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 €29 once per published 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.

Updated August 2026. Corebook's plans and features were checked on their pricing pages on 3 August 2026, their client wall on 4 August.

Updated August 2026. Corebook's plans and features were checked on their pricing pages on 3 August 2026, their client wall on 4 August.

Where Corebook is the better buy

Corebook is built for teams, and there are three shapes of work where that beats a one-time fee outright.

Volume. The Studio° licence is $69 a month, or $1,100 once, for unlimited projects. Vessa is €29 per published brand. Do the arithmetic before you pick: past roughly forty brands, Corebook's lifetime licence is the cheaper number, and an agency shipping a guideline a month gets there.

Guidelines that shouldn't be public. Password protection, viewer accounts and user access control sit on Corebook's entry brand tier, with SSO above 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 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, which is the point, but it means there is nothing to save.

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 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.

It also writes it down for machines. Every published Vessa guideline serves a brand.json and an llms.txt at its own URL, free tier included, with no key to request, and the easing curves and durations are in the JSON alongside the color and type. Corebook names the AI tools on its homepage and sells asset tagging as a separate product, but there's no file for a machine to read.

Who should pick which

Pick Corebook if you publish guidelines constantly and the flat agency fee beats per-brand pricing, if the guideline has to stay private or sit behind SSO, 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 that's the part nobody else documents.