Vessa vs Brandpad
Brandpad is a subscription platform for studios running a portfolio of client brands, with unlimited editors and access controls, starting at $50 a month for two guidelines. Vessa is €39 once per brand, built for the designer or small studio who hands over one identity at a time and wants the motion documented as motion instead of described in a PDF.
Brandpad is free for three weeks and then $50 a month, so one client brand for a year is $500 on the yearly plan, which has room for a second guideline too. On Vessa building is free and a client's brand is €149 + VAT, for businesses. You pay it once and there's nothing to renew.
Updated October 2026. Brandpad's prices were checked on their site on 26 October 2026, its features and published pages on 23 October.
| Vessa | Brandpad | |
|---|---|---|
| Price model | Free to build. Publishing your own brand is €39 once with VAT included, and a client's brand is €149 + VAT, for businesses. No subscription. | $50 a month or $500 a year for two guidelines. $125 a month or $1,250 a year for six. |
| What you pay to start | Nothing to build. €39 once when you publish, then edit and republish for as long as you want, with nothing to renew. | Nothing for three weeks. When the trial ends the brands you built are locked until you pick a plan, from $50 a month. |
| Where the guideline lives | vessa.design/brand/{name}. Same URL shape for every guideline. | brandpad.io/{name} by default, your own domain on a paid plan. |
| Custom domain | Not offered. Every guideline lives on vessa.design. | Included from the $50 plan up, per brand. |
| Platform credit on the live page | On an own-brand page, one “Published with Vessa” link beside the year. A client-brand page carries nothing of ours, only your studio’s credit if you turn it on. | Published guidelines ship with "powered by Brandpad" in their meta description. Removing Brandpad's labelling is a paid-plan feature. |
| Motion system | A built-in section: motion personalities with live scrubbable specimens, real easing and duration values, and copy-as-GSAP or CSS code your developer can paste. | No motion documentation feature in Brandpad's published material. |
| Editor | A structured form. You fill typed sections and the template owns every layout and animation decision. No canvas. | A structured editor too. Start blank or from one of their templates. |
| People editing it | One account per guideline. No team seats. | Unlimited editors and collaborator accounts on every paid plan. |
| Private or password-protected guidelines | Yes, a password per brand. No viewer accounts or SSO. | Yes, on every paid plan: a password on the whole guideline or on single download buttons. Readers need no login. |
| Asset management | Assets and ZIPs attached to the guideline. No separate library. | A full DAM on the Enterprise tier, sold through Papirfly, with SSO, approvals, reporting and print templates. |
| AI: building and reading the guideline | Both directions. An MCP server, so Claude, Claude Code or Cursor can create the guideline, fill sections, upload assets and publish it. And a versioned brand.json plus an llms.txt on every published guideline, with no key and no login. Motion is in the JSON: easing curves, duration bands, stagger. | None published, and no AI claims. |
| Track record | New. Launched 2026. | Years of work behind it, with Pentagram, Warner Bros, Facebook, Mikkeller and The Royal Foundation on the client wall. Now part of Papirfly. |
Updated October 2026. Brandpad's prices were checked on their site on 26 October 2026, its features and published pages on 23 October.
Where Brandpad is the better buy
Brandpad has been doing this for years and it shows in the parts Vessa hasn't built.
Several people editing the same guideline. Every Brandpad plan comes with unlimited editors and collaborator accounts. Vessa has one account per guideline and no seats. If a brand manager on the client side needs to fix a paragraph without emailing you, Brandpad already handles that and Vessa doesn't.
A lock on a single download. Both products put a password on a guideline. Brandpad can also put it on one download button and leave the rest of the page open. Vessa's password is one lock for the whole page.
A portfolio you maintain, not a handover you finish. Six live brands, constant edits, an asset library, approvals, SSO. That's the Brandpad and Papirfly shape, and the subscription is the honest price for it. Vessa's one-time fee assumes the guideline is delivered and then quietly kept up to date, not run as an internal system.
A name your client already trusts. Pentagram and Warner Bros are on their wall. Vessa launched this year. If that matters for a pitch, it matters.
The different bet each one makes
Brandpad bets that a brand guideline is a system you operate. Assets, permissions, editors, versions, a subscription that keeps the whole thing alive. That's a real bet and for brand teams it's the right one.
Vessa bets that most guidelines are a handover. You finish the identity, you hand over one link, and the page has to be good enough that people actually open it. So the money is a one-time fee per brand instead of rent, and the craft budget went into the page itself: the moodboard that reflows when you open an image, colors that copy on click, a type specimen set in the client's own faces, and a motion section with real easing curves and code your developer can paste.
That last part is the piece no other guideline tool ships. In a guideline, motion usually means an embedded video or a paragraph saying "animations should feel smooth". Vessa documents it as motion, on the page, playing, with the values and the code underneath.
Who should pick which
Pick Brandpad if you run a portfolio of brands, need more than one person editing, want a password on single downloads, or you're buying into the Papirfly side of it for asset management and SSO.
Pick Vessa if you're a designer or a small studio handing over identities one at a time, you want the guideline to be the best-looking thing in the project rather than the most administrative, and you'd rather pay once per brand than carry a subscription between clients. And pick it if your identity moves, because no other guideline tool documents motion as values and code.
See one before you decide
VANTA is a full Vessa guideline, live, with the motion section doing what the motion section does. Read it the way a client would. The gallery has more from real brands.
€39 once, per brand. No subscription.