Canto
Canto Reviews
& Product DetailsWhat is Canto?
Canto is a digital asset management solution for businesses – from small-scale businesses to enterprises. Companies constantly require IT support to manage their assets and IT infrastructure. Canto aims to remove the IT support demand or reduce it so that you can focus on the actual project. They have 25 years of experience in the industry and have helped many brands to manage their assets effortlessly using their digital asset management solution.
To achieve the goal, it offers teams to work through a seamless dashboard where you can easily organize your assets visually. The approach is secure and also easy to do. For instance, teams can work seamlessly within the DAM solution to tag, report, and collaborate with digital assets using a visual environment.
Best For
- StartUps
- Freelancers
- Small Business
- Medium Business
- Large Enterprise
- Non-profit Organization
- Personal
- Cloud, SaaS, Web-Based
- Mobile - Android
- Mobile - iPhone
- Mobile - iPad
- Desktop - Mac
- Desktop - Windows
- Desktop - Linux
- Desktop - Chromebook
- On-Premise - Windows
- On-Premise - Linux
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Company Name
Canto
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Located In
United States
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Website
canto.com
Starting from:
$Custom On Request
Pricing Model: Subscription
- Free Trial
- Free Version
Pricing Details:
Canto doesn't offer any official pricing. To know about Canto pricing, you need to contact them. They believe each use case is unique and provide tailor-made pricing for those. Thus, to know more about Canto pricing plans, you need to contact them via their pricing page. However, they do come with a free trial. To get started with the free trial, you must register through their free trial page.
- Asset Categorization
- Asset Sharing
- File Conversion
- File Preview
- Reporting/Analytics
- Search/Filter
- Version Control
- Metadata Management
Additional Features
- Customizable Branding
- Workflow Management
- Mobile App
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Centralized Asset Management
Many users appreciate the centralized storage of media assets, facilitating easier access and management.
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Ease of Use
Canto is often described as user-friendly and intuitive, making it simple for employees to navigate and use.
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Efficiency and Time-Saving
The software significantly reduces the time spent searching for assets across departments and servers.
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Customization and Tagging
Features like custom tagging and the ability to create different portals for various user groups are highly valued.
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Improved Brand Consistency
Canto helps maintain brand consistency across various company creative elements.
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Collaboration and Sharing
The software enhances collaboration and simplifies the sharing of assets both internally and externally.
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Interface and User Experience
Some users find the interface clunky and suggest it could benefit from a modern makeover.
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Difficulty with Certain Features
Issues with features like brand guidelines and document lifecycle management have been reported.
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Data Entry and Tagging Challenges
Managing data entry and tagging effectively, especially with multiple content contributors, can be challenging.
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Service and Support Issues
There are mentions of slow and inconsistent support from the Canto team, particularly during implementation and training.
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Cost and Additional Fees for Add-ons
While generally considered cost-effective, some users note the extra costs for additional features.
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File and Video Management
The management of video files and documents could be more efficient and visually appealing.
Disclaimer
Here at Tekpon's Global Buzz, we blend AI smarts with a human touch to offer a snapshot of user reviews from the web. While we carefully craft these summaries, please remember they reflect diverse user views and experiences, not Tekpon’s own opinions.
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Table of Contents
Canto’s approach to digital asset management might not be unique, but they have done everything needed to make Canto a feature-rich DAM solution in the market. It covers all the basic features offered by other asset management solutions and goes beyond to provide advanced features. Our Canto review looks closely at its features, ease of use, security, and other vital aspects to see if it fits the modern digital assets management philosophy.
Canto Digital Asset Management
Working with digital assets may sound simple. However, it can soon become overwhelming when dealing with multiple digital asset types and sources. That’s where digital asset management (DAM) comes in. There are plenty of digital asset management solutions for businesses. However, Canto seems to stand out in the market. It is a digital asset management software. Canto digital asset management markets itself as an easy-to-use functional solution; that offers companies an organized way to manage their assets.
But does it provide value to businesses that do not want a dedicated IT team or outsource their IT support elsewhere? In our Canto review, we will try to evaluate its value proposition for companies. So, let’s get started.
