Choosing the right Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform has never been more critical or complex. And now, with the need to integrate AI becoming the new standard, it marks a fundamental step change in how brands create, manage, and scale content experiences.
Marketing, brand, and creative teams must have a system that goes beyond file storage and actively supports content production, collaboration, governance, and delivery across omnichannel.
If you’re at the juncture of evaluating DAM options to simplify your asset management, there are probably several DAM vendors like Bynder and Canto that are already on your radar.
In this blog, we’ll compare Bynder and Canto to help you decide which solution is best for your business.
Canto vs. Bynder: Key differences
Bynder is widely recognized as a best-in-class, enterprise-grade DAM solution that’s trusted by 4,300+ global brands. It consistently ranks as a Leader with analysts like Gartner, Forrester, and IDC.
Each year, Bynder invests $30M in developing innovations in-house to keep its customers ahead of their market’s needs. This includes its pioneering work in AI-powered content management, from intelligent metadata enrichment and search capabilities to governance agents that help ensure brand consistency at scale.
Related: Download The Complete Guide to Bynder’s AI Capabilities
Canto, by contrast, is typically chosen for its lower upfront cost and narrower functionality. It may work for smaller organizations with basic needs, but customers often outgrow its limited scalability and integration capabilities.
Canto has also leaned on acquisitions like MerlinOne and ImageRelay rather developing innovation in-house. And although its recent Canto XI announcement may appear as an unveiling of innovative platform enhancements, in reality, the new capabilities are just catching up with what’s already on offer from a marketplace leader like Bynder.
The key differences between Canto and Bynder
- Scalability: Bynder scales with global, enterprise-grade operations, while Canto is limited to smaller-scale use cases.
- AI capabilities: Bynder invests in developing and introducing cutting-edge AI capabilities, while Canto’s AI is gained from its acquisitions.
- Integrations: Bynder offers 140+ off-the-shelf integrations with an API-first approach, while Canto offers a far smaller integrations library.
- Support and onboarding: Bynder offers strategic onboarding and 24/7 global support. Canto operates a more limited service.
- Security: Bynder holds multiple ISO certifications, and the independent website SecurityScorecard has scored Bynder significantly more highly than Canto.
Canto vs Bynder: A feature-by-feature comparison
Implementation/user experience
Bynder is built with fast adoption in mind, with a customer success and onboarding team of 125+ people, and the ability to provide strategic onboarding and a modern, intuitive user interface (UI) that drives adoption across its customers’ teams.
In fact, Bynder customers often cite the DAM’s ‘clean UX’ as the main reason they can easily onboard hundreds, or even thousands of users.
By contrast, customer reviews of Canto on G2 and TrustRadius highlight slow performance and a clunky UI as common user frustrations.
AI capabilities
Bynder invests heavily in AI innovation to help organizations move faster in their industry, whether it’s consumer brands, finance, or automotive.
Bynder’s current AI capabilities include:
- Generative AI for scaling content creation
- AI-driven tagging and duplicate detection
- AI Search Experience (text search, natural language search, image search, and facial recognition)
- AI translation and localization to help speed up content creation and global distribution.
Furthermore, Bynder’s next-level AI, AI Agents, help you deliver more accurate and personalized content, faster — driving stronger engagement, operational efficiency, and brand protection.
Enrichment Agent: Understands visual and contextual meaning to automatically generate accurate metadata, tags, and titles; enriching your assets with brand-specific intelligence.
Transformation Agent: Uses generative AI to instantly adapt your assets for any channel or region, resizing, reformatting, or localizing content to accelerate content time to market.
Governance Agent: Scans the web to detect off-brand, outdated, or non-compliant assets. This helps safeguard brand consistency, digital rights, and levels of regulatory compliance.
Related: Read more about Bynder’s AI Agents
Canto offers AI tools like auto-tagging, facial recognition, and AI visual search, but many of its users have publicly noted that they often need to correct some of the tags manually afterwards. And while Canto acquired MerlinOne to help bolster its AI capabilities, its tools don’t appear to integrate smoothly with the core Canto platform.
