product input to a

vendor that is growing.

• Digizuite offers strong integrations but comes up short in

usability and UI. Digizuite is a Denmark-based DAM company

founded in 2000. It’s one of the few remaining DAM-only specialists

in this evaluation, and its target verticals include manufacturing,

retail, and energy — spanning midsize to large enterprises.

Digizuite’s vision centers on UI, AI, and integrations to power

omnichannel content, but it doesn’t fully deliver on that vision in its

product. Its market approach is also on par with competitors, though

the vendor could stand to bolster it with joint go-to-market campaigns

with adjacent vendors in the DX space. Digizuite’s performance lags

others in this evaluation, and it’s not among the most frequently

mentioned DAMs in enterprise deals. Digizuite offers differentiated

capabilities in enterprise platform integrations, with strong

integrations into agile CMS and PIM systems — Optimizely and

 inriver, respectively. It also offers solid version control capabilities.

One customer reference noted positive experiences with its

implementation and support teams: “They’ll add new capabilities in

response to customer needs.” Digizuite comes up short in content

analytics, where it lags its competitors and offers a more basic view

of asset performance. It also has subpar offerings in vertical industry

capabilities, despite targeting healthcare. Digizuite doesn’t include

follow-the-sun support services as a standard offering — it’s an

option — which can result in slower response times for some

customers. It’s a good fit for companies that don’t have massive

libraries of content but want to create a connected content

ecosystem with integration capabilities.

Contenders

• MediaBeacon offers solid library services but doesn’t provide

meaningful integrations.MediaBeacon is a Minneapolis-based

DAM firm that rolls up to global conglomerate Danaher and

packaging company Esko. It offers a strong partner ecosystem that

its clients take advantage of to implement and scale the DAM.

MediaBeacon’s vision is moving away from core DAM use cases and

toward one that focuses on product packaging. MediaBeacon offers

strong library services and excels in intelligent content generation,

the capabilities that power on-the-fly renditions and different versions

of assets for various use cases. It comes up short versus its

competitors in enterprise platform integrations — specifically agile

 CMS and PIM, which are important for content and commerce

applications. One customer reference noted that the platform needs

to be more extensible into a broader ecosystem of digital experience

providers to provide more relevancy within the DX stack.

MediaBeacon is a good fit for product and packaging companies that

need a scalable DAM product with strong core library services.

• Canto offers strong portals but has weak library services

capabilities. Canto is a San Francisco-based DAM company

founded in 1990. It has pivoted away from a multiproduct approach

and rallied around its SaaS DAM offering. Canto is weak relative to

others in this evaluation on its vision, which offers a view of a basic

asset repository but doesn’t position the vendor to unlock scale

through atomization and personalization. Its commercial model is

transparent but hasn’t yet evolved to embrace outcomes-based

pricing like some Leaders in this evaluation. Canto offers

differentiated search capabilities. It also has superior capabilities

when it comes to its portal, which has traditional offerings like curated

assets in addition to a style guide to create brand consistency. Its

“asset picker” capabilities extend the DAM into other applications like

a browser or email. However, Canto is weak on AI metadata

extraction. One customer reference noted that “autotagging still

needs some work” with consistency and overall functionality. It’s a

good fit for companies in verticals like retail and nonprofits that need
 an easy way to curate and present assets to a wide range of users

but don’t need a lot of added features.

• Hyland offers strong scalability but falls short on

usability. Hyland is a Westlake, Ohio-based technology company

that acquired Nuxeo DAM in 2021. Nuxeo offers an on-par product

roadmap of planned enhancements, which it communicates to and

solicits feedback from its customers. It uses Jira to give customers

visibility into planned enhancements and feature requests. This is our

third time evaluating Nuxeo in our DAM Forrester Wave, and its

vision continues to vacillate — from a core DAM to product content to

digital supply chain. This puts it at odds with other vendors in this

evaluation whose visions are more consistent. Nuxeo offers

differentiated support when it comes to 3D assets, which is important

for retail and manufacturing brands that are using — or beginning to

use — 3D components to deliver more flexible, scalable content

assets to the market. With 3D, creators can set up and power

emerging channels or output a 2D image to deliver to traditional

channels. It also offers a platform that is highly scalable. Nuxeo

comes up short versus its competitors in vertical industry capabilities,

where it offers no specialized capabilities for healthcare and on-par

capabilities for financial services. It has subpar creative toolset

integrations, with one customer reference stating, “The integration

looks promising but still needs more work to mature into a useful

product for creatives.” Nuxeo is a good fit for retail or manufacturing

 companies that require a scalable DAM but also plan on doing

custom development to build the DAM to suit their needs.

• CELUM offers solid enterprise integrations but lags in usability

and UI. CELUM is a Linz, Austria-based DAM firm founded in 1999

that’s still led by its founder. It keeps up with overall market growth

and is still profitable. It’s also one of the few remaining DAM

specialists in this evaluation. CELUM falls short on its market

approach, which is relatively narrow and geographically specific to

the DACH region (Germany, Austria, and German-speaking

Switzerland). CELUM offers solid enterprise platform integrations

with differentiated and well-adopted PIM integrations, which drive a

content and commerce story for the vendor. It falls short versus its

competitors in the areas of digital rights management and content

performance analytics. One customer reference said, “The out-of-

the-box analytics are very weak. You can’t deep dive into more

details.” CELUM is a good fit for DACH-region luxury goods or

manufacturing companies that need basic DAM capabilities with solid

PIM integrations.

