The 7 Best Canto Alternatives for Digital Asset Management

Are you looking at digital asset management providers? If so, you’ve probably heard of Canto. While Canto’s worth checking out, this blog post will explore the seven best Canto alternatives for digital asset management.

We sat down with some of our existing clients who used to work with Canto to learn what they liked and didn’t like about the platform. But first, we’ll look at the Canto software and its features.

What is Canto?

Canto, also known as Canto Cumulus, is a digital asset management software provider. It’s popular in the industry due to its wide range of products, targeted to both smaller businesses and big enterprises.

Canto Company Information

Originally known as Cumulus, Canto was originally developed as a MacIntosh application. It was so successful that Apple named it the “Most Innovative Product of 1992”.

Canto’s company mission statement is to make it easier for brands to centralize, organize, find, and share digital content. As a content hub, it helps companies save time, deliver content faster, and ensure brand consistency.

Based in San Francisco, USA, Canto began the development of its Cumulus software in the early 1990s. Over time, the company grew into one of the most popular DAM providers in the world, with a diverse set of clients including Gymshark, LinkedIn, and Columbia University.

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Canto Digital Asset Management Software – Overview

The Canto digital asset management software platform is broken down into four overall products. These products include:

• The Canto DAM Platform
• The Canto Media Delivery Cloud
• Video Enhancements
• Integrations

You can buy the whole platform, or specific pieces of it to fit your business needs.

Canto Features

As with most DAM systems, there is a broad range of Canto features included in the platform. Here’s a breakdown of the software’s capabilities, as seen on the Canto website.

Organise

A DAM system’s primary function is to store and organize files in a manageable way. Canto’s Smart Albums automatically sorts assets by file type, while keywords and tags help everyone find content quickly.

Search

Canto, like most of today’s DAM systems, has both an easy and advanced search function. With an easy search, you get all the details relevant to the searched text, including file names, metadata, and dimensions.

The advanced search capability helps you search for content by categories, descriptions, metadata, and other parameters.

Share

With Canto, you can share your files and content with both your teammates and people outside your firm. This can be done through email, links, social media, or file storage services like Dropbox or Google Drive.

Visual Previews

Canto lets you preview visual content within its platform. Simply click once and pull up the entire file, from videos and images to Adobe InDesign files and more.

Branding

Branding is one of the areas a DAM system has the biggest impact on. Canto helps you manage brand guidelines, style guides, presets, and watermarking.

This means you always have the most up-to-date versions of your assets and people recognize your content on any channel.

User Roles

Within the Canto DAM, you can define user permissions so only the correct people have access to files. This means you can also provide limited access to people outside the company so they can assign metadata, create folders, and help maintain your library.

Security

Security is a big strength of the Canto platform. It offers single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA). On top of this, the platform is GDPR compliant, scans your system for threats, and provides access control to all company software, among many other things.

Collaboration

Canto’s collaboration features help you approve content and communicate with external contributors. The system has integrated workspaces and portals, so end-users only have access to on-brand and ready-to-share files.

Reports

Within Canto, you have a visual dashboard that shows user activity so you can report on your library. The system has a large database of pre-defined widgets so you can customize your dashboard to your needs.

Canto Software Packages

The Canto software packages are broken down into four categories. We investigated them with the help of some of our clients who used to work with Canto.

Canto DAM Platform

The Canto DAM platform is the central hub for storing, organizing, and sharing your digital assets. This is the basic product from Canto and is required for the other products offered as add-ons.

Canto Media Delivery Cloud

The Canto Media Delivery Cloud is an add-on that intermediates the DAM and your front-end distribution channels. It allows you to deliver your assets, globally, and in real time.

The Media Delivery Cloud, like our dynamic image delivery solution at DemoUp Cliplister, also allows you to create unlimited variations from a single primary image.

Though it does have a feature like our template and banner editor, it lacks the built-in optimization function our system offers.

Video Enhancements

Canto’s Video Enhancements product helps your team create and share video content. It offers smart tags for better searchability, automatic video transcriptions, and direct embeds.

Integrations

Canto offers a suite of native integrations, like Adobe After Effects, LinkedIn, and many more.

Canto Pricing

If you’re looking for information on Canto pricing, it can be hard to find. The website does not display transparent pricing, so how much is Canto?

After some thorough digging, we found that the platform can start at around $1,000 per month per user for most businesses. This makes Canto digital asset management pricing some of the most expensive on the market.

So, while it is packed with features and functions, you can usually find better value for money elsewhere. If you want to know where to start, here are the best Canto asset management alternatives, starting with our own DemoUp Cliplister DAM software.

DemoUp Cliplister: The Top Canto Alternative

We know what you’re thinking – “Of course, you say you’re the top Canto alternative!” – but hear us out.

We know it would be easy to simply declare ourselves the best digital asset management software and be on our way, but that’s not our style. We always want to help you get the best tool for your business. So, here’s a breakdown of the DemoUp Cliplister DAM solution.

There are many features our DAM platform shares with Canto.

For instance, we provide a central repository for all your files, images, video and other content, a built-in template and banner editor for manipulating images within the system, unlimited image variations from a primary file, as well as most other functions Canto offers.

What differentiates us (aside from price), is that the DemoUp Cliplister DAM tool features 3D/AR and video syndication for eCommerce brands and retailers.

Video Syndication

Brands get access to a network of 350+ retailers worldwide, so you can show all your product content and media directly on retailer product detail pages. Plus, the retailer integration is prominent and above the fold, so that your customers always see them.

