What TrustRadius Research Says
Canto (Formerly Cumulus) Pricing 2022
When you have a high volume of photos it can be increasingly hard to organize them into portfolios, PDF packages, and presentations. On top of that, searching for specific photos without exact file names is a pain, and then finding the safest process for sharing that portfolio with your team and clients takes forever. An awesome solution is Canto, a cloud-based media storage platform.
What is Canto (Cumulus)?
Canto is a digital asset management (DAM) platform for organizing your company’s brand asset library. They are mainly used as an image media library solution because of their powerful search functionality through tagging, filtering, and facial recognition.
Cumulus was an outdated version of its digital asset management platform that was not cloud-based. The company has been in the process of retiring Cumulous and urging people to switch since Canto debuted 7 years ago. The Canto platform fully discontinued Cumulus licenses in 2021 and the recent pandemic was a big drive for past users to switch. More and more teams have needed to become remote causing many recent users to actively switch.
Any leftover Cumulus users are encouraged to migrate their media over to Canto. You can learn how to migrate your media libraries here, and you can see their FAQs section here if you have more questions.
Common use cases for the Canto digital asset management system are in IT, publishing, and higher education. The product itself actually takes up over 5% of the digital asset management software market. In terms of revenue, Canto is very popular in both small businesses and large enterprises. For company size, most teams are large and medium-sized with well over 50 team members.
If you want to learn more about Canto see their demo video below.
5-Minute Demo – Canto Digital Asset Management
The Canto Platform’s Specific Features for DAM
The main reason for Canto’s popularity in the DAM industry is its daily workflow and project management features. A media library’s main benefit is the ability to access, share, organize, and analyze your metadata.
Canto achieves this through powerful capabilities and integration with popular publishing software like Adobe Indesign, WordPress, and Microsoft Word. They also integrate with other media management tools like Google Drive and Dropbox so you can access other assets in storage. You can learn more about their integration options here.
Teams can also access their brand assets from Canto while on the go via their mobile app. The Canto app works with iOS devices, but there isn’t an android version available. All resources for accessing Canto by mobile devices are just for apple operating systems.
Below is a list of the Canto DAM platform's main features:
The search engine for the database has a filter and facial recognition AI
Detailed reporting for analysis of your content
User management for different levels of access
Simple file sharing in and outside of your organization
Easy collaboration with custom links, portals, and commenting
Visual previews of the library for fast browsing
High-end security via AWS data centers
If you want to learn more about their features and functionality, you can check out their product page here.
How Much Does Canto Cost?
If you’re looking for an upfront pricing model you, unfortunately, won’t find it. Canto’s pricing requires your team to fill out a submission form with basic contact information so you can start the process of getting a quote. This doesn’t mean we can’t provide some guidance on the relative costs of this tool.
Without a valuable deciding factor like pricing, the next best purchasing consideration is their reviews. You’re in luck in this area because Canto has plenty of reviews. Canto reviews offer both great positive feedback along with strong notes of improvement.
An awesome way your and your team can figure out if the software meets your needs is through comparing features and functionality mentioned in reviews. Looking for mentions of automation or if it lacks enough choices. It can be tedious, but if you see a trend in the nuances of reviews then it can build a better picture of the product. If you want to save time use the review search bar and filter button so you can target specific topics like cost or file sharing.
Pros
It’s no surprise that as a Top Rated software, Canto has pages of great reviews. Aspects of the DAM platform that businesses loved were the search options, file sharing, file organization, and easy downloading/uploading.
Below are common positives pointed out by end-users. If you click the “read more” link in each comment it will take you directly to the full review!
“Controls duplicates…eliminates the use of multiple folders,” read more.
“Automatic tags…reliable search engine,” read more.
“User management,” read more.
“Organization on the files,” and “Easy access for download and share,” read more.
“Sharing media internally and externally,” and “Integration with MS Office and Adobe,” read more.
“Search and filter function,” and “responsive and helpful customer support,” read more.
“Tagging to make searches very simple and eliminate complete folder structures,” read more.
“Great customer service to help with a range of questions…They're great at sorting out problems and finding solutions but slow to respond by email,” read more.
“Easy user upload and download,” and “ability to share assets with outside members,” read more.
“It is easy to use with the pptx add-in integration and the categorization works quite well,” read more.
These are some great things to hear about a service, but not all end-users have the same experience. Some who even enjoyed it overall still have a lot to say about what they want to be improved.
Cons
When it comes to the negative feedback expressed about Canto software, there is quite a bit of end-user that struggled with their user interface (UI)/user experience (UX), templates, loading time, and overall learning curve. While quite a bit of positive reviews talked about the software's ease of use, for other teams it was far from user-friendly.
One thing to note is that although many reviews have complaints, it doesn’t mean they gave it a super low rating. You can often find helpful constructive criticism for improvements in reviews that had a fair experience in general.
Below are some of the negatives that were noted by customers. If you click the “read more” link in each comment it will take you directly to the full review!
“[it could be] a better looking UI/UX,” read more.
“[it could use] Some UI/UX improvements. The portals feature is a nice start, but the design tools are limited,” read more.
“UI is a bit clunky,” read more.
“Functionality- needed to select download icon in 2 different screens for image to download,” read more.
“A more intuitive user experience,” read more.
“More portal templates,” read more.
“More templates for design,” read more.
“The tagging methodology seems VERY hard to grasp at first,” read more.
“Load speed,” read more.
“Better and more timely support. We had major issues with the facial recognition software after the migration. It took over a year of us asking for help and an escalation of the issue to get it resolved,” read more.
“Very expensive,” read more.
While one end-user mentioned Canto was costly, another end-user gave a little detail on the actual pricing model. They noted that there were two different user types, regular users and power users. The regular users had a free subscription and power users paid $1000 per seat a year.
That is a huge expense on any budget but the reviewer went on the say they attempted using another DAM software that was cheaper, but Canto was a “far better product.” They answered “yes,” when asked if the value was worth the price in the key insights section of the review. Many other reviewers that had issues with Canto also reported they felt the costs were worth the overall product.
This review was made in September 2022, which means it was recent but that doesn’t automatically mean you will be offered the same subscription options. Canto claims to offer custom quotes based on each team’s use case. Some teams may not qualify for the regular, and other teams might be given a higher estimate for power users. If you contact them for a quote make sure to ask as many questions as possible now that you have an idea of what it might cost your team.
What is an Alternative for Canto?
A strong competitor of Canto is Bynder, another DAM platform with similar capabilities. Just like Canto, their main features include search options like filtering and admin permissions. The downside is that like Canto you can’t get pricing without discussing your use case with sales.
In Canto reviews, a few customers talked about dissatisfaction with prices whereas with Bynder several end-users spoke up about how expensive it was. One of the bigger issues consumers had with Canto was adjusting to the UI, but with Bynder they offer onboarding services with all packages. One end-user even wrote customer support “were incredible to work with.” You can find a comparison breakdown of the two software here.
More Resources
If your team wants to see more digital asset management software you can find a list of products here.
For those that have used any of the platforms discussed here, please leave a review to help other buyers make informed decisions.
