Are you now trying to search inside the box to see if any epic campaign ideas are left?

Or, do you end up having sleepless nights because you have an extravagant idea but shudder at the thought of executing your creative vision with your large team?

The ideas are endless, but putting them into action, communicating them to the team, getting your ducks in a row, and launching them can be quite the struggle in creative operations.

Here is where creative operation software comes into play. 

What are creative operations?

Imagine you’re planning to run a digital marketing campaign on various platforms. The campaign includes a series of banner ads, social media graphics, a launch video, email marketing banners, and a landing page. To ensure quality, consistency, and compliance with your brand guidelines, you need to brainstorm, create, optimize, scale, distribute, and derive performance insights while keeping your team in the loop. With a creative operations application, you can easily streamline all these steps in a matter of minutes. 

Creative operations refers to the strategic and systematic approach to managing the processes, people, and technology involved in the creative production and marketing of content and assets while maintaining brand quality.

The different stages of creative operations

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1. Ideation and creation: This stage involves conceptualizing, researching, and creating initial drafts of content, visuals, or concepts.

Suited team/role: Creative teams including content and copywriters and designers.

2. Creative automation: The next step is making your content creation easier or multiplying them into different variations. Creative Automation is the combination of technology and tools to streamline repetitive or time-consuming creative tasks.

Suited team/role: Marketing and advertising teams 

3. Creative workflow and project management: Managing the entire creative process requires effective project management. This stage involves planning, scheduling, and overseeing the execution of creative projects. 

Suited team/role: Project managers, creative directors, marketing managers.

4. Creative asset management: In this stage, the focus is on organizing, storing, and retrieving creative assets such as images, videos, and design files that you have created or generated using AI.

Suited team/role: Brand managers, designers, digital marketers.

5. Creative analytics/optimization: . It's crucial to analyze its performance. This stage involves gathering data on how creative assets are performing and using insights to optimize future content. 

Suited team/role: Growth and performance marketers and data analysts.

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Also read: What is Creative Analytics and Why is it Important?

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Each of these stages plays a critical role in the creative process, and the involvement of different teams and roles ensures that creativity is efficiently utilized, automated, managed, and optimized to drive success for businesses. And who’s at the forefront of getting all of these different teams together? A creative operations manager!

If you’re struggling with creative operations, here is a list of 43 tools that can help ease your troubles.

Creative operations toolbox: 43 must-have tools 

Creative operations play a crucial role in businesses of all sizes, but the specific needs and strategies can vary depending on whether it's a small business, a mid-sized business, or an enterprise. 

Here, we’ve listed the top 43 creative operations tools for various teams and roles within the business scale along with their features, flexibility, pricing, and customer ratings. Find the right fit from here to elevate your team's day-to-day creative operations management.

Enterprises

They engage in extensive and complex creative operations, managing vast amounts of creative assets and campaigns across multiple teams and regions. They implement advanced digital asset management, data analytics, and marketing automation solutions. Enterprises emphasize global brand consistency, compliance, and data-driven decision-making to have a strong advantage in the market.

1. Artwork Flow

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Artwork Flow is a versatile creative operations platform that provides functionalities such as workflow management, online proofing, creative automation, and digital asset management to make the lives of marketing teams easier.

Highlights

• Smart proofing tool exposes to you the typos, errors, and compliance issues in your creatives.
• Replace emails with the Artwork Flow platform and get all your design feedback worked out in one place instantly.
• Track daily tasks and ease the approval process among team members with customizable and creative workflows.
• Scale/resize your creative assets without losing the quality and send personalized messages regardless of geographic borders using creative automation software. 
• Running a festive campaign? Generate stunning backgrounds for your creatives using AI-background image generator tool.
• Artwork Flow generates AI-enabled tags for every asset in the library helping to retrieve a brand asset from the past within seconds.

Pros

• AI-powered DAM library.
• The team always releases enhancements that make the experience better. 
• Customer team checks with you regularly to ensure everything’s running smoothly.
• Clean interface and easy to use.

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Cons

• Important features are hard to figure out from the interface.

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What gives it a competitive edge

Using Artwork Flow's Studio, you can create a basic ad, import it, and use a CSV file to get the copy edited into different languages for regional ads, expanding the global reach.

2. Monday.com

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This Monday pretty much drives your work blues away by making creative management fun. With a user-friendly interface, Monday.com offers flexible visibility, and projects can be customized to fit every individual’s needs. 

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Highlights

• Manage and track each part of the communication with stakeholders easily.
• Monitor your KPIs and optimize project campaigns accordingly.
• Create live-action items by embedding boards, dashboards, and other components into work documents.
• Monday AI is a recently introduced feature that is available in the beta now. From generating your weekly project plans to rephrasing your emails, this feature eases your work.

