If you are comparing these two with an archive already sitting in one of them, the deciding factor is rarely a feature. It is what survives the move. Metadata portability, proxy regeneration, and the permissions you would have to rebuild by hand tend to cost more than the licence, and they are the part of the decision that no demo covers. So before comparing the systems, price the move.
Make an inventory of what you would be carrying across
There are more layers to an archive than most people count. The media files themselves, which are usually the easy part. The proxies, which may have to be generated again from scratch. The metadata, including whatever custom fields grew over the years. The permissions and group structure. The integrations pointed at the current system. And the part nobody writes down, which is a decade of muscle memory about where things go and what the abbreviations in the folder names mean.
Any two systems in this category will handle the first item fine. The rest is where the real difference between your two candidates shows up, and the only way to find out is to export a slice of your own archive and try to read it on the other side.
Most of the metadata you would carry over is thinner than it looks
Open twenty assets at random from the last two years and look at what is actually in the fields. On most teams, a large share of it is the ingest date, the person who uploaded, and a project code. Descriptive metadata about what is in the picture tends to exist for the assets somebody once needed and nowhere else.
This matters because a migration plan usually gets built around preserving metadata that is not carrying much weight. If the fields are mostly empty, the honest comparison is not which system imports your schema more faithfully. It is which system produces useful description going forward with the staffing you actually have. The way a library gets built in the first place tells you more about that than the import spec does.
Route one: stay where you are and fix the edges
Cheapest and least discussed. Clean up the fields that matter, agree on a naming convention for new material, and add a weekly habit for the parts nobody maintains. This fails when the limit you are hitting is structural, for example a deployment shape that cannot support a remote editor. It works surprisingly often when the limit is that nobody has owned the library for two years.
Route two: migrate fully
You move everything, accept a rebuild period, and end up with one system of record. The cost is concentrated and visible: proxy regeneration, a metadata mapping exercise, a stretch where people search both places. The failure mode is a stalled migration, where the backlog never crosses and the team lives with two libraries permanently. If you take this route, decide in advance which portion of the old archive you are consciously abandoning.
Route three: leave the files where they are and search across them
This route treats retrieval as separate from storage. The existing system keeps doing custody, and a layer on top makes the material findable by what is in it. The trade is that you now run two things, and the search layer only knows about storage you connect it to. With Vivu, the search side only knows about what you upload: the footage you want searchable goes in as a copy and is indexed on Vivu's side, while custody stays with the existing system and nobody has to fix the folder structure first. That changes the question from what survives a full migration to which footage is worth making searchable.
Route four: split the job on purpose
Some teams stop trying to make one system do everything and let the archive of record stay boring while the active working library lives somewhere fast. That is a legitimate design, and how a review tool and an asset manager divide the work is the same argument in a different pair. The cost is a boundary rule that someone has to enforce, otherwise you get two half-archives.
When switching is the wrong project
If the complaint you hear most is that people cannot find things, a migration will not fix it by itself. Search quality follows from what gets indexed and who maintains it, and both of those travel with you. Moving a poorly described archive into a better system gives you a poorly described archive in a better system. Fix the description problem first, in whatever you have now, and you will also learn which of your two candidates you actually need.
How to decide
Run one test. Export a representative slice of your archive, import it into the other candidate, and have somebody who did not do the export try to find six specific things in it. Whatever gets lost in that exercise is the real difference between the two, priced in your own material rather than in a feature grid.
FAQ
What happens to our existing tags when we move to a different asset manager?
Standard fields usually survive, custom fields usually need a mapping decision, and anything stored as free text in a description box tends to arrive intact but unsearchable in the new structure. Export a slice and inspect it on the other side before you commit, because the answer depends on how your fields were set up years ago rather than on what either vendor supports in general.
Is it worth switching just to get better search?
Sometimes, but check first whether the limit is the system or the input. If almost nothing in your archive has descriptive metadata, a new system inherits that gap on day one. Switching pays off when the new setup produces description on its own, or when you are committing to staff the work properly this time. If neither is true, you will run the migration and get the same complaint back.
Can we run two asset systems in parallel while we transition?
You can, and many teams do, but pick an end date and a rule for what goes where before you start. The failure pattern is not technical. It is that six months later half the material is in each place, nobody remembers the rule, and every search takes two attempts.
How do we tell whether our current setup is really the problem?
Watch someone find something. Pick a real request, hand it to a person who was not on that shoot, and time the path they take rather than the result. If they open the asset manager and then give up and message a colleague, the system is not being used and no comparison of two systems will explain why. If they use it properly and still miss the clip, then you have a genuine retrieval limit worth shopping for.