Fabric vs. Acquia DAM

Last updated April 2026

Acquia DAM controls your brand assets at enterprise scale. Fabric understands all your content at any scale. Acquia DAM (formerly Widen) is a six-app enterprise platform for cataloguing, distributing, and tracking marketing content. Fabric is an AI workspace where every file you save is understood, connected, and part of a library you can search by meaning and ask questions about. One governs assets across an organisation. The other makes them useful to the people who work with them.

Comparison table

What is Acquia DAM?

Acquia DAM (formerly Widen Collective) is an enterprise digital asset management platform with over 20 years of heritage and 1.5 million users. It's built around six apps: Assets (central library), Entries (PIM for product data), Insights (analytics), Portals (branded sharing), Templates (web-to-print), and Workflow (proofing and approvals). AI powers auto-tagging, search, and duplicate detection. 200+ integrations connect it to CMS, CRM, eCommerce, and creative tools. Available standalone or as part of Acquia's Digital Experience Platform. HIPAA and SOC 2 Type II compliant. Pricing is quote-based across Workgroup, Enterprise, and DAM+PIM tiers. Reviewers praise the configurable metadata and customer support. They note slow page loads and search inconsistency in larger deployments.

What is Fabric?

Fabric is an AI workspace that combines file storage, note-taking, search, tasks, collaboration, and publishing. The Fabric Memory Engine automatically extracts, enriches, and maps relationships between everything you save. Where Acquia DAM manages assets through six specialised apps, Fabric understands content in one workspace. Both store files. They do fundamentally different things with them.

Key differences

Six apps vs one workspace

Acquia DAM is a modular platform. Assets for storage, Entries for product data, Insights for analytics, Portals for sharing, Templates for collateral, Workflow for approvals. Each app handles a specific function in the enterprise content lifecycle. The system is powerful and configurable. It's also complex. Setting up taxonomies, configuring metadata schemas, and training teams takes time and planning.

Fabric is one workspace. You save content. The Memory Engine extracts it, enriches it, indexes it, and maps relationships. AI, search, notes, collaboration, publishing, tasks. All in one place, no configuration required. Acquia DAM is enterprise infrastructure you deploy. Fabric is a workspace you use.

Understanding vs controlling

Acquia DAM controls what happens to assets: who can access them, how they're tagged, where they're distributed, how they're tracked. The metadata schema is highly configurable. Governance is the point.

Fabric understands what's in your files. Every file is extracted, enriched, and indexed. The AI maps relationships. You can ask questions across your entire library, search by meaning, and find connections without a taxonomy to maintain. Acquia DAM manages asset lifecycle. Fabric understands asset content.

AI

Acquia DAM uses AI for auto-tagging, search assistance, and duplicate detection. It automates the manual work of metadata maintenance. Useful at scale.

Fabric's AI is a conversational assistant that understands your entire library. It answers questions, summarises documents, transcribes audio and video, maps relationships, and takes actions. Acquia DAM's AI maintains the catalogue. Fabric's AI understands the knowledge.

Search

Acquia DAM searches by metadata, tags, and custom fields. AI assists with tagging accuracy. Reviewers note that search can be inconsistent in larger deployments, particularly when taxonomy and tagging quality varies across teams.

Fabric searches by meaning. Semantic search finds content regardless of how it was tagged. Visual search finds similar images. Colour search finds assets by palette. In-document search goes to the page, slide, or timestamp. Cross-platform search pulls from Google Drive, Notion, and Dropbox alongside your Fabric library. Fabric's search doesn't depend on taxonomy quality.

PIM, portals, and templates

Acquia DAM's Entries module provides product information management: product data modelling, channel distribution, variant management. Portals create branded mini-sites for curated external sharing. Templates enable localised web-to-print collateral. These are specific enterprise marketing capabilities.

Fabric doesn't have PIM, branded portals, or web-to-print templates. If your workflow requires centralised product data, curated asset portals for external audiences, or automated collateral generation, Acquia DAM's modular apps handle that.

