Business Operations

The Top 7 Digital Rights Management (DRM) Software

Discover the Top Digital Rights Management (DRM) Software designed to safeguard digital assets and intellectual property.

Last updated on Apr 2, 2025
Caitlin Harris
Laura Iannini
Written by Caitlin Harris Technical Review by Laura Iannini
The Top 7 Digital Rights Management (DRM) Software include:
  1. 1.
    Adobe Experience Manager Assets
  2. 2.
    Brandfolder
  3. 3.
    Bynder Digital Asset Management
  4. 4.
    CapLinked FileProtect
  5. 5.
    Digify

Digital Rights Management (DRM) software is your gatekeeper against unauthorized use and piracy of digital content. It is a systematic approach to copyright protection for digital media. By inhibiting access to proprietary files and data, it prevents unauthorized redistribution of digital media and restricts the ways consumers can copy content they’ve purchased.

DRM software offers benefits to creators and owners of digital content by ensuring their intellectual property is protected and used correctly. In addition, it helps in controlling the access, sharing, and overall usage of the content, thereby avoiding illegal distribution. The software usually includes features like watermarking, encryption, and licenses controls.

For users, it provides authenticated access and usage of the digital content with due permissions. However, if an unauthorized access is attempted, DRM controls will block this usage ensuring the security of digital content.

In this article, we’ll explore the top DRM tools designed to safeguard your content against unauthorized use. We’ll highlight the key use cases and features of each solution, including content protection, access controls, integrations with content distribution and sales platforms, and additional in-built security features. 

Adobe offers comprehensive digital rights management via Adobe Experience Manager Assets, their cloud-based Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. Designed for contemporary content needs, Adobe Experience Manager Assets simplifies the management of digital assets and helps businesses create, deliver, and optimize personalized experiences on a large scale. The platform is integrated within the larger Adobe Experience Manager platform, offering a single interface for efficient management of all your company’s digital asset expiration information and various asset states.

Adobe Experience Manager Assets’ digital rights management tools minimize the risk of potential legal consequences associated with the utilization of unlicensed, unapproved, or expired assets. The platform systematically enforces license requirements for assets, and automatically removes expired assets. This feature not only saves time, but also significantly reduces the legal risks that could result from potential license violations.

Adobe Experience Manager Assets also offers a versatile search panel, allowing users to track assets based on their status. This helps maintain insights into digital rights management, along with provision to approve, or reject assets. The search console also makes it quite simple to look for expired assets and sub-assets, monitor past and future asset expirations, and even set up email notifications for regular updates.

1.

Adobe Experience Manager Assets

Adobe Experience Manager Assets Logo

Brandfolder is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) software that facilitates the efficient organization, control, distribution, and measurement of a brand’s creative content. Its digital resource platform supports a variety of formats such as documents, images, 3D, and 8K videos.

Brandfolder’s DRM capabilities ensure easy accessibility and protection of branded content by embedding EXIF, IPTC, and compliance information into the metadata of uploaded assets for simplified searching. Additionally, Brand Intelligence, the platform’s proprietary AI-engine, facilitates the effective usage of marketing resources by quick content retrieval, while enabling teams to focus on strategic projects. It reduces duplication efforts with effective search capabilities powered by natural language processing and intuitively organizes content. With Brandfolder Insights, teams can monitor customer and prospective lead interactions with their content, including what assets are accessed and downloaded.

Brandfolder can be integrated with other tools through its developer-friendly API and pre-built integrations. This ensures seamless accessibility of assets regardless of the platform used, making Brandfolder a comprehensive choice for businesses looking for DRM as part of a wider digital asset management platform.

2.

Brandfolder

Brandfolder Logo

Bynder Digital Asset Management (DAM) offers a comprehensive platform for consolidating and managing digital assets, assuring optimum use and brand uniformity. As part of this broader DAM platform, Bynder offers digital rights management for protecting digital property and ensuring its proper utilization.

Bynder DAM enables users to configure access and usage permissions. With different user permission levels, Bynder DAM allows each user’s interaction within the DAM to be specifically managed based on their role. The platform enables you to streamline these policies and automate their enforcement, helping to eliminate the risk of material being distributed without authorization. The platform is designed with both internal and external content sharing capabilities, enabling secure content distribution straight from the DAM system. With additional features like setting expiration dates for assets and tracking sharing history, users can actively control how and when content gets used.

Finally, Bynder DAM’s platform can also help to prevent unauthorized distribution of sensitive digital assets. By recognizing the nature of different pieces of content and their usage requirements, Bynder DAM helps you determine which security measures to implement, and at which levels, in order to secure your most sensitive content.