Pros

• Great customer service.
• Intuitive dashboard and interface.
• Customization options for specific projects. 

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Cons

• The layout can be confusing.
• To get certain features, you might need to upgrade the plan.

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What gives it a competitive edge

Tracking the progress of a project and checking in with collaborators to make them accountable, improving efficiency. 

3. ClickUp

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Many marketing agencies use ClickUp to manage campaigns, clients, operational procedures, and more.

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Highlights

• Helps to set clear project expectations with time estimates and monitor time spent with detailed reports. 
• Offers multiple templates for various marketing workflows.
• The ability to sync with your calendar to view all your tasks, events, and reminders in one place.
• Connect your marketing apps with 1000+ integrations.

Pros

• Ease of use.
• Automations are easy to set up. 
• Captures accurate client feedback and interdepartmental communication.

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Cons

• At times, you might lose a card while trying to upload it due to the delay.
• Does not facilitate communication through emails every time. 

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What gives it a competitive edge

With ClickUp’s sprint feature, visualize, and speed through any tasks by automating them to hit your target.  

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4. Creative Force

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Creative Force is a creative operations platform that streamlines the creative workflow by providing tools for managing product images, organizing content, and facilitating collaboration among creative teams.

Highlights

• Say goodbye to administration work with workflow automation and focus completely on productivity and creativity.
• Creative Force allows businesses to store, organize, and manage all of their creative assets, such as images, videos, and documents.
• Review different versions of your creatives with side-by-side comparisons using version control.

Pros

• Keep track and inventory of all the creative assets diligently.
• Real-time video production and tracking
• Service levels are satisfactory.

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Cons

• Important features are hard to figure out from the interface.

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What gives it a competitive edge

Creative Force is launching an AI-based content generation tool called Dreem.ai to identify and elevate e-commerce values for brands.

5. Smartsheet

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Smartsheet provides work management, content automation, and collaboration features that help marketing teams organize, track, and automate various projects and tasks.

Highlights

• Improve your team's productivity using utilization reports. It spots important trends from historical data such as the busiest months for your company, who's overboard on a project, and which teams have performed well.
• Remind your team of their tasks and deadlines with automated alerts and reminders.
• The platform can integrate with Google Workspace, Slack, Salesforce, Jira, and more. 

Pros

• Group information from all projects and track their progress.
• Access projects from the mobile app 
• Points out tasks with the most dependencies when managing an important project. 

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Cons

• You might find the workflow complex at times. 
• For integrations like Zapier, you need to pay extra. 

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What gives it a competitive edge

The Smartsheet solution continues to improve user experience by adding functions and features requested by users.

6. Adobe Advertising Cloud Creative

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Adobe Advertising Creative is a suite of tools within the Adobe Creative Cloud designed specifically for ad creation and optimization.

Highlights

• Adobe’s integration with its creative apps helps in seamless collaboration between teams and automatically scales over thousands of creatives within seconds.
• You can search and retarget customers using ad automation.
• Adobe Advertising Cloud Creative offers a variety of tools that businesses can use to create ads, including templates, drag-and-drop editors, and AI-powered tools. 

Pros

• Find all the essential creative tools in one place. 

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Cons

• The programs tend to crash.
• Opening files created in previous versions is impossible.

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What gives it a competitive edge

With all the Adobe integrations, you can centralize your workspace into one without the need to depend on any third-party apps.

7. Screendragon

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Screendragon provides creative operations features tailored for marketing and creative teams. With features like project management, workflow automation, budgeting, and more, it streamlines the creative process and improves team coordination.

Highlights

• Ensures brand governance by managing all brand resources in one place.
• With powerful dynamic forms, generate proper briefs and make use of features like real-time form calculations and multi-media previewing.
• Workflow automation is implemented in all content briefs, campaigns, localizations, and much more.

Pros

• Navigate like a pro with its user-friendly interface. 
• Advanced workflow capabilities. 

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Cons

• The loading time can be slow.

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What gives it a competitive edge

Screendragon lets you bid farewell to lengthy hand-over and tracking of old email correspondence by streamlining and improving the project oversight.

8. Bannerflow

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Manage campaigns and personalize ads at a pace with Bannerflow’s creative management platform which specializes in creating, managing, and optimizing digital advertising campaigns.

Highlights

• Bannerflow specializes in DCO, enabling marketers to create personalized, data-driven ad campaigns that adapt to user behavior, leading to higher engagement.
• Delivers high-quality ad campaigns with lower production costs.
• User-friendly interface and responsible support team.

