Vessa vs Corebook

Corebook prices brand guidelines as an operating cost: $69 a month for an agency with unlimited projects, or $119 a month billed annually for a single brand with editors, viewers and access control. Vessa is €39 once per brand, built for the designer handing over one identity at a time who wants the motion documented as motion instead of described in a paragraph.

Corebook is free for 14 days and then $69 a month for a studio. A brand you hand over needs its own licence on top, from $119 a month billed annually, so one client brand comes to $1,428 a year. 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. Corebook's prices were checked on their site on 26 October 2026, its features and homepage on 23 October.

Updated October 2026. Corebook's prices were checked on their site on 26 October 2026, its features and homepage on 23 October.

Where Corebook is the better buy

Corebook is built for teams, and in these cases that beats a one-time fee outright.

Volume. The Studio° licence is $69 a month, or $1,100 once, for unlimited projects. Vessa is €39 per published brand. Do the arithmetic before you pick: past roughly thirty brands, Corebook's lifetime licence is the cheaper number, and an agency shipping a guideline a month gets there.

Readers with their own accounts. Both products put a password on a guideline. Corebook's entry brand tier adds viewer accounts and access control per user, with SSO above it and 2FA at the top. Vessa has a password per brand and nothing past it.

A brand team, not a handover. Three editors and twenty viewers on the first tier tells you exactly who Corebook is for: the marketing side of a company where a dozen people need the logo files and two of them need to edit the copy. Vessa has one account per guideline and no seats, so the client either asks you for a change or you hand them the login.

Templates you reuse across clients. The Studio° dashboard carries reusable templates. If your studio has a house structure it applies to every identity, that saves real hours. Vessa's structure is fixed by design. The closest it gets is duplicating a finished brand and starting the next one from it.

Figma in the loop. Corebook's Figma plugin builds guidelines, imports brand assets and creates local Figma styles. Vessa has no plugin. Everything goes in as an upload.

The different bet each one makes

Corebook bets that a brand guideline is infrastructure a company runs. Storage tiers, editor and viewer seats, access control, SSO, an asset library that grows to twenty terabytes. Everything about the pricing says the buyer is a brand team with a budget line, and for that buyer it's the right build.

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.

And it's built to be worked on by an AI, not just shipped to one. Vessa is an MCP server: connect Claude, Claude Code or Cursor and it can create the guideline, fill the sections and publish, while you keep the taste calls. Every published guideline also serves a brand.json and an llms.txt at its own URL, with no key to request, easing curves and durations in the JSON alongside the color and type. Corebook has announced MCP behind a waiting list and sells asset tagging as a separate product. As Corebook describes it, the AI reads the guideline for context. Nothing says it helps build one.

Who should pick which

Pick Corebook if you publish guidelines constantly and the flat agency fee beats per-brand pricing, if readers need their own accounts or SSO, if your work starts and ends in Figma, or if the client's marketing team needs seats and an asset library rather than a link.

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.