Canto - The Creative Lifesaver
Updated May 31, 2022
Canto - The Creative Lifesaver
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Other
Overall Satisfaction with Canto
We use Canto as a Digital Asset Manager for all content running through the Brand team. We store everything from photos, videos, and GIFs to Brand Guidelines and ads to launch. We also use Canto as an essential part of our Project Management system and content approval process. On the other side, we use Canto to share these assets with our media partners and agency partners. All we have to do is upload assets to Canto and share a link with any partners to get them going on any content requests. It really is a one-stop-shop for all your asset management needs. Our Brand and Creative team LOVES Canto!
- Sharing assets to third party groups and partners
- Storage for a decent price
- Approval processes and project management systems
- Ability for third parties to make selections or favorites from a collection
- A better looking UI/UX
- More portal templates
- Searchability
- Tagging/Smart Tagging
- Share Links/ Portals
- Canto has saved so much time finding assets.
- Went from 8 content management "platforms" to just one.
- Increased communication between teams.
I have done demos with A LOT of other digital asset managers and chose Canto out of all of them. Most of the Digital Asset Managers I used all do similar things. They all hold photos, they all have some kind of folder organization, and some have searchability and tagging. But overall Canto was the one for our team. It had an unbeatable price for the amount of storage. It had amazing searchability. The onboarding experience was very quick and painless. They helped us make the transition from all other platforms onto Canto. Canto was also the only service that third parties could leave comments on our content without having to pay for a seat on our platform.
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
Using Canto
75 - In our marketing team, all divisions are using Canto, whether it's the web development team sharing inspo or designs or the paid ads team sharing finalized ads to clients for approval, or the content division uploading all approved client images to use on all channels. It is such a relief to have all assets in one place for internal use. I love that you can specify approvals as well so people are only seeing the images/videos/content that is approved. It has made the communication between teams so much better and more efficient. Our clients have also shared their love for this new way of sharing and approving content.
20 - Canto is extremely user-friendly. Any of our seat users are able to go in and support Canto for their team. There is an admin for each team that supports and updates their collections and then shares the updates with the rest of the company. Canto also has a vast resource library in case any team needs help integrating into Canto. Some skills required to support Canto is organization, tagging, detail and communication.
- Organization
- Asset Management
- Approval Process
- Tagging photos and ads for searchability
- Clients favoriting images for retouching
- Client and internal approval processes
- Workflow feature
- Client portals
- Workspaces and portals for brand guidelines
Evaluating Canto and Competitors
Yes - We are a relatively small company so we were primarily using Google Drive to house all of our content (which was such a mess). Then we were using AirTable for client review which has a very simple UX but is really just a glorified excel spreadsheet. We have also been using Pixie set which has been really great but can only house certain file types so it was not a solution for everything. We needed a platform like Canto to get rid of all the platforms we were using that could only do one thing. Canto has SAVED us.
- Price
- Product Features
The product features were everything to our team when we were looking for a DAM solution. All the DAM systems have a similar backbone in what features they have. They all can tag. They all can support a variety of file types. They all can share assets in a folder with people outside your account. Canto had many additional features that were really what pushed us to go with Canto. They had a really great onboarding process where they were helping us migrate every piece of content from our other platforms. They have an approval process and workflow where you can ad assets into the flow and get approval or feedback from clients. They features are everything and they are still making more and more features.
During the selection process, it was really hard to describe all the features we needed to have on a DAM. In the future, I would have used the demos and calls during the selections process to take the reigns and show them exactly what we were doing currently, what we wanted to do in the future and what we needed from them to make sure it all could happen. That would have helped the evaluation and selection processes so they would have been able to take what I needed and what I was trying to solve and show me the product features that aligned with those goals. It would have made the selection process much faster.