Canto vs. Frontify

Sharing assets with anyone in our organization, whether they are a Canto user or not, is extremely easy. I use my mobile device for taking photos and videos so the app is crucial in my role. It removes the extra step of sending the assets through email and then save it to the appropriate folder. Although, on occasion, I do have file uploads fail. A quick phone reset usually takes care of that. I also love the integration with Canva as that is our design tool of choice. Having easy access to our assets saves an incredible amount of time.

Well suited to organization starting their journey of design system creation. It provides a ready to go foundation that requires minimum effort to set up and get going. It may be limited if scaling into thousands of design elements and multiple users - we have not tried at scale of more that 10's of users.

• Allowing users to download a resized version of an image self serve (eg. for social media)
• Sharing collections where recipients can see and download high res images
• Tagging to make searches very simple and eliminate complete folder structures
• Tag all info about an asset in the data rather than trying to name images with this data

• It manages the visual aspects of a brand very well.
• It is easy to use and update.
• It converts the colors from hex to rgb and cmyk seamlessly.
• It has a nice user interface.

• Some UI/UX improvements.
• The portals feature is a nice start, but the design tools are limited. I wish it would function more like a CMS.
• Intermediate user types. Currently, it's regular users (free) and power users ($1,000/per person/year). A user level with a lower cost and fewer administrative functions would be welcomed.
• Adobe Connector should be made available for users who are not assigned as power users.

• I believe having an agency option would be great so that one could manage and build multiple brands for multiple clients.
• Having sections for voice and personality would be great.
• The ability to export a brand document to a .PDF to share with partners.

I was able to demo almost every significant DAM service while trying to choose what platform to adopt for the company and Canto won the race by far. They are better than other DAM services and their reps are always responsive and ready to help in any way they can, which is huge when you are moving an entire company to the platform. The Canto team has also been able to take our feedback and work on larger projects to make the platform better for us and other users by adding features that no other DAM is utilizing

Frontify is very easy to use and makes updating information a breeze. Frontify acts a central location to house assets and information for easy sharing. You can plug and play information and even white label the guide if desired

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.

Canto is usually available, though sometimes goes down for 30 min - 1 hr. Usually resolved quickly

I've satisfied with the performance

We had a lot of virtual meetings when we first started using Canto to see the features and training for the upload process. Our onboarding associate was very friendly and supportive as we went through learning the system and its capabilities. She showed us examples, and worked with us through our beginning stages of setup, and answered any questions we had.

My trainer was relatively junior, didn't really understand the product

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.

Canto is more visible than Dropbox, which we were using before making the switch. We are able to share assets easier and theoretically search assets easier as well, but the open nature of Canto has led to some data integrity issues which we are working through. The tagging functionality wasn't present in Dropbox, so we used folders as our primary means of sorting. That was cumbersome. We like Canto's solution better.

We've invested time building our own hosted interface, and recently begun exploring Figma for design system management too. The benefit of Frontify is it's easy public access. The downfall is integration with other systems required in the UX, Design, Product Management, and Development processes - something Figma supports well.

Canto is based on the West coast, so occasionally patches and planned outages happen during East coast working hours

• POS: time to find assets has been greatly decreased - faster workflows.
• POS: colleagues report not being dependent on a single content-savvy person anymore to get suitable content.
• POS: no need for FTP-server, transfer, google drive share links,... anymore to share large files.
• NEG: streamlining the process of how to upload content to CANTO led to some delays in the availability of content for the organization (personal resources issue, not databank related).

• Solid cost benefit - the cost is not prohibitive for the value it brings
• Overall value depends on internal federation of usage