Fabric vs Air: which creative workspace should you use in 2026?

Last updated June 2026

Air is a creative operations platform for organising, reviewing, and scaling visual assets. It does that well. But it doesn't know why you made them.

Fabric is an AI workspace where your assets live alongside the briefs that defined them, the research that informed them, the meetings where they were discussed, and the notes you wrote about them. The AI assistant has memory that persists across sessions. It knows your projects. It answers questions about your work with cited sources. It can directly edit your documents with accept/reject controls. Background agents run autonomously on schedules to produce project summaries and research digests. Self-writing docs stay current from your meetings and connected sources. 9,000+ integrations via Zapier. An MCP server that connects to Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, and any MCP-compatible AI tool. All of this at $5/month flat. Air Pro costs $500/month.

Air organises creative files. Fabric understands your creative work.

Side-by-side comparison

Where Air wins

Visual asset management. Air was built for creative assets from the ground up. The interface is optimised for browsing photos, videos, and design files visually. Boards display assets as thumbnails. Hover previews let you scrub through video without opening it. The entire UX is designed around visual content in a way that Fabric's broader workspace doesn't specialise in.

Version stacking with visual diff. Every iteration of an asset groups as one evolving file with the newest version on top. Compare versions side by side to spot differences. For creative teams producing multiple rounds of revisions, this is a workflow that Fabric doesn't replicate.

Dedicated approval statuses. Assets move through defined states: in review, approved, needs changes. The approval workflow is purpose-built for creative review cycles, with statuses tied directly to the assets rather than managed through a general-purpose kanban.

AI Canvas for asset scaling. Air's Canvas takes an approved asset and multiplies it: resize for different channels, generate variations, remove backgrounds, apply brand templates. 50+ AI image models. This is production automation for creative teams who need one image in twenty formats. Fabric's canvas is for spatial thinking and live embeds, not image generation.

Adobe and Figma plugins. Open files from Air in Photoshop, Illustrator, or Premiere Pro. Save changes and they sync back automatically. Figma plugin syncs design assets directly. Fabric embeds Figma files on its canvas but doesn't have native plugins for Adobe tools.

Upload forms for external contributors. Photographers, freelancers, and partners submit assets directly into Air without needing an account. Useful for teams collecting work from external contributors at scale.

Unlimited users. Every Air plan includes unlimited workspace and board users. Fabric doesn't charge per user either ($5/month flat), but Air's model is explicitly designed for large teams with many stakeholders.

Where Fabric wins

AI assistant with memory. This is the fundamental gap. Air's AI tags images and powers visual search. Fabric's AI has memory that persists across sessions, supports multiple models (Gemini, Claude, Grok, OpenAI), and understands your entire library: the meeting where you discussed the campaign, the brief that defined the direction, the research you saved, the brand guidelines PDF, and the images. Ask a question that spans all of them. The AI answers with cited sources showing exactly where each answer came from. It can directly edit your documents with accept/reject controls. Air's AI works on assets. Fabric's AI works on knowledge.

Background agents. AI agents that run autonomously on schedules (daily, weekly, monthly) and produce real documents: project summaries, research digests, content roundups, meeting prep briefs. Granular access control. Approval gates. Air has no autonomous AI.

Self-writing docs. Living documents that stay current from your meetings, Slack channels, GitHub, and other connected sources. Documents that write and update themselves. Air doesn't generate documents.

9,000+ integrations. Fabric connects to 9,000+ tools via Zapier alongside native connections to Google Drive, Dropbox, Notion, and Gmail. An MCP server connects Fabric to Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, ChatGPT, and any MCP-compatible AI tool. A full REST API. Air integrates with Slack, Adobe, Figma, and a smaller set of tools.

Pricing. Fabric is $5/month flat regardless of team size. Air Creator is $10/month for one user. Air Pro is $500/month for 10 users. Air Business is $900/month for 15 users. A 10-person creative team: Fabric $5/month. Air $500/month. That's a 100x difference.

All content types as first-class citizens. Air is optimised for visual assets. PDFs, documents, and text are supported but secondary. In Fabric, a PDF is searchable to the paragraph, a recording is searchable to the timestamp, a saved article is readable in a beautiful reader, and an email is as findable as an image. Every content type is indexed, searched, and understood equally.

Meeting recording. The feedback call that happens alongside the asset review? Record it. Bot-free. Transcribed. Searchable to the timestamp. Connected to the project. Air doesn't record meetings.

Notes and documents. Fabric has a full editor for briefs, notes, and long-form writing alongside the asset library. Air has no document editor. The brief lives in another tool.

Spatial canvas for thinking. Fabric's canvas is for arranging ideas visually with 17+ live embeds: Figma files, YouTube videos, Spotify playlists, Google Maps. Air's Canvas is for AI image editing, not spatial thinking.

Web annotations. Highlight and comment on any website. Annotations persist across sessions and are searchable. Air doesn't annotate the web.

RSS feeds. Auto-sync content from any RSS or Atom feed into your library. Air doesn't pull from feeds.

Where both overlap

Both tools offer visual asset browsing and organisation, AI-powered search with auto-tagging, colour search, comments and annotations on images, kanban approval workflows, version management, sharing with permissions and access controls, publishing with password protection and analytics, desktop sync apps, and integrations with Slack, Google Drive, and Dropbox.

The overlap is real. The difference is scope: Air builds these features around visual assets as the primary content type. Fabric builds them around all content types equally, with AI that connects assets to briefs, recordings, research, and notes.

How to choose

Use Air if your team's work centres on visual assets: photos, videos, design files. You need version stacking with visual comparison. You need AI Canvas for resizing and generating image variations at scale. You work inside Adobe Creative Cloud and need native plugins. Your approval workflow is specifically about creative asset review. You have budget for $500-900/month for a team workspace.

Use Fabric if your creative work involves more than visual assets: briefs, research, meeting notes, PDFs, saved references, voice memos, and articles alongside images and videos. You want AI that understands the entire project, not just the assets. You need meeting recording, a notes editor, a spatial canvas, web annotations, or background agents. You want $5/month instead of $500/month. You want the brief, the moodboard, the assets, and the feedback in the same workspace.

Use both if you need Air's version stacking, Adobe plugins, and AI image generation for production work, and Fabric for the knowledge layer: research, briefs, meeting recordings, cross-project AI search, and client-facing publishing with analytics. Air for the asset production pipeline. Fabric for everything around it.

FAQs

Which is cheaper? Fabric at $5/month flat, regardless of team size. Air Creator at $10/month for 1 user. Air Pro at $500/month for up to 10 users. Air Business at $900/month for up to 15 users.

Which has better search? Air for visual asset search specifically (object recognition, face recognition, video transcript search, visual similarity within a visual-first interface). Fabric for search across all content types by meaning (inside PDFs, inside recordings, across images, across notes and documents). Both offer colour search and visual similarity.

Which has better AI? Different AI for different purposes. Air's AI tags assets and generates image variations via Canvas. Fabric's AI understands your entire library, answers questions with cited sources, edits documents, and connects assets to briefs, recordings, and research.

Can either replace our DAM? Air is a modern DAM with collaboration and AI. It's designed to replace traditional DAMs. Fabric handles digital asset management alongside knowledge management, but it's not a traditional DAM replacement for teams that need Adobe plugin integration, version stacking with visual diff, or dedicated approval statuses.

Which has mobile apps? Fabric (iOS and Android). Air has no native mobile apps (web-based access on mobile).

See also: Best creative collaboration tool, best creative proofing tool, best digital asset management tool, best design review tool, best moodboard app.