Canto for Businesses
This means agencies can work effortlessly on multiple projects and do not have to spend separately on a person to manage the assets entirely. Furthermore, it offers a visual interface with an intuitive design approach to achieve all these, similar to most asset management solutions. In addition, you get features such as watermarking, automatic file organization, tagging, sharing, metadata creation, and so on.
Users can also secure the assets with an access-based approach for brands. Regarding connectivity, it supports workflow integrations with popular software and storage solutions, including WordPress, Slack, Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Facebook, Google Drive, Twitter, Box, and Pinterest. In short, you get a proper assets solution capable of handling website asset(s), brand assets, and more!
What is a digital asset management tool?
Digital Asset Management (DAM) enables companies to handle their digital assets internally from a central location. Companies can use DAM to organize, share and store digital assets. Digital assets can be any creative file, including videos, images, and other media types. However, not all digital assets type can be classified as assets. In addition, to be classified as assets, the company needs to have the rights.
DAM is important for companies as it brings multiple benefits to their business, including:
- Improves team productivity and creativity
- Offers a centralized approach for digital assets organization
- Manage picture collections and press kits effectively
- Better search capability for searching media files
- Tags images automatically
- Offers facial recognition
- Automates image watermarking
- Provides extensive copyright functionality
Enterprises can set up DAM in multiple ways, including internal centralization, external distribution, and internal storage.
Is Canto cloud-based?
Yes, Canto is a cloud-based solution. This means you do not have to worry about infrastructure management with Canto. The cloud-based approach also makes it easy for companies to scale when needed.
Details of Canto Features
Canto is a feature-rich DAM solution. It offers features ranging from organization to sharing to reporting to simplify organizing assets. Let’s go through their core feature sets to understand what they offer.
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Organize
Here you get access to a plethora of features that simplify organizing assets. At the core, you get smart albums that automatically organize and sort the assets based on their file types. Apart from that, you also get albums, folders, and contextual labeling in the form of tags.
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Albums and Folders
You get the option to organize your assets by folders and albums. In addition, they provide customizable sorting options. This way, you can create a proper structure that lets you quickly sort the assets by file type, date, or alphabet – with a single click.
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Keywords, Smart Tags, and tags
Tags and keywords best understand media assets. Canto makes it easy to identify tags using smart tags and keywords. You can use any keyword or tag that makes it easy to identify them. In addition, these labels provide the necessary context to work with them later.
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Smart Albums
Canto also automates organization by organizing assets through smart albums. They are created automatically when you upload assets to the platform. Moreover, the smart albums are easy to navigate and work with, providing value.
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Personal Collections
Teams can also create their collection to simplify their work process. For instance, a personal collection is best suited to collect and organize assets related to a particular project.
Search
Canto offers excellent search functionality to help teams working on large projects. It offers a search to be filtered by dates, authors, keywords, types, and other metrics.
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Global search
Teams get access to global search. It is a simple-to-use default search option. The search done through global search include important information, including metadata, filename, and dimensions. In addition, the global search is fine-tuned to find files that are hard to search through other means.
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Advanced search
The advanced search offers more advanced search functionality so that every single file stays within your reach. Here, you can fill in more details such as descriptions, categories, metadata, and even old comments. This way, you can fine-tune your search. Also, users can do an advanced search to narrow the search on previous search results.
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Filters
You can also quickly sort through your assets using Cant’s filter features. Users can access the filter feature directly through the main interface. You can filter using statuses, metadata, content type, and other vital information. It is a quick way to access files.
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Facial recognition
Canto’s facial recognition is one of a kind. With it, you can search for a person’s image in just a few clicks. To make it possible, Canto utilizes Amazon’s Rekognition technology. Companies can use the facial recognition feature to find colleagues, event speakers, and executives across the database. If you think you don’t need it, then the feature can be enabled or disabled.
Share
Assets are meant to be shared. That’s why Canto offers a comprehensive feature set to enable teams to quickly and safely share assets. This means you can share assets via expiring links or emails without the need to leave Canto. Teams can also share it through social media sites or storage sites.
- Portals are a way to share assets among organization users with limited privileges. Moreover, portals can be set as public or private and completely customizable.
- Share with links – Colleagues can share content via sharing with links. In addition, its addition, it lets others upload assets which they can later upload to Canto’s main library.