Pros

• Quicker turnaround for banners.
• Integrations quickly with internal tools.

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Cons

• High refresh time on the web.
• Pricing structure is inflexible. 

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What gives it a competitive edge

If you want a robust platform that balances creativity, ease of use, automation, and analytics, then Bannerflow is your go-to platform.

9. Celtra

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With this platform, digital marketers can create interactive or video creatives using well-designed templates, collaborate with their agencies, and evaluate the creative process via analytics.

Highlights

• Mobile-specific solutions and custom ad formats elevate creative abilities and improve campaign performance. 
• Create, edit, and execute videos. Helps to schedule campaigns. 
• The platform also provides comprehensive reporting and analytics capabilities to track the performance of creatives and make informed decisions about campaigns.

Pros

• Robust reporting capabilities and the ability to customize it. 
• Easy to use. 
• Great customer support.

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Cons

• Listing campaigns in dropdown is time-consuming. 

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What gives it a competitive edge

Celtra upscales the quality of creative production in terms of creation, speed, and engagement. It allows you to explore unique creative solutions.

10. Air

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Air is a creative operations platform for trend-setter marketers. Its UI is sleek, it helps you become creative and collaborate with stakeholders including external agencies. 

Highlights

• Leave annotations frame by frame in high-quality videos if you need to get anything changed. 
• Smart search functionality helps you find digital assets faster. (search by keywords, metadata, and tags).
• With Kanban view, get a 360-degree view of your project and track its progress.

Pros

• Easily collaborate with external stakeholders.
• Speed up editing and distribution with smart search 
• See who has access to your assets quickly with rights management.

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Cons

• Available on web browser and Mac only. No integrations with other devices. 
• The free version of the software has very few features. 

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What gives it a competitive edge

Air’s UI is specifically built for visual assets. Thus it is a perfect tool for marketing and creative teams to find, manage, and collaborate on their visual assets.

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Also read: Compare Artwork Flow and Air. inc - The Best Artwork Management Solutions

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11. Wrike

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Wrike is a creative project management and collaboration platform that provides task management, Gantt charts, real-time collaboration, and reporting. 

Highlights

• Reporting and analytics features provide insights into project progress, team performance, and resource allocation.
• Manage budget like a pro with customizable currency preferences.
• Automated workflows.

Pros

• Easily helps you to manage and keeps you on top of projects.
• Great interface and simple to use. 
• Transition to the software is smooth.

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Cons

• Ensure to check with the team and inform them before you upgrade your plan or buy anything. Customer service has mixed reviews.

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What gives it a competitive edge

Wrike is the perfect example of creative collaboration among teams. It allows easy task handover and prioritization.

12. Bynder

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Bynder helps marketing professionals hustle through asset creation, streamlined collaboration, and content workflow across various teams.

Highlights

• The creative workflow feature lets you standardize, approve and even analyze the project workflow.
• Studio feature helps you to create, resize, and distribute video content smoothly.
• Bynder has an in-depth analytics tool where you can see how your assets are being shared, downloaded, or viewed.
• Bynder assists you in content creation with its generative AI tool.

Pros

• Clean and intuitive user interface allows you to collaborate with internal and external stakeholders effectively. 
• Finding assets and sharing them with others is made easy. 
• Eliminates complicated file structures. 
• Provides educational resources to get comfortable with the platform.

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Cons

• Random bugs.
• Creating collections and managing them can be a little tricky. 
• Doesn’t offer many customization options. 
• Downloads all the versions of an asset instead of downloading only the latest or specific version. 

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What gives it a competitive edge

With the quality of support rated 9.2, Bynder has an agile customer support team to hear customer feedback and work to improve the experience.

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Also read: The Brand Team’s Complete Guide to Generative AI

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13. Jira

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Jira is one of the top platforms that provides a range of tools for creating and assigning tasks, setting priorities, tracking progress, and collaborating with team members.

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Highlights

• Jira has a flexible and customizable workflow to work for both technical and non-technical users in the product and project management teams.
• Scrum and Kanban boards help you break down complex tasks and help them visualize the workflow.
• Make better product decisions by prioritizing tasks and collaborating effectively with your team from anywhere.

Pros

• Integrates with BitBucket and Zendesk which saves time from moving one program to another. 
• Proper agile and Scrum approach helps in learning progress and plan releases.

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Cons

• Cannot clone tasks once they’re done.
• You can't use plugins for a limited number of users.

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What gives it a competitive edge

Jira has an improved user interface and a neat dashboard within a reasonable price range. It is a convenient platform to work for all the roles in project teams.

