January 08, 2023

Topics: DAM

Top 5 Free and Open Source DAM Software in 2023

By bolstering brand visibility, consistency and promise, DAM software are all set to lead the change for businesses in 2023.

Open Source DAM: Why It's Your Best Choice?

A Gartner survey shows that around 90% of organizations depend on open source components in their functioning. Whether it's easing scalability, flexibility, transformation, cutting down costs, or pushing the envelope of innovation, open-source DAM comes out tops. That's because most outright proprietary digital asset management solutions are built explicitly to gel only with other proprietary software offered by the same vendor and not with other software solutions in the market.

On the other hand, an open-source best DAM system comes with APIs that provide excellent interoperability with any 3rd party software. It also provides a single repository for images, animations, illustrations, logos, audiovisual content, and hordes of other digital media present in numerous formats and their respective metadata.

Pimcore DAM: One of the Best Open Source Solutions That Exists!

Apart from being open-source, Pimcore DAM is one of the few software in the industry that is genuinely open and aims at achieving real business transformation. Pimcore does it by consolidating all your digital media assets and integrating and managing any kind and amount of digital data for any industry.

Here's delving a bit deeper into how Pimcore's open-source DAM compares with its contemporaries:

Pimcore DAM

Centralizes all your media assets, including images, videos, documents, graphics, and other media content.
Optimizes data dissemination, reuse of digital assets, and content searches.
Provides scalability and high performance.
Aids operational efficiency, automated workflows, multi-channel marketing.
Equips you with effective metadata management.
Integrates easily with PIM, CMS, and desktop publishing software.
Offers 24/7 availability of content and media assets.
Eases AI/ML image tagging workflows powered by Google TensorFlow.
Integrates extremely well with a PIM system to improve product experiences

Ingesting Media Assets: Pimcore's cloud DAM lets you ingest assets by just dragging and dropping or importing complex folder hierarchies promptly from your desktop. Descriptive metadata can be included in the digital assets conveniently from the backend. It even provides a suitable tagging module to find relevant asset data, including AI-powered smart tags by Google Tensor Flow and Amazon Recognition.

Security of Media Assets: Tracking and allowing access to the digital assets to anyone is relatively easy with Pimcore’s intuitive dashboard (built directly into its interface). Its end-to-end Data Encryption and Identity and Access Management (IAM) keeps it safe and secure. Admin(s) can give access rights, define user roles, trace the usage (additions, modifications, deletion), and other critical metrics related to DAM.

Storing Media Assets: Pimcore DAM is an enterprise-ready platform that keeps media assets of any kind, variety, volume, or amount and its meta-data in a centralized repository. Due to accuracy in scanning, tagging, and storing, Pimcore DAM makes it relatively easy to retrieve data from piles of information.

Transformation of Media Assets: Pimcore DAM transforms media assets for businesses via its advanced transformation pipelines to support various resolutions, bit-rate conversions, color profiles, DPIs, and responsive states for several output channels. Pimcore DAM also creates perfect images for resized, cropped webshops that are in a proper format.

Enriching Media Assets: Pimcore offers a highly user-friendly interface fuelled by core concepts such as multi-tab interface and conceptual navigation, making it extremely quick and easy to handle and enrich assets. In Pimcore DAM, analytics is powered by Matomo, a leading web analytics software (which is also open-source) that offers enterprises 100% data ownership, privacy protection of any analytical data stored, collected, and processed.

Related Media Assets: Pimcore DAM helps you create a range of metadata around your media assets. This metadata supports establishing relations to track variants and find assets. The metadata in the open-source Pimcore DAM can be pre-configured according to the asset type in multiple languages. This data can be also be called by other systems like PIM and MDM through Pimcore APIs.

Processing Media Assets: With pre-built transformation templates in its library and customized watermarks, Pimcore DAM offers a structured process of working with assets, including versioning, editing, tagging, and scheduling. Also, multiple formats can be published from a single file through content delivery networks.

Finding Media Assets: The content search process in Pimcore DAM is highly streamlined. It is supported by a highly flexible and configurable metadata management model that uses an enhanced tagging module to aid asset findability. Pimcore DAM makes sure its searchability remains meaningful and scalable.

Previewing Media Assets: Previewing capability in Pimcore DAM is quite convenient. Being compatible with more than 220 different file formats, including bitmap formats, office documents, vector formats, pdfs, and various video codecs. The transformation function and rich preview feature are some of the most substantial aspects of Pimcore DAM.