Notes, documents, and beyond

Acquia DAM is a DAM. No notes, no document editing, no spatial canvases, no meeting transcription, no general-purpose tasks, no publishing with stakeholder-level engagement tracking.

Fabric is a workspace. Notes, documents, spatial canvases, meeting transcription, tasks, AI across all content types, publishing with analytics. If your work goes beyond managing brand assets, Fabric covers the rest.

Compliance

Acquia DAM is HIPAA and SOC 2 Type II compliant. For healthcare, financial services, and regulated industries where these certifications are mandatory, this matters.

Fabric uses AES-256 encryption and is CASA Tier 2 compliant. Different certifications for different requirements.

Pricing

Acquia DAM's pricing is quote-based and sits in the mid-range of the enterprise DAM market. Workgroup supports up to 50 users with 1TB. Enterprise offers unlimited users with 10TB. DAM+PIM bundles product data management. Implementation involves taxonomy setup, metadata configuration, and team training.

Fabric includes AI, search, collaboration, publishing, and file storage at every tier. [Insert Fabric pricing details.] Different products for different scales. For individual users and small teams, Fabric is more accessible. For enterprise marketing organisations with hundreds of users and compliance requirements, Acquia DAM's pricing reflects that infrastructure.

When to use each

Use Fabric if you want your content understood and connected, not just catalogued and governed. You need AI that answers questions across your entire library. You want semantic search, notes, collaboration, meeting transcription, spatial canvases, and publishing with engagement analytics. Your content goes beyond marketing assets. You want a workspace that works immediately, not a platform you deploy.

Use Acquia DAM if you're an enterprise marketing organisation that needs modular DAM with PIM, branded portals, web-to-print templates, approval workflows, and HIPAA/SOC 2 compliance. You have hundreds of users across multiple departments and geographies. You need 200+ integrations with your CMS, CRM, and eCommerce stack. Asset governance at enterprise scale is the problem.

Use both. Some teams use Acquia DAM as the system of record for governed brand assets and Fabric as the workspace where those assets are researched, discussed, and connected to strategy. Acquia DAM distributes the final product. Fabric is where the thinking happens.

Why people move from Acquia DAM to Fabric

They wanted to understand their content, not just govern it. Acquia DAM tags, controls, and distributes. Fabric reads, indexes, and answers questions. Teams that needed insight into their content, not just access control, found Acquia DAM insufficient.

They needed more than asset management. Notes, meeting recordings, research, document collaboration, spatial thinking. Acquia DAM manages marketing assets. Fabric handles everything.

Search depended on taxonomy. Inconsistent tagging across teams meant inconsistent search results. Fabric's semantic search works regardless of metadata quality.

The platform was more than they needed. Six apps, configurable metadata schemas, enterprise deployment. For teams that didn't need PIM, portals, templates, and compliance certification, the complexity and cost didn't match the use case.

FAQs

Does Fabric have PIM like Acquia DAM?

No. Fabric doesn't have product information management with product data modelling and channel distribution. For centralising product data alongside brand assets, Acquia DAM's Entries module handles that.

Does Fabric have branded portals?

No. Fabric's publishing lets you share anything with one click, with analytics and password protection. It doesn't have curated portals for different external audiences the way Acquia DAM does.

Is Fabric free?

Fabric has a free tier with limited storage and AI. Acquia DAM has no free plan and requires a sales conversation.

Does Acquia DAM have a conversational AI assistant?

No. Acquia DAM uses AI for auto-tagging, search assistance, and duplicate detection. There's no assistant that answers questions about your content or maps relationships across files.

Is Acquia DAM HIPAA compliant?

Yes. Acquia DAM supports HIPAA and SOC 2 Type II compliance. Fabric is CASA Tier 2 compliant with AES-256 encryption.

Can Fabric replace Acquia DAM?

For general content storage, search, collaboration, and AI, yes. For enterprise DAM with PIM, branded portals, web-to-print templates, approval workflows, and HIPAA compliance, no. They serve different purposes at different scales.