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 €29 once per published 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.

Updated August 2026. Brandpad's features were checked on their site on 1 August 2026, their plans and pricing again on 4 August.

Updated August 2026. Brandpad's features were checked on their site on 1 August 2026, their plans and pricing again on 4 August.

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.

Guidelines that shouldn't be public. Brandpad lets you keep a guideline private and hand out access per person, with no login for the people reading it. Vessa's drafts are unlisted and kept out of search, but a published Vessa page is a public page. Password protection is on the list, not in the product.

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 tester running on the client's own face, and a motion section with real easing curves and code your developer can paste.

That last part is the piece nothing else in this category ships. Motion documentation today lives in an After Effects file or a paragraph saying "animations should feel smooth". Vessa documents it as motion, on the page, playing.

Who should pick which

Pick Brandpad if you run a portfolio of brands, need more than one person editing, need guidelines that stay private, 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 that's the part nobody else documents.