Canto vs. ImageKit.io

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.

E-Commerce is a perfect example where a service like ImageKit.io, is well suited. It takes a lot of the guesswork related to browser image format support, correct image dimensions for every kind of device, away from the developer. Thus reducing the need for maintaining code ourselves to check for and deliver an image for every user and his specific browser. This reduces code maintenance time in the long run and less custom code will ensure stability after integration for our online store running on OpenCart 3.

• 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

• Automatically convert images for fast delivery based on browser support and network quality.
• Well-documented integration documentation that is easy to follow when getting started with your implementation.
• Easy to navigate user dashboard for setup and management of server origins and account settings. The usage analytics page is also handy to track and fix any 404 errors there might be for an image/s.

• 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.

• The Usage Analytics page could be laid out a little better and include filtering options, options may include path, country, IP Address, etc.
• The ability to add an additional user to the starter plan would be great to illustrate the possibility to new customers.
• The API Reference guide could include some more section-specific code examples for each of the supported technology stacks.

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

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.

The main consideration for our choice was to be able to optimize and deliver the images from the server they are stored on without needing to move or change the current product upload workflow for our Marketing team. This is where ImageKit.io provided the best solution at the time we evaluated the options available in the market.

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).

• Our code has become easier to maintain, we no longer need to let the backend generate thumbnails
• Our site speed up significantly, which boosted our SEO ranking
• We had a similar solution built in-house on AWS lambda, but we no longer have the headache to maintain this solution ourselves.