Asset organization and search
Bynder DAM supports scalable taxonomy management, dynamic metadata, and AI-powered search, ensuring that your teams can find the files they need instantly.
By contrast, the Canto DAM relies on a folder-based structure with basic permissioning, tagging, and search capabilities.
Integrations and composability
Bynder DAM’s API-first architecture easily connects with 145+ popular integrations covering everything from marketing, CMS, and CRM to creative suites and PIM.
And, with Bynder’s composable architecture, your business doesn’t need to re-platform to connect to the integrations it needs — an invaluable benefit for organizations that need to scale their content operations.
Canto offers users around 40 integrations; however, it also relies on previously acquired software like MerlinOne and Image Relay to help expand its overall capabilities.
Customer onboarding and support
Bynder customers benefit from access to dedicated onboarding teams, best-practice guidance, and 24/7 multi-lingual support. In this way, Bynder is not only a DAM vendor but a partner that works closely with its customers to help them achieve operational and commercial success.
Canto offers a less comprehensive level of customer support, with a lack of specialist support for teams that want to begin the process of scaling up.
Content operations and content delivery
To support brands in scaling their content creation and delivery, Bynder offers the following solutions in the DAM:
Studio: Empowers any team member to create consistently on-brand visuals, GIFs, or videos.
Content Workflow: AI-powered content management that manages the content production process from start to finish.
Content Experience (CX) solutions: CX for User Community and CX for Omnichannel ensure that content can be accessed, shared, optimized, and delivered at speed.
Canto offers some basic collaboration tools like ‘comments’ and ‘version control,’ but it’s not fully equipped for a more advanced level of content operations, which can limit its value for teams based in medium to large businesses. Furthermore, capabilities like Brand Studio, for example, may appear to ‘new’ and ‘cutting edge’, but it’s simply Canto’s Brand Templates feature rebranded as Brand Studio.
Security and compliance
Bynder ensures enterprise-grade protection with:
- ISO 27001, 27018, and 22301 certifications
- SOC2 compliance
- GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA compliance
- 93/100 SecurityScorecard rating
- Advanced encryption, role-based permissions, and AWS hosting
In comparison to Bynder, Canto offers baseline security and falls short on other certifications, as well as attaining a score of only 66/100 on SecurityScorecard.
How to choose the right DAM solution for your organization
When you’re evaluating DAM solutions, we recommend that you always consider the following criteria. It should help keep you on track when you’re looking to choose a DAM vendor:
Scalability: Can the DAM platform grow with your teams and alongside your global operations?
AI capabilities: Does the DAM solution include cutting-edge AI-powered capabilities that will increase overall efficiency levels and reduce the amount of manual work needed day-to-day?
Integrations: Will the DAM connect smoothly with your existing tech stack — without the need for extra technical support or ‘workarounds’?
Governance: Does the DAM platform allow you to easily manage permissions and compliance across multiple brands, departments, and regions?
User experience: Can the DAM be adopted by your business with ease? And does it actively facilitate collaboration between different teams and departments?
Security: Are your assets and files going to be protected by enterprise-grade security protocols if you choose this DAM?
Bynder checks all of the above boxes
While Canto may appeal to entry-level buyers with its lower upfront costs, those savings can quickly be eroded as teams hit their scalability limits, content operations slow down, and there’s more time wasted on manual tasks. All of this means that an organization may need to search for a new DAM vendor after just a couple of years.
Bynder, on the other hand, is trusted by thousands of global brands because it delivers scalable, enterprise-grade functionality, smooth integrations, reliable and intuitive AI capabilities, and strong security and governance.
Plus, the ongoing investment in new innovations, as well as the strategic onboarding and customer support available, means that customers work in close partnership with Bynder, receiving the support they need to grow and thrive.
Ready to see Bynder in action? Book a fully-tailored demo with a product expert, and discover why the world’s most iconic brands are choosing Bynder DAM to help them grow and thrive.
