Artlist vs Storyblocks

Meet the contenders

Artlist — All-in-one creator subscription

A music-first creator bundle: music, SFX, footage, templates and a large AI suite under one Max subscription.

Artlist began as a music licensing service for filmmakers and has grown, tier by tier, into the closest thing the market has to Brollvia's shape: one subscription that bundles royalty-free music, sound effects, stock footage, video templates and LUTs, wrapped in a fast-growing AI toolkit. Its flagship Max plan adds AI video, image and music generation, AI voiceover and avatars, and a Studio product for keeping characters and locations consistent across AI-generated scenes. Reviewers count roughly 60,000 music tracks, 50,000 sound effects, 180,000 footage clips and 20,000 templates — a mid-sized but carefully curated catalogue, positioned on quality and ease rather than raw scale.

Two Artlist features deserve respect from any filmmaker. The first is music depth: Max includes stems, so an editor can rebalance a track or lift the vocal out of a cue, and the catalogue is organised into playlists by mood, genre and use case. The second is Clearlist, which connects to your YouTube channel, monitors uploads and automatically clears the false copyright claims that plague stock-music users — unglamorous, monetisation-saving work that most libraries, Brollvia included, do not yet do for you. Artlist also ships plugins for Premiere Pro, After Effects, Final Cut and DaVinci Resolve, so its media can be pulled into the timeline without a browser round-trip.

Where Artlist's model differs from Brollvia's is openness. There is no documented public API for searching and licensing its catalogue, and the one report of an MCP integration — a secondary source describing Claude-based in-chat generation — is about generating media, not licensing the library, and was not verified on an Artlist page in our research. Licensing proof is account-bound: your coverage lives in your Artlist account rather than behind a public verification anyone can check. And while Max is a strong bundle, its price — $39.99 a month for Pro, before the RAW/LOG upgrade — sits well above Brollvia Pro.

Storyblocks — Unlimited-download subscription

Truly unlimited downloads of human-made stock for video creators, with a built-in editor and an AI editing toolkit.

Storyblocks built its name on a simple promise the rest of the industry resisted for years: pay one subscription and download without counting. Its library — more than six million assets by the company's own account — spans footage, photos, vectors, illustrations, music and sound effects, all of it human-made, a point Storyblocks now markets as a feature in itself. For video creators it adds the piece most libraries skip: templates, for After Effects, Premiere Pro, Apple Motion and DaVinci Resolve, so the subscription sells not just raw material but finished motion design.

Two additions define modern Storyblocks. Maker is a built-in video editor aimed at fast, template-driven assemblies — useful for social teams who live inside the library anyway. The AI Toolkit, announced with partners ElevenLabs and Runway, goes in the opposite direction from generative platforms: instead of generating new footage, it edits the human-made stock you downloaded — AI voiceover and voice cloning from ElevenLabs, and Runway Aleph re-lighting, re-colouring and re-backgrounding of existing clips, on a few thousand AI credits a month depending on tier. It is a coherent philosophy: authentic footage, AI-assisted finishing.

The trade-offs are structural. Self-serve plans are annual-only, and the tiers fence off agencies, production companies and broadcasters into a custom Business plan. There is no public API or MCP server in the sources we checked, no script-to-shots matching, and licence proof lives in your account rather than behind public verification. Storyblocks is an excellent library-and-templates subscription; Brollvia is a smaller library wrapped in considerably more machinery.

Pricing, in each platform's own terms

Artlist

Artlist pricing rewards commitment and bundles. The entry point looks gentle — Music & SFX Social at $9.99/mo — but that buys no footage at all. The honest comparison against Brollvia Pro ($15/mo, unlimited everything) is Max: $29.99/mo for Social, $39.99/mo for Pro, billed annually, so $360–$480 a year against Brollvia's $99 annual launch rate. AI usage is where Artlist bills get unpredictable: Max Pro's price climbs steeply through AI-credit tiers, from around $50 at 16,500 monthly credits to $300+ at half a million, per Artlist's launch materials as summarised by reviewers. If you generate heavily, model your credit burn before the annual bill surprises you.

The RAW/LOG upgrade (+$20/mo) deserves a line of its own, because for colour-critical work it is not optional decoration — it is the difference between footage that grades like your camera originals and footage that does not. Brollvia has no equivalent tier today (its absence is scored honestly in the matrix below), so a fair total-cost comparison for a professional colour workflow is Max Pro + RAW/LOG at roughly $60/mo against Brollvia Pro at $15/mo with that format gap accepted. For everyone else — social, corporate, YouTube, most commercial work — the $15 flat rate is simply cheaper for a comparable bundle.

Storyblocks

Storyblocks pricing is easy to model because it is flat: $21, $30 or $40 a month, billed annually — $252 to $480 a year. Against Brollvia Pro at $99/yr or $15/mo, Storyblocks costs roughly two to three times as much for its full tier, and the comparison hinges on whether templates and unlimited depth repay that. For a creator downloading fifty assets a month, the effective per-asset cost at Storyblocks is pennies either way; the real price difference is contractual. Every self-serve Storyblocks plan is annual, so the $30 headline is a $360 commitment, while Brollvia lets you leave monthly.

Watch the tier fences. Small Business at $40/mo explicitly excludes agencies, production companies and broadcasters — if that is you, the price becomes a sales conversation, and the Business tier's $1M indemnification, SSO and broadcast/OTT rights are the actual product. Brollvia's fence is simpler: Free, Pro at one price for everyone, Teams at $12 a seat, and an extended licence per asset when a production needs merchandise or broadcast-grade terms. Neither model is dishonest; they just bill different kinds of certainty.

In the edit: workflow

Artlist

In daily use, Artlist feels like a well-stocked record shop: strong playlists, quick previews, plugins that drop media into four different editors, and Clearlist quietly defending your monetisation after publish. The gaps show up when the workflow leaves the browser-and-timeline loop: there is no API for your tools to license footage programmatically, no script-to-shots matching, and no public page where a client or a platform can verify your licence — your proof is your account. Brollvia was designed for exactly that wider loop, at the cost of a younger catalogue.

Storyblocks

Storyblocks shines inside a conventional editing week: browse, download without rationing, pull a template, rough-cut in Maker if the deadline is rude. Its AI Toolkit then polishes what you downloaded rather than asking you to generate replacements. The friction appears at the edges of that loop — no agent can license for you, no script breakdown proposes shots, and proving a licence to a client means account screenshots rather than a verification link. Brollvia inverts the experience: a smaller shelf, but the loop from brief to verified licence is automated end to end.

Switching away

From Artlist

Moving from Artlist to Brollvia is mostly a matter of re-downloading: footage you licensed under Artlist stays licensed under its terms for the uses you made, but your working library, playlists and project organisation do not transfer — no platform in this comparison offers library migration, Artlist included. The practical path is to let the annual plan lapse at renewal, run both for a month on active projects, and rebuild your staples as Brollvia collections and packs. If you rely on stems or Clearlist, weigh those two features honestly before switching; they are Artlist's strongest hold.

From Storyblocks

Leaving Storyblocks is contractually simple and practically annoying: simple because licences for published work persist, annoying because the annual term runs to its end and your template projects still reference Storyblocks downloads you will want to keep locally. Keep the downloads folder — it is your licence evidence for past work — and rebuild your go-to material as Brollvia collections. If Maker is your daily editor, budget a real adjustment period; Brollvia deliberately does not include an editor, preferring panels inside Premiere and Resolve.