Creative Management Software Tools – Top 16 Solutions to Choose From

The definition of a creative management platform

Digital marketing is an incredibly competitive field, with new trends and technologies shaking up the entire market on a regular basis. Keeping up with every new technology and idea that could potentially improve the results of a standard marketing campaign is challenging enough – but there is also a rising problem of content demand that needs to be solved.

With the entire world reaching levels of digitalization that were unheard of before, there is a lot more demand for content as a whole. A lot of marketing campaigns struggle to keep up with the demand purely because they lack the resources to do so – be it in terms of software, or in terms of a competent workforce. This particular gap between the demand for content and the capability to produce said content is a well-known problem in the industry.

The biggest goal of CMPs, or Creative Management Platforms, is to solve this exact problem. CMP in its most bare-bones form is a cloud-based solution that offers marketing teams a lot of useful features. These features range from ad design and ad distribution to task automatization, performance measurement, and more. It is supposed to be a centralized hub for all of your digital marketing needs and services – with the convenience of having a number of completely different features within a single user-friendly platform.

Creative management systems and their variety

At the same time, it is not that easy to define something as a “standard” for a CMP platform. As we have mentioned before, there is a basic definition of what a CMP can do – but it does not mean that every CMP would have all of the aforementioned features. In fact, a lot of platforms for creative projects have a rather limited set of features while also being able to qualify as a CMP.

In reality, a creative management platform can be beneficial in several different ways. A CMP for a designer is a great tool for general ad generation, with the help of all the latest technologies in art generation – but without the complexity of something like Adobe Photoshop with its hundreds of menus and tools to choose from. A CMP for a marketer is an ad publishing tool, first and foremost – with the ability to optimize those ads in multiple ways, while also offering insights into how all these ads work. As for the marketing or design team as a collective term – a CMP can be a great collaboration platform that allows seamless data sharing and easy feedback exchange, which boosts productivity, boosts ad quality, and so much more.

There is a lot of demand for these kinds of creative management tools – and the demand is there for both simplistic and comprehensive solutions. Different marketing agencies and companies have different budgets, different goals, and different use cases for creative management platforms. As such, the definition of a CMP is rather vague, purely because of how varied those solutions can be.

The truth is, figuring out a solution for your specific creative management needs can be an incredibly complicated process. It may also be extremely expensive if it turns out that the solution you have chosen has a lot of features that are not needed for your current tasks, and the overall payment is a heavy burden on your financial situation. As such, it is always recommended to perform all kinds of research before picking a specific creative management system for your business.

16 best creative management platforms and tools

Speaking of research, this is our part in helping companies to figure out what kind of solution may suit them the most. In the list below you’ll find 16 completely different creative management platforms. Each of these CMPs has its own set of features, and it is our intent to make it as obvious as possible which solution suits what kind of marketing company the best.

Celtra

Celtra is a creative management platform that offers performance branding, collaboration improvements, workflow optimization, and so on. It has brand consistency toolkits, a central content repository for all of your translations, descriptions, and headlines, as well as smart image cropping, customizable reports, and built-in approval and briefing capabilities. At the same time, it may be somewhat confusing when it comes to creating reports, and the overall product price is not exactly approachable for smaller companies.

ironSource Luna Platform

ironSource Luna is a marketing platform that hosts a number of useful features, helping marketing teams via automated tasks, workflow optimizations, as well as the ability to produce creative advertisements and deploy them via multiple marketing channels. Its features include keyword analysis, performance optimization with ML help, a centralized place to see all of your marketing activities at once, and also the ability to analyze the KPIs of your campaigns. However, it is somewhat complicated in terms of general operations throughout the platform, and some users have reported delays in terms of data synchronization.

Widen Collective

As a creative management software, Widen Collective’s capabilities mostly revolve around asset distribution and asset management for different channels, teams, and tools. It supports multiple preview formats, asset history, data exporting capabilities for a variety of specific topics, and a visible workflow of the entire lifecycle of a company. Unfortunately, it also lacks quite a lot of features that are regular for this particular sphere, and the user interface as a whole is not particularly friendly, making the overall learning curve quite steep.

Papirfly

Papirfly is another variation of an all-in-one creative management service that allows its clients to create marketing materials with custom-made templates, with the ability to modify those templates to their own circumstances without any third-party expert help. It can act as a brand hub for different teams to communicate in, while also offering extensive analytics, embedded digital asset management, and even a variety of APIs to be able to deliver your data to different software solutions in your organization. Its photo editing tool may be somewhat lacking, as well as its overall UI, but the solution itself is quite competent for different situations and circumstances.

Bannerwise

Digital ad production can be automated with the help of Bannerwise – a platform for creative projects that can also create, optimize, and even publish various advertisements. It has the capability to set up a brand identity for all of your content at once, can create custom dynamic ads, offers support for video banner ads, and has an adaptive algorithm that can create different variations of the same ad in seconds. It is also not particularly fast and may not be the most feature-rich solution on the market, but its overall capabilities are still enough for a lot of customers.

