Acquia DAM (Widen) vs. Extensis Portfolio

Acquia DAM is well suited for large companies that need to organize and control the flow of assets being used by their teams and vendors. It provides much better control than file storage sites like Dropbox, where there's little control over what goes where and almost non-functional search functionality. If you're a smaller company, you may be able to get by or have someone dedicated to doing so, but for larger companies, it really takes a lot of the manual work out of it!

Incentivized

Extensis Portfolio is perfect for organizing photos as long as everything is keyworded correctly. If it is not part of a group's workflow to add a description or keywords to your photos, then you'd be dumping your photos into a pool with no way to search for them. Extensis Portfolio is best utilized when you give it the ability to help you search (by keywords yourself).

Incentivized

• They offer valuable guidance and educational resources to Administrators
• Their I.T. support is knowledgeable and responsive. And friendly!
• They build community among Acquia DAM (Widen) Admins
• They aren't as salesy and pushy as many of the other DAM Vendors that we considered. I don't feel like they are constantly trying to upsell me or take advantage. I hope this continues to be the case with the acquisition by Acquia.
• They're just plain nice people to work with.

Incentivized

• Watch folders: Extensis allows for multiple watch folders to be commissioned on a variety of network connected data shares--NAS, direct connect external HDs, etc.. We have our workflow such that each photographer can upload their job into their own folder, and Portfolio automatically injests the image assets.
• Metadata injecting: a key component of our archiving needs are met with Portfolio's fully- customizatable and automatic metadata injection. This allows us to set standard fields across all the assets, while also allowing for custom variations in categories, keywords, and tags. Absolutely key to our workflow.
• Integration with Adobe CC is seamless through the built-in connector.
• Finally, the support team is OUTSTANDING! We absolutely LOVE our support engineer. We are a small org compared to the rest of his portfolio, but he always puts in the extra effort and takes the time to allow us to feel like we are totally supported.

Incentivized

• The AI tagging is not very intuitive; if you upload 100 assets, you have to wait for ages to see if they have been tagged by constantly checking the field views over and over again. It would be good to have an AI tagging manager where you could submit and check tagging status.
• For image downloading, it would be good to be able to select an image size rather than an aspect and then adjust the image to the size.
• We would have jumped at the chance for SSO or Site Core integration, but the costs were so high it just was not worth it; we could have hired people to do it manually for cheaper.

Incentivized

• Learning curve. It can be very intimidating and difficult to learn for people who are not experienced with similar software.
• Ease of adding new users. It's currently a long process to bring anyone new onto the platform. We have to go through our DAM manager and only they have the ability to add or remove people.
• Thumbnail previews sometimes blank. Sometimes the thumbnails for photos don't load or need to be refreshed manually, which can be frustrating when needing to search through multiple folders and photos.

Incentivized

Acquia DAM (Widen) is changing its pricing model and at this point, we are unsure whether it is a good thing for us or not. While we consider this a robust tool, we will take our time to evaluate the competitors.

Incentivized

Acquia DAM (Widen) is very intuitive, it does not take extensive training as some tools do to use the tool. Uploading assets, creating portals, collections and sharing are all very simple. Acquia DAM (Widen) also does not force you to fill out all of the metadata. You can fill out as little or as much as you would like.

Incentivized

Never had an issue where I was unable to access Widen.

Incentivized

There have been a couple of rare instance where after I uploaded an asset, I was unable to rename it, or after uploading it it took a while before it actually appeared and can be viewed in the DAM.

Incentivized

The Acquia DAM support team is fantastic! Not only do we have an amazing customer support contact, the regular chat support is a great resource. Our CSM schedules meetings with our team regularly to ensure that we're meeting our goals. And the general support is great at responding quickly!

Incentivized

Because our organization tends to run software on older equipment, finding someone to support our particular configuration was a challenge. Additionally, trying to explain to someone In tech support about our issues was difficult because a lot of the issues were quirks within the software that had to be seen to be understood.

Incentivized

The training was very thorough. The recordings for all our traning sessions were provided to us so that we could go back and review. Our trainer was always available for follow up questions. Our trainer shared a spreadsheet with us as a checklist for all things that needed to be done to ensure proper import and setup of our assets and DAM.

Incentivized

It was a lot of work! But worth the effort to get our assets cleaned up and organized. Enough time and personnel need to be allotted for any implementation, but we had some advantage in having our assets in a previous DAM with attached metadata in XML, and our users were prepared with knowledge of our existing DAM at that time. Though old habits present their own issues, a company that is starting from scratch with no DAM has to think farther ahead about how it will organize and collect assets. Far more pre-planning with stakeholders would be needed for a company starting an implementation from scratch.

Incentivized

We started with the Widen system but ended up switching to Brandfolder. Brandfolder had the consistent interface across internal and external platforms. It was easier to use and search for assets for our internal team and brand partners. I preferred the Widen system's ability to share assets with direct links and the ability to add metadata upon upload.

Incentivized

We have been with Extensis for many years-- so the comparisons are outdated at this point. Companies like WebDAM, Adobe's Lightroom, mediavalet, and others, just don't have the robust catalogue management Portfolio does. There is a solidness and assurance of functionality we experience when using Portfolio-- nothing clunky or web-cloud shaky

Incentivized

• Acquia DAM simplifies global access by offering an intuitive platform for easy asset uploads
• With centralized storage, sharing becomes seamless, fostering efficient collaboration worldwide.
• Utilizing Acquia DAM, I efficiently apply metadata for accurate categorization, enabling easy reference to past content whenever needed.

Incentivized

• Allows quick and easy image and asset searches.
• Has been an invaluable tool for our organization by freeing up database employees to tackle other tasks.

Incentivized