Acquia DAM (Widen) vs. Canto

Acquia DAM is well suited for large companies that need to organize and control the flow of assets being used by their teams and vendors. It provides much better control than file storage sites like Dropbox, where there's little control over what goes where and almost non-functional search functionality. If you're a smaller company, you may be able to get by or have someone dedicated to doing so, but for larger companies, it really takes a lot of the manual work out of it!

Incentivized

Canto is an excellent tool for organizing assets and searching for them in one location. I also really enjoy using the mobile version of Canto on my smartphone when I am on the go. Canto is robust and fast and it has been a major advancement in the way that my organization stores and shares assets.

Incentivized

• They offer valuable guidance and educational resources to Administrators
• Their I.T. support is knowledgeable and responsive. And friendly!
• They build community among Acquia DAM (Widen) Admins
• They aren't as salesy and pushy as many of the other DAM Vendors that we considered. I don't feel like they are constantly trying to upsell me or take advantage. I hope this continues to be the case with the acquisition by Acquia.
• They're just plain nice people to work with.

Incentivized

• Allowing users to download a resized version of an image self serve (eg. for social media)
• Sharing collections where recipients can see and download high res images
• Tagging to make searches very simple and eliminate complete folder structures
• Tag all info about an asset in the data rather than trying to name images with this data

Incentivized

• The AI tagging is not very intuitive; if you upload 100 assets, you have to wait for ages to see if they have been tagged by constantly checking the field views over and over again. It would be good to have an AI tagging manager where you could submit and check tagging status.
• For image downloading, it would be good to be able to select an image size rather than an aspect and then adjust the image to the size.
• We would have jumped at the chance for SSO or Site Core integration, but the costs were so high it just was not worth it; we could have hired people to do it manually for cheaper.

Incentivized

• I do with we could search for colors or items in Canto, for example red shirt photos
• We have a small team, but everyone needs different levels of access, I feel like there arent many levels of access as there could be

Incentivized

Acquia DAM (Widen) is changing its pricing model and at this point, we are unsure whether it is a good thing for us or not. While we consider this a robust tool, we will take our time to evaluate the competitors.

Incentivized

We are very likely to renew our service with Canto. This is because of the support we have received and what we have seen Canto do so far for our company. We are finally able to organize our assets well and maintain governance over all of our digital assets. It has eliminated time difference issues and is equipping people within our company with a lot of content for them to use and push.

Incentivized

Acquia DAM (Widen) is very intuitive, it does not take extensive training as some tools do to use the tool. Uploading assets, creating portals, collections and sharing are all very simple. Acquia DAM (Widen) also does not force you to fill out all of the metadata. You can fill out as little or as much as you would like.

Incentivized

Canto is about as easy to use as it gets. I have personally trained a handful of employees who are unfamiliar with DAM/marketing SaaS technology on how to use the platform for their needs. These trainings only take about half an hour (given they are using a very limited set of Canto's features), and afterward, they are pretty well-equipped to use the platform.

Incentivized

Never had an issue where I was unable to access Widen.

Incentivized

Canto is usually available, though sometimes goes down for 30 min - 1 hr. Usually resolved quickly

Incentivized

There have been a couple of rare instance where after I uploaded an asset, I was unable to rename it, or after uploading it it took a while before it actually appeared and can be viewed in the DAM.

Incentivized

I've satisfied with the performance

Incentivized

The Acquia DAM support team is fantastic! Not only do we have an amazing customer support contact, the regular chat support is a great resource. Our CSM schedules meetings with our team regularly to ensure that we're meeting our goals. And the general support is great at responding quickly!

Incentivized

I think Canto's onboarding process was really helpful. Our employees were able to utilize the system without excess training sessions which isn't always the case with some software. I also think that their customer support has proven to be super helpful when minor issues arise

Incentivized

The training was very thorough. The recordings for all our traning sessions were provided to us so that we could go back and review. Our trainer was always available for follow up questions. Our trainer shared a spreadsheet with us as a checklist for all things that needed to be done to ensure proper import and setup of our assets and DAM.

Incentivized

Very knowledgable and accommodating trainers who listen to what you're asking and provide detailed yet simple instructions.

Incentivized

It was a lot of work! But worth the effort to get our assets cleaned up and organized. Enough time and personnel need to be allotted for any implementation, but we had some advantage in having our assets in a previous DAM with attached metadata in XML, and our users were prepared with knowledge of our existing DAM at that time. Though old habits present their own issues, a company that is starting from scratch with no DAM has to think farther ahead about how it will organize and collect assets. Far more pre-planning with stakeholders would be needed for a company starting an implementation from scratch.

Incentivized

We didn't have a thorough enough plan for ownership of uploading and tagging and some of our tags were inconsistent which led to some regression in our usage. We tightened up that plan on our end and spoke with support team on Canto's end to establish some best practices and have a much better workflow now.

Incentivized

We started with the Widen system but ended up switching to Brandfolder. Brandfolder had the consistent interface across internal and external platforms. It was easier to use and search for assets for our internal team and brand partners. I preferred the Widen system's ability to share assets with direct links and the ability to add metadata upon upload.

Incentivized

Canto was one of the most cost effective options and was the only one that included all of the features that we were looking for (AI tagging, facial recognition, PMS integrations, OCR text recognition, etc)

Incentivized

Canto is based on the West coast, so occasionally patches and planned outages happen during East coast working hours

Incentivized

• Acquia DAM simplifies global access by offering an intuitive platform for easy asset uploads
• With centralized storage, sharing becomes seamless, fostering efficient collaboration worldwide.
• Utilizing Acquia DAM, I efficiently apply metadata for accurate categorization, enabling easy reference to past content whenever needed.

Incentivized

• Through a public service-based portal we've created, we have decreased the number of simple service calls that our service reps receive, because customers are now able to access an online platform and help themselves. This frees up our service reps and give them more time to spend on other, more complex cases.
• Decreases the time spent looking for assets. Simply search Canto!
• Easily providing information to many parties that our business deals with has been very helpful in improving relationships.

Incentivized