3.

Bynder Digital Asset Management

Bynder Digital Asset Management Logo

CapLinked is a document security company that provides a DRM tool called FileProtect. With this tool, users gain full control over their documents, with capabilities to grant and rescind access at any point, even after the document is downloaded. Any enabled downloads will have automatic restrictions on activities like copying, editing, or printing. There’s also functionality to set expiry dates for access to documents.

FileProtect offers comprehensive activity tracking that makes a record of all in-browser activities, including instances of file download. These real-time activity analytics can offer valuable insight into the behaviors and interests of prospects, contributing to efficient workflow management and project lifespan optimization. It eliminates the need for plugins or frequent updates, offering a seamless experience with safer document sharing.

CapLinked’s FileProtect also allows custom integrations to fulfill specific security requirements, ensuring necessary compliances and security processes are being met. Because of this, FileProtect is well-suited to organizations that not only want enhanced control over their digital content, but also need to comply with strict industry or federal compliance requirements.

4.

CapLinked FileProtect

CapLinked FileProtect Logo

Digify is a digital document security platform that helps businesses ensure maximum control over documents distributed online. The platform offers a user-friendly digital rights management solution that allows users to protect a wide array of digital content—from intellectual property, such as market research, eBooks, training modules and reports, to other confidential documents. Digify’s key purpose is to defend digital files from unauthorized redistribution and limit the ways recipients can copy content.

A key feature of Digify is its versatility in document and file format protection. The platform supports various formats including PDF files, images, videos, and even MS Office documents. The system offers distribution control over sensitive documents, allowing for restrictions on downloads or printing and the automatic watermarking of documents. Digify also grants its users control over file access, with the ability to revoke permissions at any time, restrict forwarding, and apply expiration dates for access.

To ensure transparency and control, Digify provides a user analytics and activity log, which tracks when and where users access the protected documents. Further bolstering the security, the platform offers automated watermarking that shows recipient’s email on the documents to discourage screenshots and screen recordings, thereby increasing the level of document protection.

5.

Digify

Digify Logo

Google Widevine is a content protection system developed by Google, which facilitates the optimal consumption of high-value digital content across several digital distribution channels. As part of this, Google Widevine offers DRM tools for licensing, secure distribution, and content playback protection on any consumer device. This functionality enables content owners, digital media providers, and service operators to securely deliver revenue-generating services on various customer-preferred devices.

Google Widevine ensures comprehensive device compatibility and coordinates with multiple content protection systems. It also offers a fully-equipped HTML5 video player that supports adaptive streaming, Quality of Service (QoS), and accessibility features across devices. The system uses a standardized format, allowing for encryption, play anywhere functionality, and has industry-adopted media containers including ISO BMFF (i.e., MP4) and WebM.

A critical part of Google Widevine is its robust device security, which utilizes factory provisioned keyboxes to establish a hardware root of trust, providing secure decryption and content rendering. In line with global standards, Google Widevine adheres to industry-accepted specifications such as W3C’s Encrypted Media Extensions, ISO/IEC 23001-7’s Common encryption in ISO base media file format files, and ISO/IEC 23001-9’s Common encryption of MPEG-2 transport streams.

6.

Google Widevine

Google Widevine Logo

Vitrium is a company specializing in DRM solutions that offer protection for various content types including documents, images, audio, and video files. Vitrium offers three distinct DRM solutions: Vitrium Pro, Vitrium Enterprise, and VitriumOne. Vitrium Pro allows organizations to share encrypted material with authorized consumers via a secure web viewer, on-demand streaming, or a personalized user portal. Vitrium Enterpriseextends these protections, facilitating the distribution of secured content through third-party systems like CRMs, LMSs, or eCommerce platforms by using API integration. For larger distribution networks, VitriumOneallows partners, customers, or educational institutions to redistribute the encrypted content to their respective users.

Each of Vitrium’s DRM solutions ensures robust protection and encryption for a diverse array of content. Upon uploading, content is encrypted with AES 128-bit encryption that converts it into a secure web format and provides companies with various options to prevent or allow actions like printing, copying, download, and screen sharing. The system also supports the addition of dynamic user-identifying watermarks for enhanced security. Vitrium also supports secure content distribution, allowing users to share content via email, a customized portal, or third-party systems for a single sign-on access.

Vitrium’s DRM solutions also offer substantial tracking and analytics, providing insightful data on content access and user behavior. This allows companies to understand their most valuable content, identify the most active users, and make informed decisions based on these metrics.

7.

