Very pleased with our decision to choose Canto
Updated October 02, 2020

Very pleased with our decision to choose Canto

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Canto

We use Canto as our first custom DAM. It is replacing an 'in-house built' system. Currently, it is being used by our Comms, Marketing, and Creative teams. Our Admins from other teams have begun accessing it too. We had outgrown our old system and had begun to invest more in our content creation abilities. This led to us reconsidering our storage and distribution methods in support of our teams. We are now more responsive and consistent when it comes to representing and promoting our brands and our teams feel more efficient being able to access this platform when and where they choose without worrying about old network restrictions.

Pros

  • Basic DAM functions like tagging, search and displaying content
  • Distribution and access to team members and trusted vendors/partners
  • Communication after the sale, system upgrades for the platform and human support

Cons

  • Sometimes the amount of customization and display tools can feel overwhelming, finding your right 'fit' for your work style requires dialing it in through your profile preferences.
  • Team alignment and efficiency has been a positive impact especially in the Covid19 work environment.
  • Speed to market has been increased by adoption of this tool across teams.
Best of all in the combined areas of Function, Price, Support based on our 3 month vendor assesment.
We appreciated the efforts and communication from the sales team during our assessment phase. The ingest period featured regular check-ins with technical and advisory team members from Canto along with great accessibility for addressing items as they popped up.
Post ingest, the website maintains a question/answer/what's new bubble in the lower corner that gives the user immediate access to support and updates for the platform...you don't have to search for these things, we appreciated this transparency from our partner.
Very customizable! This allows every team member to adjust displays and defaults to their liking. Once I had my defaults dialed in, it became super easy to interface and navigate. This helped out a lot with getting our team to use and integrate into our processes.

Do you think Canto delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Canto's feature set?

Yes

Did Canto live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Canto go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Canto again?

Yes

This is our team's first experience with a DAM provider, so we were looking for 'basic' functionality. Canto delivered on that and provided more that has allowed us to begin to look at the tool differently and find new ways for it to support our team and department functions.

Content access and distribution across different disciplined teams have seen early adoption.
The Canto Connect desktop app makes the ingest of a large amount of content (recent photoshoot or initial library move) easier than expected. We appreciated the support roles and their responsiveness to our team's needs during the transition to the platform.

Using Canto

Communications and Public Relations
Creative disciplines
Marketing
Admins
Digital, Leadership, Creative, Project management backgrounds.
  • Creative team members fulfilling project needs.
  • Marketing team members assessing overall content library and helping them to shape asks for new content.
  • Communications team members efficiently sharing with third party and media partners.
  • Content reviews internally.
  • Viewing and sharing off company network.
  • Facilitating more in-depth content review and approval processes.
Experience to date (8 mos.) has been overwhelmingly positive. Support, features, access and feedback from our user base has all been better than expected.

Evaluating Canto and Competitors

Yes - We had some asset management tools from the previous decade but they had fallen out of favor and were not used by many. We were using an internal server to navigate but without the search or visualization that Canto does so well.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
Features and ultimately Usability were our primary reasons for choosing Canto over others. Our team was starting from scratch so the variety of functionality was a bit overwhelming...we were just happy to have a search function! We quickly got up to speed with the different ways Canto could bring efficiencies and shorten processes for our production team. Since then, Canto keeps providing updates and new functions that we have benefitted from.
I don't think we would change our evaluation process. We spent three months internally mulling over many metrics and did several demo sessions. This process made us feel good about our decision at the moment and Canto has over delivered on expectations.

Canto Implementation

We should have planned and identified ingest and content librarian during transfer and launch. Our admins wear other hats and accountability and getting to planned milestones lagged a bit due to this.
  • Implemented in-house
Yes - User ingest and credentials
Content ingest
Training
Revisions and Tweaks
Soft launch
Department launch
Change management was a minor issue with the implementation - Awareness, training, and any steps you can take toward mass adoption by general users when launching is worth it in medium to large companies.
  • Lack of a central 'librarian' from our team caused the implementation to last longer than expected
  • Covid19 struck a week before launch so we didn't have the in person feedback we desired to take care of bugs on our side

Canto Support

ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
No - The system is so intuitive and offers great functionality that our team can achieve what it sets out to do with the system without much oversight or support. When we do need assistance or clarity, we usually have answers to questions within 1-3 days. Our team size and budget did not have us interested in premium support and haven't had issues to ask about it.
At the beginning of our implementation we had several questions around user categorization and status. I sent an email and our account manager jumped on the phone and walked me through the answers to every question. Very helpful team and genuinely want to help us succeed.

Using Canto

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • search function reads file name, all tags and more associated with each piece of content. Pretty basic stuff, but a huge step forward from our last system
  • sharing items, albums or folders full of content is very easy and ready to go across multiple platforms
  • uploading new content is quick and intuitive, out team adds all the time!
  • Dialing your preferred default view takes a bit but is worth the time
  • As an admin, sometimes the settings palettes can be difficult to navigate or return to because there are so many. A frequently used settings shortcut would be nice
  • We do wish the STYLE GUIDES function was more widely available, I believe we only got one 'use' for this and we have 10-20 across our brands. The overall interface and setup is not very customizable. Needs to be redesigned and more robust.
Yes - Yes, they have a web based mobile interface. No app for mobile. They do have a desktop app, Canto Connect, that is helpful for bulk upload and Collection viewing.

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