See how Shade stacks up against Playbook and where the use cases make sense for each.
Key takeaways
Shade is designed for all media workflows, not just design.
Practically, Shade and Playbook serve two different purposes and markets. Shade organizes items traditionally as files to work well with operating systems and downstream applications. Shade can AI search over 500 different file and media types, including BRAW, R3D, Audio, 3D objects, and more.
Creative teams need hybrid solutions.
Shade is designed for hybrid workflows and systems where data is on-premises, such as long-term storage, NAS, and any other server infrastructure preconfigured. It unifies your data across cloud storage providers and locally into one access, search, and sharing pane. Playbook offers yet another cloud alternative.
Shade is more than a UI: work with your files in real-time.
Shade allows you to mount your drives as virtual drives on your computer. This enables you to work with your files in real-time in any downstream application as if they were on your computer. Today, Playbook offers just a UI, would need to build out our real-time file mounting infrastructure.
Ready to switch from Playbook to Shade?
Shade is built to manage petabytes.
Playbook advertises itself as the Dropbox for Designers. You can see more in our comparison with Dropbox. Practically, Shade and Playbook serve two different purposes and markets. At Shade, we’ve designed our file system to work with petabytes of data across multiple locations and regions. This enables you to create a highly flexible and customizable infrastructure plan using our managed or bring-your-own storage offerings across your local, on-prem, and cloud infrastructure. Playbook only offers their creative cloud as a solution. Shade’s AI search provides a full neural search capability across all petabytes of data to find exactly what you need across these locations. Shade is also well suited to support over 500 file types across various other media, including BRAW, R3D, Audio, 3D objects, and more. All of these are searchable with AI using Shade.
Work like you’re on an SSD, not in the cloud.
The cloud has historically promised much but has underdelivered with slow internet access, hefty egress fees, and poor data management. However, clouds and tools like Playbook are not designed to work with terabytes of files in real-time. Shade, however, with our ability to stream chunks of files and work with them in downstream applications, you can search, work, and share terabytes of data in real time from any location to any software. Shade also supports bringing your own storage to have the exact search and access capabilities on your existing hardware infrastructure. Now, all your data from anywhere is accessible as if it were on a super intelligent SSD.
Multimodal AI search
Shade offers a multimodal AI neural search—not just a tag-based search. This means you can search for “two people walking through a forest” or a “tinny snare drum” and find the exact image/video or SFX you need. We generate tags, objects, faces, and embeddings at scale so you can search through millions of files entirely in real-time.
When to use Playbook over Shade: managing Canva and Figma libraries
Playbook is well designed for creative and design assets. If you are more design-focused and moving large amounts of files across teams is not a critical issue, then Playbook might be the right solution. Playbook is very well suited for those who are used to tools like Canva or Figma and need a separate repository to organize and manage items like fonts and brand media assets. Although you can do the same things in Shade - Shade offers a complete solution for those who are working not just with gigabytes but terabytes of media assets and would like to unify data sources of truth and have access to all of their data from anywhere across on-prem and cloud.