Publishing Media Assets with Headless DAM: Publishing media assets in Pimcore is relatively easy as it’s carried out through its single-source publishing features that manages digital assets centrally. Its headless DAM feature can also make it all the more effective and efficient. Besides, the meta-information containing asset specifications aids the assets in reaching their right destination. Pimcore’s data hub allows reusable, automated digital asset pipelines for higher scalability

Final thoughts about Pimcore DAM:

"Pimcore DAM is a highly advanced, truly open-source platform. Convenient integration with other systems makes it a superior enterprise content hub. Most importantly, Pimcore DAM comes bundled with an ecosystem of highly successful PIM, CMS, and eCommerce software. The entire combination can fast-track enterprise growth by many notches, making businesses robust and future-ready."

Explore Features of Pimcore DAM

ResourceSpace DAM

Offers an open-source digital asset management software
Can be customized according to the brand
Shares assets from one central hub
Offers advanced privacy settings to secure and protect files
Helps organizations improve efficiency, encourage collaboration, and free up time and resources.
Is fully customizable to meet the demands of businesses in the best possible way

Ingesting Media Assets: There are many options for getting files into the system. The basic one is through FTP and local folder uploading method. Uploading happens through dragging and dropping. Another one is through StaticSync mode, which is needed while operating on a large set of files.

Security of Media Assets: Permission control, single enterprise sign-on, and configuration for multiple user privacy are some of the ways how media assets are made secure in ResourceSpace. It also offers customization of security settings of your user accounts under system configuration.

Storing Media Assets: Media assets are stored in a central hub of DAM, where file preview, editing of format and size, archiving, syncing, categorizing, sharing, transferring security, advanced searching, and filtering is also possible.

Transformation and Enrichment of Media Assets: Provides many options and complete control for in-app customizations and modifications to suit any businesses' needs. It supports several configuration options, including search result display, displayed text, etc. Personalization of the interface is also possible by changing the colors, header image, layout, and more; it can be done quickly using the admin dashboard settings.

Related Media Assets: The version control tool allows users to carry out a simple revert process. The recognition tool allows objects, items, faces, places present in your visual media to be automatically detected, making appropriate keyword suggestions. Since Resourcespace is only a DAM platform, no relation exists with any master data.

Process Media Assets: With ResourceSpace, the media process includes uploading media files, editing multiple resources, editing previews, sharing of resources, version control, usage history, followed by performance monitoring through actionable analytics and reliable reports.

Find Media Assets: ResourceSpace supports fast and accurate file search. It allows users to identify assets by geographic location while supporting a wide variety of languages so that the search experience becomes global. It also offers some special search tools.

Preview Media Assets: The file previews are available for hundreds of images, videos, and documents, that includes browsing pdfs page after page, as well as generating automatic video previews that are web-ready.

Publish Media Assets: Publishing media assets or making assets available on third-party sites happens by exporting content on platforms such as YouTube, Drupal, Flickr, WordPress, Joomla, or other CMS systems. The created video content, images, or slideshows need to be embedded on 3rd party sites by following specific instructions.

Final thoughts about ResourceSpace DAM:

"Publishing media assets or making them available on 3rd party sites happens through embedding, by following specific instructions; this additional task only makes the process a long-drawn-out one."

Razuna DAM

Is an open-source digital asset management software
Can be stored and deployed anywhere
Can manage any assets of any format
Creates a centralized digital asset management system for better sharing and collaboration
Is highly secure and reliable
Offers a powerful search engine
Is quite extensible due to APIs

Ingesting Media Assets: You can choose the folder and drag and drop it to the upload window. You can select more than one asset at once. Files can also be added from an FTP server. There is also the possibility of adding files through emails or creating a link to your existing file servers.

Security of Media Assets: With Razuna DAM, users can stores digital assets very safely by keeping it on their network, utilize SSL encryption, fix up user permissions, and deploy DAM on the cloud. Access controls can be created effortlessly for every folder. Its group permissions hold power over who gets access to confidential information.

Storing Media Assets: Media assets can be stored on a local server and offers you the option of using cloud storage such as Euclaptyus or Amazon S3. Users can even deploy it on their virtualization platform. It supports a fully managed cloud storage, fueled by a global network of storage nodes.

Transformation and Enrichment of Media Assets: Razuna lets you manage media assets efficiently. Any video, image, or audio can be converted individually to any other format. Assets can be converted into the desired format within Razuna itself without needing any 3rd party apps; in the end, it offers available formats to the users from which they can choose. Users can even give URLs directly to their customers or develop a webpage having a collection of assets.