14. Canto

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If you want to manage your generated creative assets, Canto is a great platform for it. It also helps you to collaborate on the same creatives with other team members. 

Highlights

• Canto’s DAM tool offers AI-driven tagging and facial recognition abilities.
• It prevents you from the maintenance of a bunch of assets and the repetition of the review and approval process.
• You can keep track of your creative assets, remove the outdated ones, and store them for future reference.
• Enhance your video and find them using AI-enabled search.

Pros

• It's a good alternative to Dropbox and has more powerful features.
• Creative assets are accessible under a single roof for all the team members. 
• Facial recognition feature among assets is a huge boon during searching of creatives for campaigns.

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Cons

• Sometimes it might show the wrong tags with assets.
• Some users have written about the platform not being user-friendly.

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What gives it a competitive edge

When it comes to user experience, the platform makes sure it delivers digital content from servers near customers across the globe for faster page load times.

15. Workamajig

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It offers a robust project and resources management medium for creative teams. 

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Highlights

• Workamajig helps understand client profitability and gain real-time metrics—You can look at projects, budgets, scheduling, reporting, and accounting in one place.
• Customize your projects by adding your preferences in the project intake form.
• Workamajig provides clarity in the direction of your goal with the information and insights it provides for your creative operations. 

Pros

• Project time allocation.
• Constantly releases updates.

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Cons

• Updating projects can be time-consuming.
• Misunderstanding among users leads to scheduling errors.

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What gives it a competitive edge

The schedule feature shows you how many hours you have and are left helping you to manage time with efficiency. 

16.Kantata

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Kantata Cloud (formerly Mavenlink + Kimble) nurtures you in effective collaboration and proactive resource planning with its flexible platform.

Highlights

• Save time by creating reusable templates and workflows.
• Streamline financial activities by adding input in the timesheets and expense claims quickly and easily.
• With business intelligence, gain valuable insights and make data-driven decisions.

Pros

• Easy to gather report time sheets.
• Versatile user permissions.
• Private messaging.

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Cons

• Poor interface and slow at times.
• It doesn’t distribute time automatically when a due date changes.

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What gives it a competitive edge

Kanata is useful for planning and maximizing your resources. Using it, you will be able to determine who is accessible based on skills and competencies and how much work they can handle.

Medium-sized business solutions

If yours is a mid-sized business, you probably manage larger volumes of creative content and campaigns. You will need more sophisticated creative management tools and processes, emphasizing collaboration, brand consistency, and marketing automation. Here are a few software you can consider to meet your creative operations needs.

17. Airtable

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Airtable is a project management tool that makes importing data, sorting it, and using it very easy and straightforward. 

Highlights

• A flexible grid-like interface that allows users to create and structure databases according to their specific needs.
• There are 100+ pre-built templates available. If you don’t want to use a template, you have the freedom to customize the template for exactly what you need.
• Store and access user personas, keywords, types of content, etc. in one view.

Pros

• User-friendly workflow. 
• It has smart features that reduce your workload. 
• It is flexible and good for client and customer reports.

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Cons

• Limited reporting capabilities. 
• Lack of action from the support team.

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What gives it a competitive edge

If you’re looking to replace your spreadsheets, Airtable is a suitable choice. It has the ability to customize everything making the platform users’ choice. 

18. Ziflow

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Ziflow speeds up your creative operations by auto-routing project management along with asset management and creative collaboration.

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Highlights

• Save time by reviewing, commenting, approving, and collaborating in one place.
• Ziflow lets you sync your projects and tasks to the respective assets.
• Proof all components of a digital campaign in one place including web pages and videos.

Pros

• Collaboration is easy as multiple users can add feedback in multiple formats. 
• Every team member can stay in the loop without back and forth as the system sends email notifications once feedback is posted, and an approval stage has been completed.
• Eliminates the need for multiple tools like screengrabs, annotation tools, PDFs, and emails as it has the necessary functionality for collaboration. 

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Cons

• Buggy plugins and glitches.

• The uploaded files may appear blurry sometimes.

• When reviewing multiple assets, if there are any changes in the revisions, all the reviewed assets need to be uploaded again which leads to a waste of time. 

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What gives it a competitive edge

Ziflow makes tracking work easy. You can easily learn who has seen or not seen the comments or feedback on a creative which helps to streamline the review process quicker.

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Also read: Top 5 Ziflow Alternatives

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19. Smartly.io

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Smartly.io empowers marketers like you to create, manage, and optimize advertising campaigns across various channels. Its automation feature enables you to scale your campaigns efficiently and achieve better results through data-driven strategies. 