• Censhare has solid search but struggles with work-in-progress

support. Censhare is a Munich-based software company founded in

2001 that sells DAM alongside a complementary suite of CMS and

PIM. Its vision articulates the importance of DAM within an enterprise

as the single source of truth for all content assets. Censhare falls

short on market performance, blaming the pandemic for its inability to

 keep up with market growth. Censhare offers solid capabilities when

it comes to search and scale, both of which are important capabilities

to drive adoption of a DAM. It has users who test the robustness and

scalability of the platform, with some customer references storing

more than 2 million assets in the DAM. Censhare lags when it comes

to workflow and approval capabilities, which are more ad hoc than

formalized and configurable. It also struggles in the area of content

performance analytics. One customer reference said, “There are little

to no reporting capabilities within our DAM. It’s one of the missing

features we talk about most.” Censhare is a good fit for European

companies with large content libraries and sophisticated users who

prioritize scale over ease of use.

Evaluation Overview

We evaluated vendors against 27 criteria, which we grouped into three high-level

categories:

• Current offering. Each vendor’s position on the vertical axis of the

Forrester Wave graphic indicates the strength of its current offering.

Key criteria for these solutions include library services, work-in-

progress assets, video and emerging content support, marketing

support, usability and user interface, enterprise platform integration,

and vertical/industry capabilities.

 • Strategy. Placement on the horizontal axis indicates the strength of

the vendors’ strategies. We evaluated product vision, market

approach, performance, planned enhancements, partner ecosystem,

and commercial model.

• Market presence. Represented by the size of the markers on the

graphic, our market presence scores reflect each vendor’s revenue

and average deal size.

Vendor Inclusion Criteria

Forrester included 14 vendors in the assessment: Adobe, Aprimo, Brandfolder, Bynder,

Canto, CELUM, censhare, Digizuite, Hyland, MediaBeacon, OpenText, Sitecore,

Tenovos, and Widen. Each of these vendors has:

• Product revenue totaling at least $10 million annually. The

vendors we included generate at least $10 million in product revenue

annually from DAM. We kept the revenue cutoff at this level to

feature some of the smaller players and their impact on the richness

and growth of the DAM market.

• A best-of-breed, standalone product available for purchase. The

vendors we evaluated have a best-of-breed or standalone product

actively available for purchase. We did not include vendors that have

embedded, lightweight DAM functionality inside another solution in

categories like product information management, content marketing

platforms, or other systems.

• Enterprise market traction and global deployments. The vendors

we evaluated actively pursue enterprise deals and have enterprise

 customers using their products in key verticals like retail, financial

services, and healthcare. In this evaluation, we define an enterprise

deployment as one where a single product is used across an entire

company on a regional or global scale.

• A robust partner, services, and integration network. The vendors

we evaluated have a strong partner, services, and integration

network. Enterprise DAM is often a costly and complex purchase,

and having the right partners to support a deployment is critical to

DAM success.

• Forrester client interest. The vendors we evaluated are frequently

mentioned in Forrester client inquiries, shortlists, consulting projects,

and case studies. We see this demand-side interest as an important

measure of market traction as well as the firms’ brand-building

efforts.

Supplemental Material

Online Resource

We publish all our Forrester Wave scores and weightings in an Excel file that provides

detailed product evaluations and customizable rankings; download this tool by clicking

the link at the beginning of this report on Forrester.com. We intend these scores and

default weightings to serve only as a starting point and encourage readers to adapt the

weightings to fit their individual needs.

The Forrester Wave Methodology

A Forrester Wave is a guide for buyers considering their purchasing options in a

technology marketplace. To offer an equitable process for all participants, Forrester

follows The Forrester Wave™ Methodology Guide to evaluate participating vendors.

In our review, we conduct primary research to develop a list of vendors to consider for

the evaluation. From that initial pool of vendors, we narrow our final list based on the

inclusion criteria. We then gather details of product and strategy through a detailed

questionnaire, demos/briefings, and customer reference surveys/interviews. We use

those inputs, along with the analyst’s experience and expertise in the marketplace, to

score vendors, using a relative rating system that compares each vendor against the

others in the evaluation.

We include the Forrester Wave publishing date (quarter and year) clearly in the title of

each Forrester Wave report. We evaluated the vendors participating in this Forrester

Wave using materials they provided to us by November 18, 2021 and did not allow

additional information after that point. We encourage readers to evaluate how the

market and vendor offerings change over time.

In accordance with The Forrester Wave™ And New Wave™ Vendor Review Policy,

Forrester asks vendors to review our findings prior to publishing to check for accuracy.

Vendors marked as nonparticipating vendors in the Forrester Wave graphic met our

defined inclusion criteria but declined to participate in or contributed only partially to the

evaluation. We score these vendors in accordance with The Forrester Wave™ And The

Forrester New Wave™ Nonparticipating And Incomplete Participation Vendor

Policy and publish their positioning along with those of the participating vendors.

Integrity Policy
We conduct all our research, including Forrester Wave evaluations, in accordance with

the Integrity Policy posted on our website.

Survey Methodology

Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2022, was fielded between September and December

2021. This online/CATI (computer-assisted telephone interviewing) survey included

1,834 respondents in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, New

Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, the UK, and the US. The survey was split into two

tracks, with unique questions, based on the selling model of the respondents’

organization. The B2B track includes 1,064 respondents, and the B2C track includes

770 respondents.