Canto is a digital asset management (DAM) software. Per the vendor, this simple yet intuitive solution gives organizations a visual way to centralize, organize and share all their digital brand assets, empowering them to save valuable time and gain a competitive edge. Canto’s DAM solution has wide applicability to a variety of industry verticals, including retail, manufacturing, education, transportation, hospitality, nonprofit, healthcare, food and beverage, technology and more. Canto’s…
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WoodWing Assets
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Elvis DAM is a scalable digital asset management (DAM) solution, offering Filtered Search, Collaboration features, Image Editing, Metadata management, Approval Process control, Version control and Asset Sharing.
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.
WoodWing Assets work exceptionally well in companies where they have a large number of digital files, that they need to manage and search. Media, advertising and marketing companies benefit significantly when using Assets to manage their digital images, video and content as the most approved as well as latest versions are automatically kept of every digital file. Companies that have a small number of digital files, with probably less than 10 staff, probably don't need a system to manage their actual digital files, provided they are in a structured folder base, that everyone can access.
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 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.
It is incredibly easy. For an idea on the onboarding or training of a basic user, this is the only system we know of that training takes literally 1 hour, and the basic user is fully up to speed. Very intuitive user experience. Easy ability to share files (simply right click). Easy ability to search for all digital files, and even content within the digital files, if you cant remember what the file name was - just this feature alone saved us hours everyday
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.
WoodWing support has been good, they do feedback quickly when reporting an issue and do keep you up to date with where they are in the process of resolving the support issue. The support team is knowledgeable and take the time to fully understand the issue. I do feel they should have an online support ability to assist with basic user issues, as opposed to having to log a ticket every time, but that would be the only reason I have not given them a 10.
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.
Overall Elvis DAM is a great product although when you compare the solution to other providers of similiar asset CDNs such as Amazon's AWS, Rackspace CDN or Cloudinary it can get quite expensive. This is especially true if you have a team that is at the larger enterprise level in which case you are charged by the user.
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).
