Canto

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s easy to use and fairly intuitive. The filter system is very powerful. Love the portals.

The choice of ‘views’ you get is limited. Some of our products are pens and rulers and the ‘list view’ thumbnails are too small to see what the product looks like. The other views show only cropped images of the product if it is beyond a certain size, making it impossible to see what the product actually is. It also has numerous bugs, such as not being able to display a greyscale image if it is saved as a .psd. Also, another wonderful fact of Canto is its portals, and we have a need to set up a great deal for our distributors. However, each one has to be created manually even though 95% of them are all the same. There should be a template facility to copy.

• One source of truth for a wide range of assets
• Prevents access and server issues with a team spread throughout the country
• Easy to use and deploy, while constantly refining structure and strategy
• Branded portals allow our employees to self-serve versus manually managing daily requests

• Interface can be clunky; needs a modern refreshed makeover!
• More style guides to customize for different needs and brands within one organization

Easy to set up and intuitive to ease. It was incredibly easy to implement across the organisation for internal and external stakeholders. Canto delivered on its promise.

Very little to dislike, perhaps if it was more focused on the hospitality industry it could build integrations with other elements of the Martech stack.