Canto

RATING:

4.5

(675)

About Canto

As a leader in digital asset management (DAM), Canto is the simplest, yet most powerful DAM platform on the market. This solution allows organizations to centralize, organize, and share assets. With AI Visual Search, you can use natural language to instantly discover content without relying solely on metadata. More than 30 years of experience allows Canto to empower brands to extract more value out of their content, maximize ROI, and accelerate time to market. Canto's platform, supported by a flexible and transparent pricing structure, caters to a diverse array of industries. It empowers companies ranging from teams of 50 employees to global enterprises to fuel their content delivery, maximizing their ROI.

Awards and Recognition

FrontRunner 2024
Software Advice's FrontRunners report ranks top products based on user reviews, which helps businesses find the right software.
AI Visual Search: Discover digital assets faster with Canto AI Visual Search.

Canto Reviews

Overall Rating

4.5

Ratings Breakdown

Secondary Ratings

Ease-of-use

4.5

Customer Support

4.5

Value for money

4.5

Functionality

4.5

Most Helpful Reviews for Canto

1 - 5 of 675 Reviews

Pamela

51 - 200 employees

Used less than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

5

Reviewed June 2022

Canto is a step ahead and in some ways almost too good to be true!

User Profile

Joseph

Verified reviewer

Performing Arts, 51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 12 months

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review.

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed December 2019

User-friendly, Secure, Dynamic

Right from the start, the user-friendly nature of the platform ensures that all users, whether trained in asset management and best-practices or not, will be able to explore our content in a dynamic fashion, with very little training necessary to get their bearings. From a seamless upload/download process to an intuitive tagging and keyword system, Canto allows its Administrators full control during the process, including the option to customize additional metadata facets as needed, offering you and your team a curated experience. Canto has revolutionized the way that we store, tag, organize, and share our digital assets while at the same time securing their future integrity. The customer care has been excellent, and the Canto team is committed and engaged at all times.

PROS

Canto's user-friendly interface allows for an easy, intuitive platform to host, organize, and share all of our digital assets. Having something that is so intuitive puts all team members at ease, and increases their implementation of the platform in their day-to-day work.

CONS

Canto divides its users between three levels: Admin, Collaborator, and Consumer. There is very little that you can't do in Canto. A fully customizable experience for Administrative and Collaborator level users means a great deal of your DAM needs are met. I do feel that the Consumer-level experience can be expanded further, for example: with regards to facial recognition, a Consumer-level user is more than capable of identifying faces within a photograph, but the current constraints of the consumer level does not allow for this level of data input. Overall, this dynamic spark of the Canto platform is sometimes lost at the Consumer-level.

Vendor Response

Thanks for your review! We appreciate the kind words. We're happy to know that Canto allows your team to be at ease while working with digital assets!

Replied January 2020

Kayla

Paper & Forest Products, 1,001-5,000 employees

Used weekly for less than 6 months

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review.

OVERALL RATING:

4

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed May 2021

Easy & Straight Forward to Use - Evaluation of Integration Process Required

The sales process was a pleasure to go through and I would rate Canto number 1 in creating an enjoyable, no pressure experience. We have other vendors that I would be happy to continue my working career never speaking again to due to their practices and lack of overall respect.

PROS

The product itself is straight forward, easy to use and fairly customizable. The tagging system works great, file storage is good (once you identify what you would like), upload links are beneficial and the portals are key for deliverable.

CONS

The configuration of SSO does not allow enough control for the administrators of this tool, it also caused quirks for administrative accounts, where one experience via login vs via SSO was different for the admins; and the system didn't recognize licenses as being used when configured via SSO. Overall, we had to disable it for the time being which is a big loss/hit to our change management process. The Style Guide tool is a great idea, but needs some work and should not be used as a deciding factor in the tool. It needs some more work and analysis on managing font, including details on using logos, etc. to be a proper style guide. It works well for corporate colours, and that's about it. Lastly, the integration process needs some evaluation on the Canto side. It is lengthy, the "integration specialists" cannot answer questions that we can figure out ourselves with ease, and it doesn't seem like there is much support or guidance. In all honesty, we could do it ourselves must faster.

Reason for choosing Canto

Canto offered a price point that we needed to close the product, with a full service solution. However, Image Relay was an awesome contender.

Reasons for switching to Canto

We needed a centralized system that allows improved access, tracking, tagging, and the ability to more easily upload and download content.

Vendor Response

Thanks for your feedback on the onboarding process, Kayla. We're always working to improve our processes and this information helps us out so much!

Replied May 2021

Felix

Apparel & Fashion, 10,000+ employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra

OVERALL RATING:

3

EASE OF USE

4

VALUE FOR MONEY

3

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

2

Reviewed September 2017

Practical tool but barely innovative.

Canto enables me to grant file access to many of our departments world wide.

PROS

Canto seems to be simple enough for even unexperienced users. It is clearly structured and all functions are easy to spot and use.

CONS

For a software that was recently developed it seems rather simple in style and function: we only received what we specifically asked for and there is nothing wrong with it but a bit of innovation goes a long way. Why not connect it with actual folders on our operating system Microsoft Windows like Dropbox: At some point, we will need to store all files somewhere anyway to upload them to Canto, why not allow a direct uplad from a designated folder windows without having to open the browser? Make that folder accessable via FTP connection, too to have backup access when Canto is down or when there is a browser problem. Image previews and navigating through Canto should easier: navigating through it takes time, sometimes you might select a wrong image due to bad visibility of small thumbnails and even going back one step wastes precious time due to loading time and selecting a new image. I would suggest a slide show feature like the standard picture viewer in Microsoft Windows. Same goes for Video previews. I like working with Canto but it always feels like we are working with a beta version, waiting for the shiny real thing to arrive.

Justin

Health, Wellness and Fitness, 1,001-5,000 employees

Used weekly for less than 12 months

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review.

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

4

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed December 2019

A Good DAM Solution

We originally used personal hard drives and shared network drives for our asset management. Working with vendors for graphics was done via email. We've been able to transfer most of that over to Canto now. A week after launching Canto, HR came to use looking for photos of colleagues. Previously this would've taken hours to find what they were after. However, the AI Smart Tagging made it very easy to do a search for "people", then we added a couple of filters. Within minutes we had hundreds of photos that we sent to HR.

PROS

Interface is very intuitive. There is a really good balance between having a turnkey solution and being able to customize things. Custom tags and multiple ways of tagging assets was my biggest priority. There were a few solutions that provided more customization, but would've required more oversight as well. Our small team didn't have the bandwidth for that. Ability to create portals and upload links has been a gamechanger for us in asset distribution and collection. Just hosted a large community fundraiser. We gave each photographer an upload link with the option of some quick tags. We had thousands of images tagged and uploaded into the platform effortlessly. This used to be very time consuming for us.

CONS

Facial recognition is pretty weak. They are the larger customer of AWS facial recognition tool. If Canto switched to Google's tool, I feel it'd be much more reliable and function the way it's intended to. As of now, we just opt not to use it. Support could do a better job at recognizing the shortcomings of their product and recommending product enhancements. I often have to request multiple times for something to be an enhancement. I haven't had any follow-up yet, so not sure if they're going to implement things though.

Reason for choosing Canto

Canto did a great job at balancing a turnkey solution that had options for custom tagging that other products in this price range didn't offer.