Related Media Assets: An option to integrate into WordPress exists with the free WordPress plugin. The desktop app of Razuna gives direct access to your digital library. Besides, Razuna uses the XMP standard for its media, which is very widely used by every other vendor. Since Razuna is only a DAM platform, its assets aren't related to any master data.

Process Media: Batch processing exists that allows you to edit metadata of many assets in a single process. It also captures metadata from documents, audio, or video files. For version management, Razuna gives you an option to create new assets of the original asset and upload it as a new version. Therefore, you can easily create a list of all the versions.

Find Media Assets: Every asset in Razuna DAM gets indexed and is made available through its powerful search. The search happens through the title, descriptions of the documents, and a full index search of the entire document. Even the metadata can be indexed within your assets.

Publish Media Assets: Razuna DAM lets you publish your media assets directly to the web. Razuna can integrate into your publishing workflow; it captures, displays, and writes metadata (EXIF/XMP/ITPC, etc.). As a result, you can add descriptions and keywords to your assets, which stay with them.

Final thoughts about Razuna DAM:

"Razuna can be shaped according to the needs of any industry or organization. It is an extensible and scalable solution. It is quite compatible with WordPress; however, its interoperability with other 3rd party software is unclear. Also, to what extent it supports flexibility and innovation remains unclear too.
Razuna comes only in payable versions, meant for Business, Enterprise+, and Non-profits."

HyperCMS

Offers an open-source digital asset management cloud service
Is scalable, reliable, and effective
Enables workplace integration, i.e., direct access and editing of all your files without needing any download/upload.
Supports smartphones and tablets to access rich content anytime, everywhere.
Offers a personalized system
Connects all your systems and enables them to access, search and integrate with digital assets

Ingesting Media Assets: Multiple files can be uploaded from diverse sources such as local file systems, Dropbox, and FTP by merely dragging and dropping them. Files that are compressed, such as folders and data libraries, can be automatically indexed and extracted. HyperCMS's supports the import and export interface of any asset automatically in and out of the system. Along with the files, it enables the import of meta information. For instance, the limitations of file formats do not restrict the metadata definitions in any way.

Security of Media Assets: HyperCMS DAM secures your precious data and protects your system from outside attacks. Equipped with a 256-bit AES encryption, HyperCMS's system supports industry-standard SSL/TSL connection security. It is prepared to catch a variety of intrusions. Therefore, the safety of the system is such that it emphasizes on blocking of malicious attacks.

Storing Media Assets: Media assets can be centrally stored, safely, and easily shared internally or externally. As a universal tool, the hyper content and DAM server manage every content project, whether it is on the Internet, Extranet, or Intranet. The features in HyperCMS DAM offers an array of functions to administer, share, and integrate digital media.

Transformation and Enrichment of Media Assets: HyperCMS DAM allows the processing and editing images without any additional software. For instance, Adobe Photoshop files can be turned into any common format. Images can be integrated into office documents. The selection of images can be simultaneously edited, where a watermark can be put on every image.
Videos can be edited and published on different channels such as web pages or YouTube quickly via their browser. It also supports batch process and watermarking of videos.
Besides this, multiple language support for media assets is available.

Related Media Assets: HyperCMS ensures there's no need to replicate, redesign, or repurchase any asset, as original files are always available. The associated media lets you see all assets at once that are either linked used as another asset. Their folder location is irrespective. Users can conveniently relate and identify assets with each other for higher efficiency.

Process Media: HyperCMS allows you to access all the rich content straightaway by integrating into your creative workflow (whether it's internal or external) and programs (such as OpenOffice, MS Office, or Adobe CS). The process control is made sure of collaborative approvals. The content is then directly shared on social media channels. It also facilitates the creation of brand portals to promote and measure the success of rich content.

Find Media Assets: Searching files is simple as the system can read and index many different file types. It can also read metadata from files and map them with your schema. Furthermore, optical character recognition (OCR) can be used for retrieving text from images. Users can find files using the search as per access permissions. An exhaustive, full-text search on any content and an advanced image search are also possible.
With face detection, objects or people can be recorded on video or images and can be traced swiftly through search. Auto-tagging enables examining images, videos to automatically identify and suggest keywords.

Preview Media Assets: With HyperCMS, the system generates file previews that simplify archiving, administration, and locating documents, images, videos, and audio files. Files can be viewed, edited, and published on different channels such as web pages and YouTube via just using their browser, without needing any new software.

