Canto Checked All Of The Boxes
Updated May 27, 2022
Canto Checked All Of The Boxes
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Canto
We use Canto to store all of our digital assets, from stock photography, product labels, video, marketing assets like brochures, and even headshots! Our entire company uses Canto in various ways depending on their department. Before Canto, we were storing our files on various hard drives - and each time we needed something we'd play everyone's fun game of "who has it", "who has the latest version", and "where are the attachments to this InDesign file". Now, everyone has the ability to log in and quickly keyword search for exactly what they are looking for.
- Visually show you the file in a thumbnail without having to click on it
- Keyword search to find files relating to exactly what you're looking for
- Easy user upload and download
- Ability to share assets with outside members
- The servers get slow after a single use experience of uploading items
- The servers can't handle large uploads (for instance like 1 GB) very well
- It would be nice to not have to pay for more than 5 users
- Canto has taken the guesswork out of "where's that file"
- Canto's keyword tagging and visual UI is spot on and super user friendly
- Canto provides a good responsive flex UI - we log in from our phones quite a bit
- Canto is expensive - and the expense is justified by having our team not waste as much time locating and sharing files.
We evaluated a few other digital asset management systems including Dropbox, Adobe, Bynder, and Aprimo. Our checklist was to find a system that would allow us to simply keyword tag, search, share, and store - all visually with ease. Canto checked all of those boxes for us. There were aspects we liked about the other systems, but none had everything we were looking for - except Canto.
Do you think Canto delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
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
Using Canto
7 - We use Canto in a variety of ways. Our core need is for asset storage management, especially videos. We produce a lot of internal content for marketing purposes, and Canto allows us to properly store, tag, filter, and find when necessary. We also use Canto to present assets to outside organizational clients, such as distributor sales reps and brick-and-mortar operations. Canto allows us to quick build portals to house specific marketing assets for ease of use without having the consumer log in.
2 - Our Canto system is managed by our IT team. We work with our team to ensure proper protocol, answer light questions, and configure our asset intake flow to ensure items are properly marked and approved for various uses. We also stay up to date with Canto additions (to the software) as they become released throughout the year. Whenever there's more depth level questions, the Canto team is always available to schedule 1-on-1's with us and guide us through.
- Store a variety of assets, including stock photos, videos, product shots, and sales collateral.
- Share those assets within the organization and outside world quickly, securely, and easily.
- Create a proper process flow for asset intake, review, and sign-off within the company.
- Canto gives the light-weight ability to crop and edit video features on the fly
- We've come up with a creative and intuitive tagging system that's allowed us to quickly search through thousands of assets to find what we want in less than 10 seconds.
- We've been able to create a proper intake process flow of assets that ping various users to complete the chain of review and sign-off.
- As we continue to work with more video there are some additional collaboration tools Canto provides to edit them.
- We are still getting more creative in how we present our portals.
- We have been using Canto more on smaller devices and are still exploring that UI.
Using Canto
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | Unnecessarily complex |
- Tagging, keywording, and smart searching
- Creating Portals for outside users
- Uploading and Downloading any asset regardless of size
- Creating a smart intake flow where assets auto-jump from one folder to another. It can be done (we did it), but it takes some time to set up.
- Creating a more visually appealing UI per your specific branding. It's not too hard, it just takes a lot of time.
Yes - We use the mobile interface a lot more than we did a few years ago. Canto has improved their UI for smaller devices over this period of time, too. It's still easy to search for and download the assess you need. We would just recommend doing more cumbersome tasks (including video editing) on larger screens.