Highlights

• The platform offers dynamic creative optimization tools that personalize ad content based on user behavior and data. This ensures that ads are tailored to specific audiences, increasing relevance and engagement.
• Smartly.io's automation features enable advertisers to scale their campaigns efficiently and achieve better results through data-driven strategies.
• Automate your workflows and deliver the content — be it image or video ads — to relevant audiences on Google Ads and Google Marketing Platform.

Pros

• Easy to navigate across multiple accounts and platforms.

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Cons

• The chat help feature is not helpful.
• Bugs cause momentary delays in meeting deadlines that need to be addressed.

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What gives it a competitive edge

For companies managing various social media campaigns, it is easy to create campaigns and set up target audiences faster, especially with a clean UI.

20. Storyteq

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Storyteq’s creative operations platform enables marketers to collaborate, create, and deliver personalized video and image content at scale.

Highlights

• Generate image and video content in local and personalized messages aligning to your brand and legal guidelines.
• You can have your content live in a very short time frame because of the fast render time and direct ties to social networks.
• Live notifications update every stakeholder on the spot helping you to get faster feedback and approvals on your creatives.

Pros

• Easy to implement and work on.
• Collaboration with teammates is a breeze.

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Cons

• Sometimes you could encounter bugs but the team is pretty responsive with it. 

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What gives it a competitive edge

It is a really good solution when creating content for different markets with different needs, languages, and products and is very cost-efficient.

21. Pixis

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It helps you create creatives targeting the right audience and optimize campaigns with AI in the center. 

Highlights

• Create assets that get your brand the attention it deserves with AI-led design suggestions.
• Scale your top-performing creatives with generative AI and make better decisions to maximize ROAS with proprietary AI models.
• Easy integration of Pixis into your marketing channels and other platforms.

Pros

• AI infrastructure integrates with your existing tech stack.
• Built-in workflow and insights help you to make decisions better.

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Cons

• There’s room for improvement in the interface of Pixis.

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What gives it a competitive edge

It facilitates simple AI deployment and rolls out new features every quarter to improve the product.

22. Airtory

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Airtory is a creative management platform that focuses on helping advertisers build ads and improve ad performance through interactive elements.

Highlights

• By integrating Airtory into your creative operations, speed up your decision to drive superior results.
• The ad builder platform lets you create interactive static and video ad creatives. It also includes drag-and-drop functionality.
• The library offers custom, rich media creative templates.

Pros

• A wide range of media formats are available.
• They update their library with interesting formats from time to time.
• Support from tech is great.

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Cons

• The standard plan offers only limited templates.

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What gives it a competitive edge

You can build an ad creative using Airtory for a fraction of the cost of hiring an outside creative agency.

23. Zuuvi

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Zuuvi helps brands create immersive content that drives user interaction and encourages positive engagement. 

Highlights

• Produce multiple professional data-driven ads using an ad automation feature.
• Make edits to your copy while the ad is live.
• Generate ads of multiple formats and sizes.
• Create animated banners without a coding background.

Pros

• Preview functionality makes it a breeze to get feedback from stakeholders.
• Good customer support.

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Cons

• Takes time to get accustomed to the studio. 

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What gives it a competitive edge 

It offers an all-in-all solution for enhancing digital advertising, creative production, and marketing collaboration in your team, catering to the diverse needs to create impactful brand experiences.

24. Rocketium

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A popular creative operations platform that combines AI, creativity, and analytics to streamline the creative process in teams.

Highlights

• Create localized videos and download them in multiple dimensions using pre-defined templates.
• Make quick edits with insights drawn from creatives for better results.
• Stick to your brand identity with an AI-powered compliance tool.

Pros

• Easy to use API.
• Rocketium is flexible while creating the videos of your dreams.
• Create personalized content by adding the media (images and music) you like.

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Cons

• Depending on your plan, there’s a limit in videos per month.
• The timings function is a little complicated to understand.
• A few users claim that customer support is not cooperative.

What gives it a competitive edge

Rocketium comes in handy if you are dealing with a variety of creatives and their operations daily hoping to reap good results in return. 

25. Papirfly

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Papirfly is a platform designed to assist growth and performance marketers with the tools they need to effectively create, manage, and optimize their marketing campaigns and materials.

Highlights

• Papirfly offers templates to create high-quality marketing materials aligning with your brand guidelines.
• It supports compliance and localization efforts by tailoring assets to meet local regulations and preferences.
• Papirfly can integrate with ad platforms and marketing automation tools, making it easier to seamlessly transfer assets and campaigns to the preferred advertising channels.

Pros

• Easy to get started with and highly configurable.
• Manage multiple brand campaigns with ease.