- Expiring links provide a unique way to set an expiry on shared content. However, after the expiry date is reached, the content is neither interactable nor downloadable.
- Social sites and file storage services – With this option, you can quickly share files with storage services and social sites, including the likes of Dropbox, Youtube, Vimeo, Twitter, Facebook, and much more!
- Advanced download options – You can optimize images before downloading. For instance, you can zoom, crop, and adjust image quality directly from Canto’s dashboard.
Visual Previews
DAMs must provide excellent visual previews. Canto knows that and offers visual previews for easy Workflow through thousands of assets.
- Video: You can preview videos directly from the dashboard in full high-definition.
- InDesign layouts: Work seamlessly with full Adobe InDesign documents.
- Images: Canto also offers a full preview of images along with metadata information.
- PowerPoint and Documents presentations: Offers proper PowerPoint and document preview.
Branding
Canto also provides a special feature set for branding purposes. So, if your company has a brand style, you can integrate it directly within Canto with the following features:
- Style Guides: With Canto, you can create a proper style guide reference within the app. You can set brand colors, typography, logos, and other critical info with your brand style.
- Login screen: Set up a proper login page for your company – customized to showcase your brand. You can customize the background image and logo as per your liking.
- Customizable interface: Canto also offers a customizable interface to feel like home.
- Download presets: You can also set presets for downloading images. This way, you can control the image’s height and width when downloading through portals or other means.
- Watermarking: You can use your watermarks(image or text) on your assets.
User roles
It is vital to control access to assets to ensure proper asset management. Canto comes with user roles to facilitate access control over the assets. The three access roles it offers include:
- Administrators: Complete control over Canto account.
- Contributors: They can upload content, add metadata, and create albums or folders.
- Consumers: Consumers can share, preview, and download digital assets
Security
Canto offers excellent security out of the box. As Canto uses Amazon Web services, they benefit from highly secure data centers. In addition, Canto is SOC 2 compliant, which means increased security. You can also set custom permissions for different ecosystem users, including vendors, companies, and collaborating agencies. On top of all of these, you also get secure sharing. Lastly, you can also set digital rights management to your assets. In short, you get the following:
- Secure data centers
- SOC2 compliant
- Custom permissions
- Digital rights management
Collaborate
With Canto, you also get the ability to collaborate within the organization and outside it. Canto offers portals and workspaces for easy on-brand collaboration. To improve collaboration, you also get access to Workflow. It simplifies task management and ensures that transparency is maintained by participating members. You can also do approvals and provide valuable comments on the assets. So, in collaboration, you get the following features:
- Workspaces and portals
- Workflow
- Transparency
- Approvals and comments
Reporting
With a visual dashboard, the admin gets a complete user activity overview. You can also arrange report widgets to customize your dashboard. Furthermore, you also get access to detailed reports and a complete audit trail. So, the reporting features include:
- Customizable dashboard
- Visual dashboard
- Detailed report
- Complete audit trail
Is Canto DAM free?
No, Canto DAM is not free. Instead, you need to contact them for pricing-related queries.
Integrations
Canto offers many integrations to make it more accessible to everyone. Therefore, it offers integrations to file storage solutions, browsers, social, creative, video, communication, and other apps and solution. Currently, Canto offers the following integrations:
- Box
- iOS
- Chrome
- Dropbox
- Drupal
- Adobe
- Google Drive
- Apple
- MailChimp
- Windows
- Photoshop
- OneDrive
- Egnyte
- Slack
Alternatives to Canto
Canto is not the only DAM solution in the market. Unfortunately, a few alternatives to Canto are worth trying if you are looking for digital assets management software. Thus, here are some of its best alternatives:
- Brandfolder
- Image Relay
- Publitio
Canto Review Conclusions
In conclusion, Canto is an excellent digital asset management solution. It excels at what it has to offer. You get a seamless dashboard to work with. Canto’s high standard for security and ease of use means many features that offer excellent team collaboration, sharing, and brand customization. Their lack of pricing structure can hinder some businesses from going forward with them. Yet, I am sure that customized pricing goes a long way in digital asset management. To summarize, if you are looking for a DAM solution that ticks most of the boxes, then Canto is for you.
