Likelihood to Recommend I think Aprimo is well suited when you are looking for a DAM to house all of your content. It will be easy to find what you need based on the metadata you are including. I think Aprimo works very well in situations where you are looking for both a DAM and project management system. We are using the DAM and Aprimo productivity and they pair well together
Read full review Canto is an excellent tool for organizing assets and searching for them in one location. I also really enjoy using the mobile version of Canto on my smartphone when I am on the go. Canto is robust and fast and it has been a major advancement in the way that my organization stores and shares assets.
Read full review Pros Audit - The trail of what you can look back on is so robust and the IDs are on every task and asset. You see a full picture of something that has been approved and can see any amends that have been made. Having the full view and timeline of any updates is essential for our teams. Reporting - Most if not all fields can be reported on. This is essential for us as we use reports to influence management decisions as well as managing day-to-day operations. DAM - The DAM functionality and connectivity is a big one for our future plans as well as existing ones. Connectors into the DAM help us integrate the systems we have already, plus plan and support the business with new plans in growing areas. Service - Aprimo support is amazing. The support we get as a company is always great, no matter how big or small any issues or queries are. The team at Aprimo is always so attentive and comes back with great answers and support. Read full review Ability to manage several portals and allow different users access to each. Ability to customize each Canto platform or portal to suit all needs. The platform is very easy to use, and while there are more complex components to the platform, users are able to use only the basics and remain very successful. Read full review Cons Customer support is slow to resolve system issues Complicated configuration with no in-depth training amounts to a huge learning curve and expensive concierge services The consumer-facing UI does not have all of the functionality that is required Training videos are out of date or purport functionality that does not exist Read full review The brand templates add-on is very difficult to use. It sounds great on paper, but when you actually try to use it you find out it's very clunky and limited. Adding fonts to style guides is difficult. Would love to see some sort of integration with Adobe and Google fonts. Duplicate finder only finds exact duplicates, so if a file has been run through processing of any sort it doesn't find it (ie Photoshop, Lightroom). Would be great if it could have some sort of optical duplicate finder. Read full review Likelihood to Renew While Aprimo provides the fundamental tools to track our actual spend, it has a major void when trying to plan for future programs. Our teams often have offline Excel spreadsheets to track actuals spend vs. our original budget, and lay out the future programs against which we plan to use budget funds. Would also appreciate reporting mechanisms which could splice data in non table format. For example, we often use marketing calendars to display programs/spend over time. This helps our team ensure that programs which are intended to run concurrent with in-store sales executions are happening in the correct time frame. The visual is simply easier to follow.
Read full review It's a fantastic product and we get a lot of mileage out of Canto. I would 100% say that we plan to renew our subscription and have not explored any other digital asset management tools. It has all the tools we need, seamlessly connects with Adobe products (out primary design tool) and continues to innovate.
Read full review Usability Really good search and upload process, and great functionality for workflow approval and editing. QuickConnect is handy for on the go, and the SSO keeps it simple. For customization, it is relatively complex and requires some technical knowledge. The user guides are very detailed, and the Aprimo Academy training modules provide lots of information, but there is a steep learning curve to get fully up to scratch with the system. The level of inter-relatedness of areas of customization could be complicated to work out if there is a problem. The support team at Aprimo is fantastic and the high customization potential is a benefit rather than a downside. A system champion is required to make sure it is fully utilized.
Read full review Canto is about as easy to use as it gets. I have personally trained a handful of employees who are unfamiliar with DAM/marketing SaaS technology on how to use the platform for their needs. These trainings only take about half an hour (given they are using a very limited set of Canto's features), and afterward, they are pretty well-equipped to use the platform.
