Dembrandt vs Frontify
Frontify stores what your brand should be. Dembrandt measures what your production site actually is.
Frontify is a brand management portal: it holds approved logos, guidelines, and documentation. Dembrandt is a CLI tool that extracts live design tokens from any URL and scores how much they drift between deployments. One is the reference. The other is the audit.
Comparison
| Frontify | Dembrandt | |
|---|---|---|
| Source of truth | Brand guidelines stored in Frontify (manual upload) | Live production DOM — what users actually see |
| Token extraction | Import from Figma or define manually | Automated CLI extraction from any URL in seconds |
| Drift detection | No drift scoring between releases | Numeric drift score per deploy, CI-ready |
| CI/CD integration | Not designed for deploy pipelines | Runs in GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, any CI |
| Scope | Full brand asset management: logos, fonts, docs | Design token extraction and drift monitoring |
| Baseline comparison | Version history of guidelines | Pin any snapshot. Every deploy scored against it. |
| Access model | Centralized brand portal for teams | CLI + API + web dashboard |
| Pricing model | Per-seat SaaS | Usage-based, free tier available |
Use Frontify when
- You need a centralized portal where marketing, design, and legal access approved assets
- You publish brand guidelines, tone of voice, and logo usage rules
- You manage multiple brands or sub-brands and need a structured library
- You distribute assets to agencies and external partners
Use Dembrandt when
- You want to verify that production matches your design system, not just your documentation
- You need drift flagged automatically on every deploy
- You run CI/CD pipelines and want a build step that fails on brand regression
- You manage multiple client sites and need cross-domain token tracking in one place
The gap Frontify does not cover
Frontify works top-down. You define the brand, upload the assets, and share the portal. The source of truth is what your team documents.
That leaves one question unanswered: does your live site match it? Frontify has no way to know. It does not read your production DOM, compute your rendered token values, or score drift between releases. That gap is where tokens silently diverge from the guide.
Dembrandt reads what the browser actually renders after full page load, including overrides from application CSS, third-party scripts, and dynamic theming. It surfaces the gap between what was documented and what shipped.
Run a one-off extraction on any URL with no account required:
npx dembrandt your-site.comTo enforce drift in CI, get an API key and add --key $DEMBRANDT_KEY to your deploy step. Full setup: cloud drift CI recipe.