kloudboard vsShade
if your media library lives in shade but your project tracking, client review, team chat, and freelancer invoices are scattered across five other tools, kloudboard pulls the whole creative workflow into one workspace.
Start free — no card requiredyour whole project lives in one place, not just your files
Shade is a brilliant home for your media — neural search, full-res streaming, automated metadata — but it stops at the files. There's no kanban, no task tracking, no calendar. kloudboard wraps the same review-and-approval job inside real board tracking with card-health analytics and a calendar that syncs to Google Calendar, so the asset and the work happening on it live together.
pay your freelancers without leaving the app
Shade has no payments layer — once a deliverable is approved you still jump to PayPal, Wise, or a spreadsheet to pay the editor. kloudboard pays freelancers natively through Dots (PayPal, Venmo, CashApp, ACH, crypto, Payoneer, international bank) at roughly a $1 flat fee plus percentage, so approval-to-payout never leaves the workspace.
talk to your team where the work is
Shade gives you timestamped comments on assets but no general team messaging — conversation still happens in Slack or wherever. kloudboard has built-in real-time chat, and bridges Slack, Discord, and WhatsApp into one unified inbox, so feedback and team chatter sit beside the board instead of in a separate tab.
free for the whole team to start, and clients never cost a seat
Shade's Growth plan starts at $29.75/seat/mo annually, caps you at 15 seats, and has no free-forever tier — and its 150 guests sit inside a paid workspace. kloudboard is free forever for up to 5 members (3 projects, 10GB, 1,000 AI credits/mo), and guests and clients are always $0 with no seat. Pro is $20/member/mo with unlimited projects.
see how your content actually performs
Shade tracks assets through delivery but goes dark once content ships — it has no social performance data. kloudboard adds social analytics for YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, and Facebook via OAuth, so a creative team can close the loop from brief to board to published reach in the same place.
an AI assistant included, not just AI search
Shade's AI is excellent at finding things — face, transcript, scene description in plain English. kloudboard adds Kloudie, a Claude-powered assistant included in every plan (1,000 credits/mo free, +10,000 per Pro seat) that works across your boards, files, chat, and tasks rather than only your asset library.
What kloudboard gives you that Shade doesn't
Built-in freelancer payments via Dots (PayPal, Venmo, CashApp, ACH, crypto, Payoneer, international bank) at ~$1 flat fee plus percentage- Kanban board tracking with card-health analytics, plus a calendar with Google Calendar sync
- Built-in real-time chat with Slack, Discord, and WhatsApp bridged into one unified inbox
- Social analytics for YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, and Facebook
- Free forever for up to 5 members, and free $0 guests/clients with no seat
- Kloudie AI assistant (Claude-powered) included on every plan, credit-metered across boards, files, chat, and tasks
Honest pricing
kloudboard
Free forever for up to 5 members, 3 projects, 10GB and unlimited free guests. Pro is a flat $20/member/mo ($180/yr) — video review, freelancer payments, and a free AI assistant all included.
Shade
Shade's entry Growth plan is $29.75/seat/mo billed annually ($35/seat/mo monthly), capped at 15 seats and 1 workspace with 500GB active storage per seat and up to 150 guests; there's no free-forever plan, only a free trial, and SSO/SAML, SCIM, audit logging and 1TB/seat sit behind custom-priced Enterprise.
for petabyte-scale media libraries and pro post-production, Shade is the stronger tool
Shade is purpose-built for heavy media: ShadeFS streams full-resolution RAW, BRAW, ProRes, and 4K/8K footage straight from the cloud without round-tripping local copies, and its neural search across face, transcript, and scene is best-in-class. If your core need is managing terabytes of footage with editors working directly against the library, Shade's storage infrastructure and codec depth go further than kloudboard's Drive. Many teams run kloudboard for the workflow and keep Shade as the asset vault.
Frequently asked questions
Is kloudboard really free?
Yes. kloudboard is free forever for up to 5 members with 3 projects, 10GB of storage, and 1,000 AI credits a month, and guests are always $0. Shade has no free-forever plan — only a trial before its $29.75/seat/mo Growth plan. kloudboard Pro is $20/member/mo (or $180/member/yr) for unlimited projects, +50GB and +10,000 AI credits per seat.
Can I migrate from Shade to kloudboard?
You can move your workflow over — boards, tasks, review, chat, and payments all live in kloudboard, and you can one-click import a Trello board if you track work there. kloudboard doesn't bulk-migrate Shade's media library for you, so a common path is to keep Shade as your asset vault while running the rest of your creative ops in kloudboard.
Does kloudboard integrate with Shade?
No, there's no direct Shade integration today. kloudboard has its own file storage (Drive), frame-accurate video and image review, and chat bridging for Slack, Discord, and WhatsApp. If your footage lives in Shade, you'd keep it there and use kloudboard for project tracking, review, chat, and freelancer payments.
kloudboard vs Shade for video review and approval?
Both do timestamped comments. kloudboard adds frame-accurate review with spatial draw-on-frame annotation on video and images, and guest reviewers need no account — Shade routes review through its workspace guests (up to 150 on Growth). kloudboard also ties that review directly to your kanban board, chat, and payments in one place.
kloudboard vs Shade for a small creative team or solo creator?
For a small team that needs project tracking, client review, team chat, and a way to pay freelancers, kloudboard's free-for-5 plan covers all of it in one tool. Shade is the better pick if your day is mostly managing huge media libraries and editing full-res footage directly from the cloud — that's what its ShadeFS streaming is built for.
Ready to leave Shade behind?
Start free today — free forever for up to 5 members, with unlimited free guests. No credit card required.
Get started for free