If you’re an online shop and join the network, you get exclusive access to content from 3,000 global brands like Samsung, Sony, and Bosch. No other Canto competitors can offer you control over the entire digital asset lifecycle or to syndicate your content around the world like us.

Combined with dynamic image delivery, the DemoUp Cliplister DAM is an all-in-one product experience platform designed to take your eCommerce game to the next level.

As you can see, both systems have their benefits. We suggest you request a free consultation to learn more about how our video syndication system works.

Dynamic Image Delivery

Our dynamic image delivery software leverages a powerful image CDN to optimise, edit, and distribute images across your online shop. This is like Canto’s Media Delivery Cloud but helps you save money on file storage with lossless compression technology.

The software is an add-on to our powerful digital asset management platform and helps eCommerce retailers lower costs, improve SEO, and grow revenue.

Full Custom Integrations

While Canto’s integrations are native, they are limited in functionality. DemoUp Cliplister provides customizations through a headless option so you get the most out of our DAM solution.

DemoUp Cliplister vs. Canto – Price

Another area where DemoUp Cliplister outperforms Canto is in the pricing department. Though the Canto pricing model is not very transparent, we have heard the software starts at around $1,000 USD per user.

That means for most enterprises, Canto is incredibly expensive. It might not be so bad if you have a small team, but the price makes unlimited users sound pretty nice.

With DemoUp Cliplister, you simply pay based on the amount of resources you require. This leads to transparent pricing that is easy to understand and build a case to present to leadership.

Visit the DAM pricing page and we will prepare a custom quote based on your business’s unique needs.

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Other Top Canto Alternatives

While the Canto digital asset management tool is no slouch, you should research its competitors thoroughly before you decide to go with it. To help you identify other options, here are six more Canto competitors.

Aprimo

Known as a marketing operations platform, Aprimo features a digital asset management product in its suite of offerings. It also creates productivity management software, helps you plan budgets, and features several native app integrations in its marketplace.

As an alternative to Canto, it’s more focused on being an all-in-one marketing operations tool than a DAM. As such, it lacks in the areas of collaboration and content distribution, which you can read more about in our Aprimo alternatives article.

Brandfolder

Brandfolder is a cloud-based digital asset management provider that helps marketing teams and creative teams store, organise, and share digital assets.

It positions itself as a DAM system with a user-friendly interface and features customizable workflows, image optimization, and advanced search functions.

If you’re comparing Brandfolder vs Canto, keep in mind Brandfolder’s enterprise solution is also very expensive. It also has a pre-defined user interface, meaning customizations are more difficult than headless options.

Bynder

Bynder is a highly popular alternative to Canto. However, it’s feature set is more focused on brand management than collaboration, creation, or content distribution. While it does have these features, it’s not quite as developed as our solution or Canto’s.

What it does do well, though is brand guidelines and version control. If this is the DAM function you most require, Bynder may serve you well. But, keep in mind that much of Bynder’s functionality also lies in its add-on packages.

This means that you need to pay extra for many of the features you need, which becomes very expensive for most business applications. And, it sorely lacks when it comes to eCommerce DAM applications like product content syndication and video asset management.

Therefore, we suggest checking out some of the other solutions listed in our alternatives to Bynder article.

CELUM

CELUM is known as a “content supply chain”. In simple terms, it’s a DAM platform designed to help teams collaborate on and distribute content. Billed as a “Content Operations” platform, its primary use is for marketing teams and creative purposes.

But, for what it does well in creating and managing content, it misses the mark when it comes to distribution. If you’re more interested in improving workflows and managing content internally than distributing the final product, then Celum might be for you.

Be sure to check out our article on CELUM alternatives to have a look at its competitors.

Cloudinary

Cloudinary is an image and video management system designed for developers. It helps you create, manage, and deliver visual experiences and is one of the top performers in the combined DAM and CDN category.

It lets you sort, organise, and store all digital files and file types, and helps you manage assets and users via its developer-friendly API.

According to Cloudinary, its digital asset management software focuses on flexibility, automation, and scalability. However, its user interface can be complicated and requires a lot of internal development.

Therefore, it’s unsuitable for companies that require custom workflows but don’t have large IT departments.

While Cloudinary is worth looking into, one of the top Cloudinary alternatives could be a better fit.

Scaleflex

Scaleflex is a French SaaS company that also creates a content operations hub. Scaleflex calls this product Filerobot. While Filerobot is a DAM platform, it may not be suitable for eCommerce usage – mainly because it’s focused on collaboration instead of content distribution and management.

For instance, there is no automated image scaling – copies must be made manually. This makes it hard to manage digital assets at scale. Our DAM at DemoUp Cliplister, though, can make unlimited copies from a single file and deliver them automatically.

Alternatives to Canto: Wrapping Up

While each DAM listed here offers something unique, none offers the speed, optimization capabilities, or scalability our clients enjoy with the DemoUp Cliplister DAM. That’s why we call global brands like Casio, Sony, and Philips our customers.

For more information about digital asset management, head over to our blog – or for a complete overview of the DemoUp Cliplister suite of products, visit the homepage.

Frequently Asked Questions

We hope you enjoyed our article about the top solutions similar to Canto. We value your feedback, so if you have any other questions, be sure to get in touch with a member of our team.

We collected and answered the most commonly asked questions we receive from former customers of Canto to help you decide on which DAM system is right for you. Read on for the full list of questions and answers below.