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Cons

• User management system is time-consuming.
• Reporting features need to be expansive.

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What gives it a competitive edge

It helps brands remain consistent by ensuring they follow the brand guidelines with all the digital and offline assets.

26. Mediawide

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Mediawide is a creative marketing platform that focuses on enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of your creative production particularly in the media channels. 

Highlights

• Scale your creative assets to various sizes and upload them to major ad networks globally through integrations.
• It allows you to conduct surveys, and customer profiling and include call-to-action buttons in HTML5 videos to increase and optimize interaction with the consumer.
• You can pre-scale, remarket, and upsell videos using a personalized interactive video platform in Mediawide.

Pros

• Cost-effective choice and you get good ROI for your business.

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Cons

• Customer support isn’t quick to act according to some reviews.
• Pricing can be better.

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What gives it a competitive edge

Mediawise helps growth marketers distribute personalized messages on a global scale gaining more traction and enhancing the customer experience.

27. Filestage

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Filestage is a good project management tool for graphic designers that helps with the content review and approval process.

Highlights

• Add time-stamped comments for videos and audio.
• The reviewer doesn’t have to create an account on the software to add comments and annotations.
• Automatically emphasizes the changes made in the latest version of the creative while comparing.

Pros

• Handles varieties of file formats.
• Easy to get specific feedback as reviewers can add comments to any part of the file. 

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Cons

• Limited number of folder templates and folders for each project.
• The software has a few bugs that may cause you to revert to emails again. .
• The software lags when you have too many projects. 

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What gives it a competitive edge

Filestage is easy to navigate and users can collaborate on different projects with both internal and external stakeholders without any complicated onboarding process that wastes time and budget.

28. Hive

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Want to know how productive were you last week? Keep track of it and also your tasks with a collaboration platform like Hive.

Highlights

• Hive lets you write perfectly drafted emails for your clients using AI.
• Executes the perfect design plan and lets all the stakeholders stay on the same page with automated updates.
• Hive lets you view project layouts in six different ways: Gantt, Kanban, calendar, portfolio, table, and label views

Pros

• Teams can use it seamlessly increasing in efficiency.
• You can leave reviews through the mobile app.

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Cons

• Sometimes you don’t receive the notifications.
• Software can slow down when too many people send messages or media.

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What gives it a competitive edge

Hive increases your team’s productivity by keeping you all accountable to your responsibilities with its automated updates on time tracking and scheduling.

29. ProofHub

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ProofHub is a creative management software that lets design teams share ideas, visualize workflows, and share files and feedback effectively.

Highlights

• It provides discussion boards for teams to exchange ideas and feedback in one centralized location.
• Track your tasks and projects with ProofHub’s reporting tool.
• Communicate in multiple languages.

Pros

• Allows every member to count task progress easily and get everyone on the same page. 
• Third-party integrations. 
• Allows you to drag and drop files directly into the software. 

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Cons

• The Mobile version is not very user-friendly.
• Limited template options.
• Detailed timesheets are not available. 

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What gives it a competitive edge

ProofHub helps you to work, collaborate, and manage creative projects in real-time from a single spot.

30. GoVisually

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GoVisually is a creative project management software designed for creative teams. It allows users to review and provide feedback on creative content such as designs and videos in a collaborative environment.

Highlights

• You can leave real-time comments including private comments, and annotations on creative assets, facilitating clear communication.
• GoVisually tackles design bumps flawlessly with the review process, which is also a public favorite.
• Video reviewing and proofing available.

Pros

• Value for money.
• It stores revisions of a creative which the users can go back and check it.

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Cons

• Limited features.
• Organization of the project structure could be better.

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What gives it a competitive edge

You don't even have to leave Photoshop or Illustrator because of the direct plugin that will upload files to GoVisually.

31. Podio

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Podio lets you get your work done with your teams through its collaborative work management system and intuitive AI tools.

Highlights

• Customizable and automated workflow.
• Smooth transfer of data from other data sourcing platforms.
• Podio’s chat feature allows you to directly communicate with your team members on the platform itself.

Pros

• Track all your important emails, tasks, and projects stress-free. 

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Cons

• Scaling is not easy with limited features.
• Lacks time-lapse feature to see how long tasks may take.

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What gives it a competitive edge

The platform is flexible and user-friendly. You can access projects on your phone or desktop from any remote part of the world.

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Also read: 5 Strategies To Best Manage Your Remote Design Team

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32. Cloudinary

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Cloudinary is a creative media management platform that provides comprehensive solutions for storing, optimizing, scaling, and delivering images and videos.

