The Brief Reviews 182

The app is terrible!! The designs that you make often export looking differently, and it's been an ongoing issue since the app was named Creatopy. Exporting issues seem to have gotten worse, from design to font and colors changing upon export. But when the company itself exports anything, it's magically not an issue. And yes this is a widespread issue between everyone and not just one person.

The added credit system is incredibly useless and serves as a way for the brief to get more money out of its customers. I also don't like a lot of the new changes such as the UI changes, and all the changes I listed above with export and the credit system. It seems like it just gets worse and worse.

I genuinely wanted to like this product, but it’s basically impossible to use for what it’s marketed to do.

First, the pricing model is incredibly frustrating. Almost everything requires additional paid credits. As a marketer, brainstorming and rapid ideation are core use cases – generating multiple visual concepts, experimenting with variations, refining ideas etc. Yet every attempt to generate or edit visuals burns credits. To make things worse, a huge portion of these outputs simply don’t work! Image generation, resizing into multiple variations and animation features fail or hallucinate the majority of the time. You end up paying for results you can’t actually use.

Second, core functionalities, especially resize, just don’t work reliably. Features that were fundamental in the previous product and central to the its value are now broken or inconsistent. It feels like the basics have been badly neglected.

At this point, the platform feels like an overpriced wrapper around Nano Banana, Veo and other tools they openly promote using and all of which you can use separately, often more effectively and at a lower cost. There’s no clear added value.

Unless something changes soon, it’s hard to see how this product or the company behind it remains competitive for much longer.

The decision to limit exports based on credits is frankly ridiculous, and an insult to any working professional. We have been using this software since it was called 'Bannersnack', and our "upgrade" to the version with AI features has been marred by frustration. It has transformed what used to be a great program to something that has become expensive, obtrusive to professional users and nonsensical. I wish we just stayed on our Legacy plan.

The great features of this program (of which there are many, particularly for building custom-animated HTML/CSS ads) are sadly stained by the idiotic decision to apply credits to exports (on top of the monthly plan that we are already paying). Any working designer knows that iterative processes are a key part of professional workflows. The fact that we are forced to pay repeatedly on every export renders the iterative design process absurdly expensive. Absolute nonsense.

We never had to pay to export before, so why now? (Greed of course) I highly doubt there is any AI used in the export feature - there never was before. And for what it's worth, the newly-added AI features are unimpressive and next to useless for us - we are often forced to build most of our ads manually anyway, because the quality of AI generations is just not good enough for what our clients desire.

The tragic thing is that the essence of what Creatopy (now The Brief) was founded on was great: that is to say, a powerful platform to facilitate the building of ads (particularly display ads in our case). That functionality is still there - if you would only focus on the actual strengths of your products instead of caving to the AI circlejerk and forcing your clients to pay for exports. This review would and should be 4 stars, if you would only focus on what your clients are actually looking for. But alas, you have greenlighted one of the most insultingly terrible decisions I have ever seen taken by a successful enterprise.

JUST DON'T CHARGE US FOR EXPORTS. IT'S SIMPLE. IT'S LOGICAL.

Suffice to say: this is an incredibly disappointing direction for a company that has been great for so long. Sad times.

UI doesnt work on mobile at all, you can't even access the account info or delete your account. Signed up for 'Free'-plan to test, but they automatically added me to 'Pro'-trial period. Scammy behaviour. This is just a poorly made sleeve for Gemini/Nanobanana/ChatGPT doing the work.

I use a platform like The Brief to make design easy. They've added a lot of extra features, which can be very useful but is also so complicated that you need to extra time to understand it. Which is counterproductive.

Straight forward tool to create ad sets and designs

The fact that you changed your billing process as well as brand is problematic for us. We’ve been subscribing for almost 3 years with no limits on our credits, and all of a sudden there was a hard limit. It affected our ability to deliver product and our processes, and we are looking at other options.

I bought a subscription expecting full access, but you still have to pay extra for most services. The platform feels confusing and far from intuitive — the interface is clunky and not well thought out. It’s unclear what’s actually included, and overall it doesn’t deliver value for the money.

do not like having to switch back to legacy editor, which is better for what our needs are. As of now not much need for the AI compents for the banners we create

The transition from Creatopy to The Brief has been frustrating at best. This is a program that I use every day. For a week it was very glitchy and I was having a hard time getting anything done because I kept getting randomly logged out. Now that the transition is complete, I have had the worst part navigating the new program.

The Brief heavily advertises the AI features despite the fact that they don't even work well. It pushes it so heavily, the navigation of the site completely went downhill. The navigation in the brand folders is not user-friendly and almost hides the folders of designs that I've already made. Along with the templates that I created in Creatopy before the rebrand, I can't use them. When I tried to talk to support about it, all that they'd offer was an ai bot that just kept telling me everything was fine on their end, and then an hour later I finally talked to a real person that admitted it was something wrong on their end, but the problem has yet to be fixed.

Long story short: The AI feature is subpar at best, The navigation is completely frustrating to work out, the overall quality has gone down, and the only reason we are still using it is the multiple years worth of designs we have saved here.

switch from creatopy was very sudden. I don't use other features (the new stuff that was added). doesn't seem like an improvement from what I'm personally working on, but I'm prob. a fringe use/user-case.

The platform has been glitchy since the recent rebrand to The Brief. Preview links are now unstable and not reflective of the actual creative file, driving delays and considerable extra work for our teams and tanking client trust of reviewing creative developed in the platform.

Also, the new layout of The Brief homepage view uses about 80% of the usable space to talk to me as if I'm new to using the platform and starting an ad from scratch. The things I really need for my projects are crammed into the remaining 20% of usable space on a tiny sidebar on the left side. Improving the UX would be a MASSIVE help in making the platform more user friendly.

I have been using the free version privately for a long time, and the solution is very stable and easy to work with.

I use this tool for banners design since it was Bannersnack back in the days. Now it's pricy, and I don't need 70% of features they provide. The export is a bit buggy, which requires credits spend for every re-export. Please fix that.

I like the setup of the brief/creatopy but for me there are too many things that aren't working the way they are suppose to do, from export issues, designs not previewing as they look in the design file, buttons not functioning. I feel like I have to reach out every week to the support team for something that isn't working properly.

The base product just gets worse and worse. there are bugs from years ago that still occur, the template resizing barely works. I have to download GIFs 3 or 4 times to get them to actually download. New features drop constantly but they barely work- the AI resizing doesn't work at all but costs credits?

The only reason I continue to use this is that there's no competition for software that does ad design, yet you continue to alienate your ad design users by neglecting the base functionality and chasing buzzworthy features.

Very intuitive UI, allowed me to create and localize a UGC ad unit in minutes and the AI tools are quite impressive. I'm excited to continue using this product to help with my creative needs.

Slow download. Preview and downloaded file look different.

The change from Creatopy to The Brief has extremely diminished the quality of this product. The credits program is awful and extremely inconvenient. In addition to the worsening product, the price has gone up significantly and is not worth it.