Vitrium

Vitrium Logo
The Top 7 Digital Rights Management (DRM) Software

Everything You Need To Know About Digital Rights Management Software (FAQs)

What Is Digital Rights Management (DRM) Software?

Digital Rights Management (DRM) software protects digital media assets against copyright infringement. It helps individuals and organizations to manage their digital asset libraries and creative or intellectual property in a way that complies with digital copyright standards and prevents the unauthorized use of their content—including unauthorized distribution and modification. To achieve this, DRM software tracks asset storage, usage, and copyright expiration, as well as implementing access and distribution restrictions. These restrictions could include preventing editing, sharing, saving, printing, or screen-grabbing content. They could also include watermarking and locking files so they can only be accessed via specific IP addresses or geographical locations. Together, these features ensure that control of the digital content remains with the individual that created it, rather than the individual that’s using it.

DRM tools can either be delivered as standalone products, or as part of a wider Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform that helps businesses to store and manage all their digital content.

What Are The Benefits Of Implementing DRM Software?

There are numerous benefits to implementing DRM technologies. First and foremost, DRM software can help organizations of all sizes, and across all industries, protect their brand and their intellectual property against copyright infringement and theft. As well as protecting the rights of content owners, this helps the business as a whole avoid costs associated with potential lawsuits and brand damage.

Additionally, by controlling access to—and distribution of—digital media, DRM tools can help ensure that the owners of that media receive proper compensation for the use of their work.

DRM software also provides greater visibility into how assets are used and distributed —both lawfully and unlawfully— helping to minimize the time and money teams spend tracking this manually. This makes it easier for teams to prove that content has been used without their permission.

Finally, this increased visibility also makes it easier for teams to source and reference content, which can help speed up go-to-market campaigns.

How Does DRM Software Work?

DRM software uses two types of protection to prevent the unauthorized use of digital media. These are copy protection and permission management.

Copy protection uses encryption to prevent unauthorized individuals from copying a file or its contents. Once someone is granted access to a file, the DRM tool can prevent them from using the copy command to copy the entire file or parts of it and pasting them elsewhere. It can also prevent printing. To achieve this, the DRM software encrypts the contents of the file so that only authorized software can open it and access its contents. This could, for example, mean that an end user could open a file through their web browser, but that it would remain encrypted if they tried to download it.

Another important part of copy protection is watermarking. DRM tools can add digital watermarks to the content, which typically include the user’s IP and email addresses—making it easy to track them down if they screenshot the file.

Permission management controls access to digital files and restricts the actions that a user can perform on the file once they’re granted access to it, such as preventing it from being edited. This is typically achieved through software licenses and keys, proxy servers, user authentication, geo-blocking, and IP authentication protocols.

What Features Should You Look For In A DRM Software?

Here are the most important features that you should consider when comparing DRM software:

  1. Content Protection: The software should use robust encryption mechanisms to protect digital content from unauthorized access. It should also be able to embed watermarks into content, making it traceable in the event of unauthorized distribution.
  2. Access Control: All DRM software should offer user authentication to control access to content based on user credentials. As part of this, you should be able to set granular policies that state who can access, view, or modify content, and under what conditions.
  3. Secure Delivery: You should be able to control the number of times content can be downloaded and the devices it can be downloaded to. You may also want your DRM tool to be able to securely stream content to authorized users, preventing unauthorized downloads.
  4. Revocation and Renewal: Your DRM software should revoke access to content in case of license violations or unauthorized use. It should also offer smooth mechanisms for renewing licenses and permissions.
  5. Monitoring and Reporting: Any strong DRM tool should offer a comprehensive log of user activities for auditing purposes. It should also generate reports on content usage, access patterns, and security events for both compliance and accountability purposes.
  6. Integration and Compatibility: You need to make sure the DRM software works seamlessly across different devices, operating systems, and platforms. It should also be relatively straightforward to integrate with your existing systems, platforms, and workflows. This is usually achieved through APIs.
Written By

Caitlin Harris is Deputy Head of Content at Expert Insights. Caitlin is an experienced writer and journalist, with years of experience producing award-winning technical training materials and journalistic content. Caitlin holds a First Class BA in English Literature and German, and provides our content team with strategic editorial guidance as well as carrying out detailed research to create articles that are accurate, engaging and relevant. Caitlin co-hosts the Expert Insights Podcast, where she interviews world-leading B2B tech experts.

Technical Review
Laura Iannini
Laura Iannini Cybersecurity Analyst

Laura Iannini is an Information Security Engineer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida. Laura has experience with a variety of cybersecurity platforms and leads technical reviews of leading solutions. She conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.