Highlights

• Catch objects in the image or video through smart tags.
• Generate and scale videos using existing elements and colors.
• Deliver engaging web experiences by optimizing the page and the page speed.

Pros

• Cloudinary's free plan has innovative features that are suitable for booming websites.
• The platform is backed with strong technical support.

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Cons

• At times, you can’t retrieve the files you are looking for.
• Some reviewers claim the documentation is complicated to navigate through.

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What gives it a competitive edge

From creation to storage, you can manage your images and also optimize and distribute from the same platform while eliminating the need to depend on other tools.

Small business essentials

Got a creative team of 1, ChatGPT, and a prayer? This section is for you.

Creative operations for small businesses include using cost-effective tools for project management, content creation, and marketing. Here are our top picks.

33. AdCreative.ai

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Is your copywriter or designer busy? With AdCreative.ai, you can be both of them! It is one of the top creative management products that leverages AI and automation to transform the way digital advertising creative is generated. 

Highlights

• Create ads of all sizes for social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., or display advertising and repurpose them.
• With Creative Insights Pro, receive insights on ad CTR and top-performing colors in your creatives which helps you to optimize your ad creatives accordingly.
• Once you input your website link, the tool itself analyzes your website from which it will tell everything about your brand. This helps when you want to generate a strategy or creative.

Pros

• It’s savvy enough for non-designers to use, so it's perfect for small businesses that don't have the budget to hire a full-time graphic designer.
• Helps you eliminate dependency and save time by creating your own professional ad creatives along with generating copy that converts.

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Cons

• No room for customization after the content is generated.
• At times, it’s hard to scale images the right way for landscape-oriented posts.

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What gives it a competitive edge

For its users, Adcreative.ai has been a pleasant and financially profitable experience compared to other AI tools.

34. Scoro 

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Scoro combines project management, time tracking, collaboration, invoicing, and reporting into a unified platform. It is designed to help teams streamline operations and improve collaboration.

Highlights

• Time tracking and resource allocation help teams understand where their time is spent, optimize workflows, and increase overall productivity.
• Users can create customizable dashboards to monitor key performance, facilitating data-driven decision-making.
• Manage your budgets effectively without overdoing it using the tool.

Pros

• Clean display and powerful time tracking tool.
• The flexibility of its setup makes it an excellent option for a small business.

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Cons

• The custom PDF templates are quite limited.

• Sometimes it is very hard to understand, especially for beginners.

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What gives it a competitive edge

Scoro ensures that you don’t waste your time and resources while looking to streamline your creative process. It solves all scheduling, planning, and tracking of projects.

35. NEXD

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NEXD is a creative management platform that specializes in creating interactive and engaging ad experiences.

Highlights

• Create campaigns without adding any code.
• Run successful campaigns with data-backed insights on your ad creatives.

Pros

• The platform is easy to use.
• The customer team is very supportive throughout the whole subscription.

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Cons

• Technical glitches come up often after an update.

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What gives it a competitive edge

You can quickly implement creative concepts for consumers without requiring extensive programming knowledge.

36. Trello

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Want to check off everything from your to-do list one by one? With its drag-and-drop functionality, Trello’s board and card system allows users to organize and prioritize tasks effortlessly. 

Highlights

• Recognize and automate repetitive tasks with intelligent automation.
• Devise and create a work breakdown structure (WBS) according to the project scope.
• The email-to-board feature lets you add tasks to the boards via email, even when not directly accessing the platform.
• Trello integrates with 200+ popular tools like Slack, Google Drive, Hubspot, and more.

Pros

• Design and user-friendly interface that’s visually pleasing. 
• Helps organize tasks and days better.
• Attractive templates and educational blogs.

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Cons

• The task management system is not upto the mark. 
• You lose what you’ve typed as a comment because you exited or minimized the app.

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What gives it a competitive edge

You can keep a close eye on your tasks by breaking down them further into smaller tasks by adding checklists. 

37. Basecamp

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Want to meet deadlines and discuss feedback without drama? Basecamp lets you do it easier for your daily ongoing tasks and creative project management.

Highlights

• View your projects in one place and step-by-step.
• Form a fresh perspective on your projects and creatives with useful insights and reporting features.
• Automate your tasks on Basecamp with integrations such as Zapier, Ziflow, etc.

Pros

• It has the right amount of features which is not too complicated to use for various teams.
• Mobile support is very efficient.

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Cons

• To work with different versions of Basecamp is a little overwhelming. 

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What gives it a competitive edge

Basecamp makes collaboration a breeze between team members across geographic boundaries along with simplifying task management. 

