What is the difference between Product Assets and Reference Entities in Akeneo?

What is the difference between Product Assets and Reference Entities in Akeneo?

TLDR: Product assets are meant to represent images/videos/documents and files in general. While the reference entities are a way to link objects to products (colors, materials, etc).

Here are the main differences between assets and reference entities:

In 3.2 and bellow

Product Assets:

• hold files (images, documents, videos, etc)
• are not flexible
• vary by channel and sometime by locale
• can be categorized
• product attributes (asset collection) cannot be localizable nor scopable

Reference entities:

• represents an object (color, fabric, supplier)
• with flexible properties
• that can be linked to products

In 4.0 and above:

Product assets have been totally revamped and are now really close to reference entities with a lot of improvements:

• transformations
• naming conventions (to guess properties from other properties)
• product link rules (to automatically link assets to products)
• media links to be able to load images, documents and video from outside the PIM