Publishing Media Assets: Publishing content on multiple channels in separate presentations is relatively easy. HyperCMS facilitates repurposing of content numerous times to make the most out of your assets. Besides, publishing to mobile, print, social, tablet, and web from a single system is possible. Scheduled publishing and unpublishing is also possible by conveniently setting a time and date.

Final thoughts about HyperCMS DAM:

"In its Free Edition (i.e., Free License), HyperCMS excludes a lot of features like:

Annotations
Project Management
Task Management
Workflow Management (Definition an application of workflows)
Encryption (encryption of files and data)
Report Management (Create individual reports)
Workplace Integration (direct access to files)"
Client Brand Module (Custom design theme with the corporate design of the customer)
Connector (Social Media Sharing, Import/Export, OpenSearch/MS Share Point integration, OpenAPI/Webservice, Translation Service)"

Nuxeo DAM

Is a cloud-native, low-code tool and has a modular architecture.
Manages rich media (photos, audio, and video) and traditional content (office documents, PDFs, scanned images)
Automates content separation and remixing
Reduces duplicate content and deliver omnichannel customer experiences
Finds content quickly, wherever it is.
Offers AI-powered smart tagging and automated metadata management

Ingesting Media Assets: Nuxeo DAM supports the upload of multiple files, including 3D and 360-degree assets, through bulk uploading, hotfolder, and uploading via API. A considerable number of assets can be ingested across different locations without much infrastructure requirements. It also supports a high number of simultaneous downloads across multiple sites.

Security of Media Assets: Nuxeo follows the highest possible standards to secure your media assets. It consists of four essential security elements, namely: Authentication, Access, Protection, and Audit. Most of the time, Nuxeo is delivered through AWS, a highly trustworthy platform that offers infrastructure protection.

Storing Media Assets: With Nuxeo DAM, digital assets aren't tied to any specific system, department, or repository. It's independent of the confines of applications, platforms, or any information silos. Users don't need to migrate content; they can quickly find it irrespective of whether it resides in a network drive, cloud systems, other DAMs, or PCs. Nuxeo offers a 360-degree view of the organization's information. As for content silos inaccessible in applications, Nuxeo facilitates their stepwise consolidation without disruption in operations with its 'Federation Framework.'

Transformation and Enrichment of Media Assets: Nuxeo DAM allows users to use their preferred applications to create and edit content. Users can sync content to their PC, which enables them to edit it from any native application. They can also preview files without any need first to download it and with no specialized application. Asset reviewing, commenting, and transforming in Nuxeo DAM is possible, including with the Nuxeo Adobe CC Connector for editing creative cloud files.

Related Media Assets: Nuxeo DAM offers Nuxeo Studio to create all kinds of media assets for driving digital transformation. Nuxeo Studio gets you complete configurability and functionality with customized controls, eliminating the need for costly customizations. It helps you develop scalable and flexible content-centric apps in your enterprise anywhere.

Process Media: Nuxeo DAM enhances your creative lifecycle with easy access to assets created across organizations. With workflow automation, managing hotfolder, creative approvals, and single-click distribution gets simplified, and content creation is accelerated. Approvals can be secured with audit trails. In its entirety, Nuxeo DAM supports powerful tagging, creative review, omnichannel distribution, and advanced search.

Find Media Assets: Finding approved media assets through search is straightforward in Nuxeo DAM, no matter the scale in the number of assets in a given organization. Various users access DAM systems that best suit their needs from advanced search functions such as misspellings or synonyms. Nuxeo DAM claims they take less than a twentieth of a second in their search.

Preview Media Assets: With Nuxeo DAM, users can preview any file without requiring downloading first or without needing a specialized app such as photoshop. Previews are available for all kinds of file types, including complex files like 3D content that need to have rotatable previews or videos with storyboards as previews. It also allows users to peer into a zip file (and downloading only particular files).

Publishing Media Assets: Nuxeo DAM allows easy publishing and distribution of content to users. It helps you send finalized assets to social networks or portals and the internet and other systems. It also makes examining reports and analysis about your assets for culling insights a breeze.

Final thoughts about Nuxeo DAM:

"Nuxeo DAM is not open-source. Pricing is only available through customized quotes. Setting it up is a complicated process.
The ingestion of data can be a tedious process when done through ways other than web UI. Publishing on popular social media platforms and other multitudes of emerging new-age channels remain unclear."