38. Hightail

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Hightail lets you share large media files along with enhancing creative collaboration within your teams and streamlining project management. 

Highlights

• You can create "spaces" where all types of files can be stored, and links to this space can be shared with anyone inside and outside of the organization.
• Facilitates time-stamped commenting on audio and video files.

Pros

• Simple and intuitive platform.
• Transfer important files with high security.

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Cons

Retrieving assets from cloud storage is tricky at times.

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What gives it a competitive edge

The platform helps speed up creative workflows by providing a centralized space for project-related assets and discussions.

39. Clipcentric

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Clipcentric is a creative production and automation platform that focuses on simplifying the process of building and delivering HTML5 display and video ads.

Highlights

• It offers features for creating responsive ad units that adapt to different screens and devices. 
• Clipcentric enables you to save time by allowing you to make small changes to the design instead of scraping them completely. 
• Build an ad from scratch from a database of video clips.

Pros

• Produce ads across platforms quickly and easily.

• Get valuable insights into how to maximize your advertising impressions.
• The platform is available on many devices.

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Cons

• Too many options on the platform that aren’t necessarily used by users.

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What gives it a competitive edge

Clipcentric's technology helps you to create visually appealing and responsive ads without extensive design expertise which reduces dependency.

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Also read: Video Automation 101: Everything You Need to Know

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40. Paymo

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A simple creative project management tool that bundles task management, time tracking, and invoicing.

Highlights

• Find out the scope of your project and make business commitments by seeing the schedule of the whole group.
• View all projects in one place with the Kanban board.
• Record and categorize billable and non-billable hours on timesheets with the built-in time tracking tool.

Pros

• It’s easy to switch from another software to Paymo.
• Track time of your projects to plan better for future commitments.

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Cons

• Hard to export anything from the platform.

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What gives it a competitive edge

Paymo provides insights into how time is spent on various tasks, helping teams optimize their productivity.

41. Infinity

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Infinity is a flexible tool that enables users to customize workflows, project structures, and data views. It supports various use cases, with advanced filtering and sorting options.

Highlights

• Customizable workflow and project structures.
• Advanced filtering and sorting options, helping users find and focus on the most relevant data within their databases.
• Various templates are available for design sprints, product roadmap, web design, and more.

Pros

• Affordable software.
• Intact customer support team.

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Cons

• There are no reminders in accordance with the due dates.
• Mobile version is not very desirable. 

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What gives it a competitive edge

Customized templates for each use case facilitate better team collaboration and easy understanding of high-priority tasks.

42. Miro

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Miro is an online collaborative whiteboarding platform that allows teams to visualize ideas, brainstorm, plan projects, and conduct workshops in real-time.

Highlights

• It offers a wide range of templates and frameworks for various use cases like brainstorming, agile planning, and design thinking.
• With Miro AI, automate your workflow directly. 
• Integrates with popular tools like Slack, Trello, and Jira, allowing teams to incorporate visual collaboration into their existing workflows.

Pros

• The free hand feature lets you experience that you’re doing it physically. 
• Various team members can collaborate on brainstorms, mind mapping, and flow documentation at the same time. 
• Miro makes work-from-home collaboration easier. 

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Cons

• Lack of integrations with tools like MS and Google Suite.

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What gives it a competitive edge

From the first canvas to the final documentation, Miro can streamline the creative process for any designer making it a suitable platform for visual collaboration.

43. Adzymic

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It offers a creative management solution that is beneficial for creating ads, improving ad relevance, increasing engagement, and ultimately driving better campaign results.

Highlights

• Create banners or ad units with ease by just adding the title, description, images, and destination URL.
• Adzymic provides APIs that developers can use to seamlessly integrate with all DSPs (Demand Side Platforms) into their applications or websites.
• The proprietary smart tag technology automates the generation of personalized ads rather than doing it manually, especially in e-commerce websites.

Pros

• Dynamic optimization with real-time data.
• Easy to navigate the platform for beginners.

Cons

• Limited customization features.
• May not be suitable for small businesses with limited budgets. 

What gives it a competitive edge

It saves a lot of time through automated generating and optimizing creative variations in real-time, allowing for highly customized and engaging ad experiences. 

Time to upgrade

That’s the end of the list and we hope you’ve got detailed facts about the best creative operations tools for your team. 

It's a lot to take in, so take your time, decide which platform best suits your team, and then get started with your ideal creative operations platform. 

Creative operations are the need of the hour. If you’d like a practical understanding of any creative operations software and its advantages, then, on a personal note, we would suggest Artwork Flow.

Why, you ask?

Experience the massive potential your brand can unleash by booking a demo with Artwork Flow today!

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