We Compared 5 Brand Guidelines Builders. Here’s What We Found

Whether you’re a small business, a creative agency, or a large enterprise, you need a brand guideline builder. This powerful tool helps you collect all your brand assets and rules, like your fonts, colors, logo, mission and vision statements, and everything that makes you, you, all into one accessible place. Brand guidelines builders are more than just storage solutions. They help you organize all that great branding information into a visually appealing brand book that keeps every single team member, contractor, and stakeholder on the same brand page.

So you know you need a brand guidelines builder, but which is the right one for your business? To get you started, we’ve compared four popular brand guidelines builders here below:

1. Corebook

Overview: Corebook is an advanced brand guidelines building tool that offers greater privacy controls, customizations, and integrations. Choose which parts of your brand guidelines to share with different parties and easily sync your guidelines with other asset management tools like Dropbox or Google Drive.

As an add-on, Corebook also allows you to upload multimedia content, including videos, soundbites, animations, and more. Your brand guidelines, usage rules, and assets are all easily accessible through your white-labeled custom URL link.

Pros:

• Corebook lets you collaborate to build your brand guidelines with members of your team and outside contractors.
• All edits update in real-time, so every stakeholder can access the most up-to-date brand guidelines with one click.
• In-person and virtual software training is available to help your team quickly embrace the tools.

Cons:

• Corebook focuses strongly on the informational and instructional brand guidelines elements, putting less emphasis on your brand’s visual identity.
• No offline version is available, meaning users must have internet access to work on brand assets.
• Some users find Corebook difficult to learn at first.

Target Audience: Agencies and in-house branding teams with design, marketing, and brand management experience

Phase: Early startup or rebranding

Price: Starting at $99/month

2. ZeBrand

Overview: ZeBrand is a simple yet powerful one-stop shop that gets your branding right from the start of your business. This isn’t your typical branding platform—we help you define and implement your brand strategy. ZeBrand's branding approach takes you through simple modules that map out everything from your overall direction and audience, to your tone and voice. Then they implement your strategy into a ready-to-go set of brand guidelines that you can start using today.

Pros:

• Upload your own logo and fonts or create them within the platform.
• 1:1 brand coaching sessions to get feedback on how to define your brand story and messaging.
• Focuses on more than just brand guidelines, they support the whole brand-building journey.

Cons:

• At this time, you are unable to upload your own photographs.
• Only paid users can continue to share their online brand guidelines via link.

Target Audience: Small business owners, entrepreneurs, and startups building their brand from the ground up

Phase: Small businesses, startups, or those in the rebranding stage

Price: 7 days free trial, then $38/mo to $148/mo

3. Brandpad

Overview: For cloud-based brand management and organization, Brandpad offers a solution. Users can upload brand assets to Brandpad and create the guidelines that govern those assets, all in one place. The brand guide itself can be fully customized to match the brand’s visual identity, communicating one streamlined look, feel, and sound. You can use any Adobe or Google fonts, or even upload your own custom fonts. Brandpad constantly syncs, meaning every user always has access to the latest version of every file, guideline, and asset.

While Brandpad is designed for agencies that manage multiple brands, in-house branding teams in any industry can also benefit from this brand guideline builder. It serves as one accessible place for your marketing team, contractors, product developers, and other stakeholders to go when they need your latest usage rules and content.

Pros:

• No limits on your number of files, assets, brand guideline pages, or bandwidth.
• Brandpad is easily scalable from small businesses to large enterprises.
• The user interface is easy to navigate and customize. No coding knowledge required.

Cons:

• Can be more expensive than similar options.
• Does not have a vision, mission, or other strategy section, but has an exhaustive role as a style guide.

Target Audience: Business owners, brand managers, creative directors, marketing teams, project managers

Phase: Any stage, from early startup to mature enterprise

Price: Free to $211 per month

4. Gingersauce

Overview: Once you’ve got a logo, you’re ready to use Gingersauce. Gingersauce is an intuitive brand book builder that walks you through every step, using templates and automation to speed up the process. Once you’ve built your brand guidelines, Gingersauce lets you share your guidelines as a PDF file or a link.

For companies that manage multiple brands or have brand guidelines for each product line, Gingersauce makes it easy to keep track of all your guidelines in one online dashboard.

Pros:

• Everything is customizable. Stick with Gingersauce’s basic templates, or customize the color, layout, text, and more.
• The step-by-step setup wizard takes the guesswork out of brand guidelines. Upload your own logo, answer a few questions, and Gingersauce’s templates and automation make every page look professional.
• You’re allowed an unlimited number of free viewers and multiple external editors.

Cons:

• This solution isn’t suitable for larger businesses with hundreds of design assets, or agencies that manage a large number of design accounts.
• Too many steps to complete the development of brand books/brand guidelines.

Target Audience: Agencies, small to midsize business owners, and entrepreneurs needing a simple, basic guideline tool

Phase: Startup, growth-stage, or rebranding

Price: $0 to $52 per brand book

5. Lingo

Overview: Lingo combines the organizational benefits of a digital asset manager with the easy-launch benefits of a brand guidelines builder to form a tool that makes branding and asset distribution a breeze. Lingo has a simple user interface, allowing editors to start with a premade template or drag and drop text boxes, visuals, files, and more directly into a custom brand playbook.

Like other brand guidelines builders, you can use Lingo to give specific users varying levels of access, providing the right assets and guidelines to the right stakeholders. Lingo even helps those users convert files to the right size and format automatically.

Pros:

• Less expensive than other brand guidelines builders, with added digital asset management tools.
• Supports some multimedia files types, like videos, animations, audio, and more.
• Analytics and asset success insights are built right into the system, giving you a view of how productive each piece of content really is.

Cons:

• Every stakeholder who needs access to your Lingo brand guidelines counts as a user. Each monthly package comes with only five users, so the cost of adding additional viewers for larger teams can add up quickly.
• Few integrations are available for common workplace systems, like Slack, Google Drive, and YouTube.

Target Audience: Business owners, entrepreneurs, branding and marketing teams for businesses of all sizes

Phase: Early startup, rebranding, or mature businesses

Price: Starting at $15/month

When comparing brand guidelines builders, don’t forget….

These brand guidelines builders are easy to use, but they’re no replacement for a real-life branding expert. If you’re launching a new business, growing an existing one, or going through a rebrand, talk to our expert branding team here at ZeBrand. We’ve helped companies around the world develop a cohesive brand that’s relatable, powerful, and drives real business success. Get started here.