Likelihood to Recommend 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 CONTENTdm is well-suited for smaller organizations as a simple solution to present a digital collection on the web. If your need is complex and requires digital preservation as part of the workflow, it may not be the best solution.
Read full review Pros 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 Constant URLs User interface is good Run by OCLC, not likely to disappear Lori Atkins University Archivist of South Texas Archives
Read full review Cons 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 As a digital asset management system, one would expect the capability of managing preservation, which CONTENTdm lacks. Lack of batch updating and other advanced metadata management capabilities. The usage statistics does not work, and the company is not planning to fix it, at least based the interaction with tech support staff. Customers were referred to use Google Analytics. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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 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 Canto is usually available, though sometimes goes down for 30 min - 1 hr. Usually resolved quickly
Read full review Performance I've satisfied with the performance
Read full review Support Rating 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 Online Training Very knowledgable and accommodating trainers who listen to what you're asking and provide detailed yet simple instructions.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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 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 We selected CONTENTdm because it had a good reputation, was used by many institutions, provided a good product, and supplied feedback and monthly reports. We are wondering about DPLA and if that will be the next evolution or platform.
Lori Atkins University Archivist of South Texas Archives
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 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 It helped us to get started with our digital collections projects at a relatively low cost. As our needs grew, it became apparent that we needed something more powerful, and that provides better workflows and better statistics and is able to handle the whole life cycle of digitation projects. Read full review ScreenShots