Canto is a very user-friendly enterprise DAM with tons of features
Updated May 24, 2022

Canto is a very user-friendly enterprise DAM with tons of features

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

Overall Satisfaction with Canto

Canto is used as the enterprise-wide DAM system. It's helping store, organize, and distribute content across channels at all stages of production. It helps reduce duplicate efforts across teams, which saves time and resource costs. It also ensures proper governance, digital rights management, and allows for controlled sharing with external partners.
  • Asset management and distribution.
  • Detailed permissions structures.
  • Portals and style guides.
  • More direct integrations with programs like Sketch and Bridge would be great! (already has some other Adobe product integrations).
  • More control over the Smart Tags feature would be really useful - to be able to train it a certain way (using brand terms, for example) or teach it not to tag certain things would help us customize the automatic tags it adds—removing some of these is a manual process (even with confidence set at 95).
  • Transparency for the price tiers for adding more power users and more storage space would be helpful in our planning.
  • All of the automation is really helpful
  • Bulk actions save time and improve efficiency
  • The detailed permission controls and admin tools are amazing for governance
  • Portals - they're easy to create and maintain and help us share assets with external partners
  • The reports are helpful, especially for our Portals
  • The customizable metadata helps us tailor the interface and functionality to our unique needs
  • Decrease in duplicate asset creation and storage.
  • Increase in collaboration across teams and with partners.
  • Decrease in time spent searching for assets.
  • Saves a lot of time and effort in the entire asset management process.
Canto was the most user friendly and had the most features compared to the other DAMs we evaluated. We liked the customizations and features and the fact that new features are released regularly. The other DAMs also didn't have as many sharing features or detailed permissions controls. Smart Tags were another feature we really liked that was unique to Canto (at the time at least).

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

It's great if you need an interface that anyone can use with a lot of features. It's user-friendly and very visual, which is great. We use the sharing features and portals a lot to share assets with external partners, and the controls around those are excellent. It's well suited to organizations with lots of assets. It would probably be less appropriate for smaller teams or companies that don't need to control detailed permissions or DRM.

Using Canto

72 - Our Canto users span across many teams and functions. Teams such as the creative studio, marketing, agency partners, business, product, web, app, social, etc. Functions such as designers, producers, creative directors, publishers, CMS managers, product owners, etc.
3 - There are about three people who regularly manage and support Canto as a platform in-house. One person (myself) is in charge of day-to-day management and maintenance. The main product owner for web and the program owner for one of our partnership programs as well as the manager of the creative studio are the most frequent stakeholders. We have skills in marketing, asset production, taxonomy, SEO, and asset management.
  • Storing, organizing, and managing all assets across production stages and channels.
  • Centralizing asset storage and use across teams and product areas.
  • Sharing sets of assets with external partners via portals
  • Tracking asset status and usage.
  • We've built custom portals in Canto for external partners instead of building a whole separate site to share assets. It's nice to have our assets and portal management all in one place and be able to customize the experience for them.
  • The ability to set date and time for approval/expiration of asset and document permissions automates a previously manual process for campaign timing
  • As we grow and our partnership campaigns expand, I could see us using more Portals for campaign-specific asset sharing
We're definitely going to renew Canto and continue to use it. It's been helpful for us to have it as a centralized repository for everything we need and the new features continue to impress us.

Canto Support

Our Canto rep is super responsive whenever we have questions. They also add new features all the time, which is excellent. They're very receptive to feedback. We've asked for new features in the past and they've even let us know when they're implementing a change or new feature that we requested, which is really nice followup. Service overall is among the best of the vended products we use.
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
I'm not sure if there is Premium Support for Canto or not. We're happy with the level of support that we have with the license we have. If they did offer Premium Support, I actually wouldn't feel the need to consider a higher tier of support if it's available because we get satisfactory support already.
Every time we reach out to Canto Support, they respond really quickly. Once when I reached out to our direct point of contact she helped us and included the support team on a response to make sure there was visibility of our situation and questions to the support team, which I thought was really helpful and showed that they value feedback and communication across teams. They take every issue seriously and are helpful when we need it.

Using Canto

It's pretty intuitive and easy to learn. We offer internal training and people find that it's usually pretty quick with few questions at the end if any. The documentation is thorough. I can almost always find what I'm looking for, but when I have questions the help center is useful and I very rarely have to reach out to get a question answered.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
None
  • Uploading assets and adding metadata
  • Searching and filtering to find assets
  • Creating new user accounts
  • Managing permissions
  • Bulk actions
  • Finding the usage history
  • Adding a cover asset to a folder
  • Managing permissions just for a specific folder