Frame.io and Shade both hold your footage in the cloud and both charge per seat, which is why they end up on the same shortlist. They are built for different halves of the job. Frame.io is where a cut goes to be reviewed. Shade is where footage goes to be found.
Pick by which problem is actually hurting.
The prices, current as of 2026-08-09
Frame.io (V4)
- Free: 2 GB, 2 projects
- Pro: $15/user/month, up to 5 members, unlimited projects, 2 TB
- Team: $25/user/month
- ~13% off on annual billing
Shade
- Growth: $35/seat/month, or $29.75/seat on annual
- One workspace, up to 15 seats, up to 150 guests
- 500 GB active storage per seat, unlimited AI indexing, unlimited drives
- Enterprise: custom, 1 TB/seat, unlimited seats, SSO/SAML
For a five-person team, that is $75/month on Frame.io Pro against $175/month on Shade Growth ($148.75 annual). Shade is roughly 2× per seat.
What each is actually for
Frame.io is a review and approval tool. Frame-accurate comments, versions stacked against each other, client links that do not require an account, and a Premiere/Resolve panel so notes land in the timeline. If your pain is "the client's feedback arrives as a text message at 11pm," this is the product.
Shade is a media library with search. It indexes what is inside your footage so you can find clips by describing them, across drives, without having tagged anything in advance. If your pain is "we shot this two years ago and nobody can find it," this is the product.
Storage tells you the same story. Frame.io gives 2 TB on a $15 plan because it expects finished cuts and selects. Shade gives 500 GB per seat at $35 because it expects to be indexing everything.
Choosing
Take Frame.io if the bottleneck is client review, you need frame-accurate notes in an NLE, or you need to share with people who will never log in.
Take Shade if the bottleneck is retrieval, you have a large archive nobody tagged, or you routinely re-cut old footage and cannot find it.
Take both if you are big enough that review and archive are genuinely separate problems. They do not conflict; they just both cost money.
Take neither if your real problem is that footage is scattered across drives with no inventory. Neither tool fixes disorganisation — Frame.io will hold whatever you upload and Shade will index whatever you point it at, and both will bill you for the duplicates.
The seat-count cliff
Shade's published pricing caps at 15 seats, after which you are in quote-only Enterprise. Frame.io Pro caps at 5 members before Team at $25/user. Both have a step you should find before you commit, not after you have onboarded everyone.
Before you pay per seat or per terabyte
Both bill on volume — seats, storage, or both. Both will happily hold footage no project references any more.
Auditing before you migrate is the cheapest thing in this whole comparison: it is free, it happens once, and it lowers a recurring bill. Clip Sweeper shows what is genuinely referenced across every project on a drive, so the library you upload is the one you actually use.
Prices change. These were checked 2026-08-09 — verify before you budget.