Read full review Reliability and Availability We have not yet experienced any downtime
Read full review Canto is usually available, though sometimes goes down for 30 min - 1 hr. Usually resolved quickly
Read full review Performance We are struggling with it though I think it’s our firewall i.e. an internal issue. Accessing the software outside or on mobile is faster. They have a multi-tenant and single tenant option (more expensive) . We bought the single tenant option in anticipation of using Campaign Management and based upon our scale. You get more capabilities with single tenant
Read full review I've satisfied with the performance
Read full review Support Rating Support is support, so mainly reactive when it is about product inside and common issues. But when it is about specific enhancements and business concerns related to our own configuration and settings, we surely feel a gap. and this is why concierge is a must have solution when facing Aprimo support
Read full review I think Canto's onboarding process was really helpful. Our employees were able to utilize the system without excess training sessions which isn't always the case with some software. I also think that their customer support has proven to be super helpful when minor issues arise
Read full review In-Person Training Aprimo offered a number of hands on sessions customized for each group. As such, they address specific needs and configurations of each team. These sessions also offered another round of cross-functional collaboration in process design.
Read full review Online Training It was very generic and we took it prior to configuration. It was however adequate to educate our user in the basic capabilities that will have become available to them after deployment.
Read full review Very knowledgable and accommodating trainers who listen to what you're asking and provide detailed yet simple instructions.
Read full review Implementation Rating We were very well supported. TopRight who performed the process/requirements definition as well as project management functions came with ample experience with various marketing automation platforms. They also came with very good multi-channel marketing experience that allowed them to tackle this implementation as a marketing deployment and not a technology deployment. TopRight bring expertise in multi-channels strategy. Aprimo performed the configuration and training functions. Their personnel were very well versed in their platform and brought much empathy to a deployment that required a great deal of change management. I am stunned by how many people (from for-profit sector who work here) have not been exposed to these types of platforms. I want to make sure that folks are so accustomed to user interface. When I roll-out campaign management, teaching them the art and science of campaign management versus just learning the tool. TopRight are marketers. They are familiar with all these technologies. Their job has been to define processes, best practices and turn into training. Similar to training from Salesforce.com about funnel mgmt etc, vs. just the product. We will create training modules that are agnostic to the platform
Read full review We didn't have a thorough enough plan for ownership of uploading and tagging and some of our tags were inconsistent which led to some regression in our usage. We tightened up that plan on our end and spoke with support team on Canto's end to establish some best practices and have a much better workflow now.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Unica - Both platforms (i.e. Unica and Aprimo) delivered comparable capabilities. However, due to internal limitations around technical support and technical maturity of the organization we selected Aprimo as it delivered the more user friendly user interface. Unica requires more technical saviness. With Aprimo you can be completely non-technical. We evaluated Epsilon, but they were too expensive and don’t compete on price. We evaluated Axciom. They offered an outsourced full service and were very powerful, but we wanted to bring capabilities more in-house. The capabilities were more advanced that we needed today. We felt Aprimo or Unica could both carry us a long way. We did not look at marketing automation vendors like Eloqua, Marketo. From a scale standpoint, we were looking for campaign management and not just marketing automation. Also wanted MRM (Marketing Resource Management) or internal workflow management capabilities. We did not take a deep dive as they didn’t have the full suite solution
Read full review Dropbox is not as organized as Canto is. This is very impactful to help us stay consistent and to stay proper when managing our digital assets. Moreover, the ease of navigation is a lot better than
Dropbox ever was, this is a big reason why our company has been using Canto for SEVERAL years.We do not want to leave Canto!
Read full review Scalability Canto is based on the West coast, so occasionally patches and planned outages happen during East coast working hours
Read full review Return on Investment The stream-lined content process with agency partners who have access to our Aprimo client. In app creative review and redlining makes changes easy for client and agency. Cost saving in the way that we were able to build custom products and not try and use a costly less effective tool. Read full review Covid: We all worked from home. It was a major impact for us to stop using a sketchy VPN that is slow and painful. We all became so much more efficient in our work. Sharing assets: Our company has grown substantially in the past 3 years. Having Canto means that we can easily share assets with our worldwide divisions. We are leading the way on this as the companies we acquired are using archaic servers. We will bring everyone in the Canto world to better manage our assets. Control: Prior to Canto, people were misusing images - not using the right ones, not using watermarks. Now it's all preventable and we are seeing better quality images used appropriately. Read full review ScreenShots