AdCreative.ai

The name of this creative platform reveals most of its specializations at once. AdCreative.ai is a CMP that uses the assistance of an AI to generate various ad creatives/posts for social media. It can create multiple copies of the same ad in different languages, is capable of using your existing data to improve overall efficiency, and can re-render all of your projects in one click. However, its implementation of AI is not perfect, and its assortment of different designs to choose from can also use some work.

Miro

Miro is a rather well-known visual platform that can be also considered one of the creative management platforms purely because of its collaborative capabilities. It can track time, client bills, serve as a collaboration hub, and manage various resources of a company in question. It provides a set of pre-built templates while also giving the ability to create your own templates. It offers multiple ways of communication, a myriad of integrations with other services, a number of widgets, and more. It is also not particularly easy to start working with, and the overall support experience seems to be lacking in some areas.

Sesimi

Sesimi is another platform for creative projects that focuses a lot on brand management specifically. It can be used to manage branded content and share it, or even create it from scratch. It offers digital asset management capabilities along with a number of other features, such as cloud-based approvals, creative templates, asset editing control, etc. Unfortunately, it is also not particularly fast, and the customization options may be lacking for larger enterprises with higher demands in terms of creativity and customization.

Smartly.io

Smartly.io is a powerful automatization tool that earned its place on the list of creative management systems via its extensive automatization capabilities, especially when it comes to social advertising. It has the ability to create, test, and launch various ads and projects, improve them with time, while also being a great place for teams to collaborate in. It offers a selection of dynamic templates with personalized social media content, as well as predictive algorithms, third-party integrations, custom KPIs, and more. At the same time, it is not the most intuitive solution in the world, and the overall customization could definitely use some work.

Storyteq

Storyteq represents another example of a CMP with a big focus on automatization. It can be used to create brand-specific templates for digital marketing content – be it static images, animated banners, or videos. Its template builder has drag-and-drop support, it offers a centralized timeline of all your banner sizes, and it can also automatically deliver assets to ad campaigns one by one or in bulk. At the same time, it is not the most detailed template editing solution out there, and most of the interactions with AE projects have a rather steep learning curve.

Bynder

Bynder, on the other hand, is more focused on digital asset management rather than automatization, offering a cloud-based centralized hub for digital assets in different forms. It can offer both physical and digital brand templates, has its own Creative Workflow service for better workflow management, can set up brand guidelines for your entire team to follow, and also has quite detailed analytics. Bynder also has its own issues to deal with, such as a relatively outdated UI, somewhat lackluster reporting, and some of its features (collections, workflows) being bare-bones, for the most part.

Bannerflow

Bannerflow is one of those solutions that fit the term “Creative Management Platform” the most, offering a wealth of features in terms of marketing campaign management, ad personalization and production automation. It has an entire support team available at all times, the capability to create and improve translation/localization workflows, various collaborative capabilities to help remote workers, a wealth of automation features, and so on. However, Bannerflow is also not the most technologically advanced solutions out there, with some of its features lacking advanced functionality that some of its competitors can offer, and the overall banner making toolset may feel a bit rigid in circumstances when more customization is needed.

Adpushup

Adpushup is one of the more specialized solutions on this list, offering a lot of advanced features for a creative management solution. It claims to be an ad revenue optimization platform, offering businesses help with various aspects of marketing campaigns with the end goal of boosting revenue. Adpushup claims to be able to help businesses obtain their revenue that has been ad-blocked, while also being compliant with Google policies, having a dedicated account manager for each customer, and also having an ML-based optimization engine that can suggest various improvements to layouts and marketing campaigns of its customers.

Creative Force

Creative Force is another unusual competitor on this list – a studio management software built specifically for interacting with e-commerce content. It has automatic metadata tagging, AWS infrastructure, extensive reporting, editable digital guides, sample management, integration with post-production, and more. It does have its issues with onboarding, and the overall scope of its capabilities might be more suitable for smaller companies – but it is still an unusual take on a creative management platform.

Viewst

The last, but definitely not the least solution on this list is Viewst – a simple and scalable SaaS fpr designers and mareters. It offers a variety of useful features that help creative management as a process – a library of templates, versioning and automation, creative change management, and approval streamlining. It can track the performance of different socials in a single place, perform creative A/B testing with minimal effort, and so much more. While it is true that Viewst does not have a limited free version for the sake of feature testing, it does have a free trial for its potential clients, offering the ability to try out all kinds of features before deciding to proceed with the purchase or not.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is an incredibly difficult field. One of the main goals of CMPs is to make this field far easier to navigate and work with. But figuring out a specific solution for yourself is a long and difficult process with a lot of nuances. You may need a solution such as Bynder or Sesimi if your main goal is to manage digital content, or you may find that solutions like Bannerflow or Viewst are best for you, with their combination of image editing and ad management capabilities. 

The reality is that finding a perfect solution for yourself is not easy, and it is our hope that we could make this process somewhat easier for some of you by providing a detailed explanation of each company’s capabilities and strengths. This article also provides insight into what a creative management platform is in the first place, which is an interesting piece of information to know for almost everyone in this field of work.