Fabric vs. Canto

Last updated April 2026

Canto stores your brand assets and helps you find them. Fabric stores all your content and helps you understand it. Canto is a digital asset management platform with AI tagging, facial recognition, and branded portals. Fabric is an AI workspace where every file you save is understood, connected, and part of a library you can search by meaning and ask questions about. One catalogues your assets. The other gives them context.

Comparison table

What is Canto?

Canto is one of the oldest digital asset management providers, founded in 1990. Over 4,000 brands use it to centralise, tag, and distribute visual and brand content. The platform's AI image recognition and facial recognition auto-tag uploads, with facial recognition being a standout: identify a person once and find every photo of them instantly. Portals let you share curated collections with external audiences. A PIM add-on connects product data to brand assets. Canto is known for ease of use relative to other enterprise DAMs and for strong customer support. Pricing is quote-based across four tiers and isn't publicly listed. There's no free plan. No Android app.

What is Fabric?

Fabric is an AI workspace that combines file storage, note-taking, search, tasks, collaboration, and publishing. The Fabric Memory Engine automatically extracts, enriches, and maps relationships between everything you save. Where Canto catalogues brand assets for retrieval, Fabric understands all your content and makes it part of a connected knowledge base you can work with.

Key differences

Cataloguing vs understanding

Canto is a catalogue. Assets go in, get tagged (manually or via AI), get sorted into albums and folders, and get retrieved by searching tags and metadata. The system knows an image is tagged "product launch, spring 2026, social media." It doesn't know what's in the image beyond what the tags say.

Fabric is a knowledge base. Every file you save is automatically extracted, enriched, and indexed. The AI maps relationships across your library. You can ask questions that span everything you've saved. Search works by meaning, not by tag accuracy. Canto helps you find an asset. Fabric helps you understand how it connects to everything else.

AI

Canto uses AI for image recognition, facial recognition, and auto-tagging. The facial recognition is notably effective: identify a person once and the system finds every photo of them across your library. This is useful for media teams managing large image libraries.

Fabric's AI is a conversational assistant that understands your entire content library. It answers questions, summarises documents, transcribes audio and video, maps relationships between content, and takes actions. Canto's AI labels assets. Fabric's AI understands them.

Search

Canto searches by metadata, tags, facial recognition, and custom fields. For finding a specific approved asset in a well-maintained library, it works. Reviews note that search quality depends heavily on how well the taxonomy and tagging have been maintained.

Fabric searches by meaning. Semantic search finds content even when you describe it differently from how it was written. Visual search finds similar images. Colour search finds assets by palette. In-document search goes to the page, slide, or timestamp. Cross-platform search pulls from Google Drive, Notion, and Dropbox alongside your Fabric library. Fabric's search doesn't depend on someone having tagged the asset correctly.

Content types

Canto handles images, videos, documents, and product assets. It's oriented toward visual and brand content. You can store other file types, but the platform isn't designed to extract and index the contents of a PDF, a slide deck, or an audio recording.

Fabric handles all content types natively. PDFs, images, video, audio, documents, slides, spreadsheets, ePubs, links, emails. Everything is extracted, enriched, and searchable. If your content goes beyond brand assets, Fabric covers the full range.

Portals and PIM

Canto has branded portals for curated external sharing and a PIM add-on that connects product data to brand assets. For e-commerce and product-driven brands managing catalogue content alongside marketing assets, these are specific capabilities.

Fabric doesn't have branded portals or product information management. If you need curated portals for specific audiences or centralised product data linked to brand assets, Canto handles that.

Notes, documents, and beyond

Canto is a DAM. No notes, no document editing, no spatial canvases, no meeting transcription, no general-purpose tasks, no publishing with stakeholder-level engagement tracking.

Fabric is a workspace. Notes, documents, spatial canvases, meeting transcription, tasks, AI across all content types, publishing with analytics. If your work goes beyond managing brand assets, Fabric covers the rest.

Collaboration

Canto has comments on assets, approval workflows, and sharing with permissions. Useful for creative review.

Fabric supports real-time co-editing on documents and canvases, pinned annotations on any content type, threaded comments, in-context chat, and shared drives. Broader collaboration tools for broader content types.

Platform coverage

Canto has no Android app. iOS only for mobile.

Fabric is available on web, iOS, Android, desktop, and as a Chrome extension.

Pricing

Canto's pricing is quote-based and not publicly listed. It sits in the mid-to-higher range of the DAM market. All core features are included in the quoted price (no module-based add-ons for basic functionality), which is a simpler pricing model than some competitors. The PIM add-on is separate.

Fabric includes AI, search, collaboration, publishing, and file storage at every tier. [Insert Fabric pricing details.] Different products for different purposes at different price points.

When to use each

Use Fabric if you want your content understood and connected, not just catalogued and distributed. You need AI that answers questions across your entire library. You want semantic search, notes, collaboration, meeting transcription, spatial canvases, and publishing with engagement analytics. Your content includes more than brand assets. You want a workspace, not a library catalogue.

Use Canto if you're a marketing or brand team that needs enterprise DAM with facial recognition, branded portals, and product information management. You manage thousands of visual assets and need them tagged, governed, and distributed to internal teams and external partners. Brand consistency at scale is the problem. And you're on iOS only or don't need mobile beyond iOS.

Use both. Some teams use Canto for distributing approved brand assets to external audiences and Fabric as the workspace where those assets are researched, discussed, and connected to briefs, meeting notes, and creative strategy. Canto is the catalogue. Fabric is where the thinking happens.

Why people move from Canto to Fabric

They wanted context, not just a catalogue. Canto stores and tags assets. Fabric connects them to the briefs, research, meetings, and strategy behind them. Teams that needed to understand the story around their assets, not just find them, found Canto insufficient.

They needed more than a DAM. Notes, meeting recordings, research, collaboration on documents, spatial thinking. Canto stores brand assets. Fabric stores everything and connects it.

Search depended on tagging. If assets weren't tagged correctly, they didn't surface. Fabric's semantic search works regardless of how content was tagged or whether it was tagged at all.

They needed Android. No Android app is a practical gap for distributed teams.

They wanted AI that answers questions. Canto's AI tags images. Fabric's AI understands your entire library and answers questions about it. Different capabilities for different needs.

FAQs

Does Fabric have facial recognition like Canto?

Fabric has visual search that finds similar images across your library. It doesn't have dedicated facial recognition that identifies individuals across photos. For media teams managing large photo libraries where finding every image of a specific person is critical, Canto's facial recognition handles that.

Does Fabric have branded portals like Canto?

No. Fabric's publishing features let you share anything with one click, with analytics and password protection. It doesn't have curated portals for specific audiences the way Canto does.

Is Fabric free? Fabric has a free tier with limited storage and AI. Canto has no free plan.

Does Canto have a conversational AI assistant?

No. Canto uses AI for image recognition, facial recognition, and auto-tagging. There's no assistant that answers questions about your content or connects information across files.

Can Fabric replace Canto?

For general content storage, search, collaboration, and AI, yes. For enterprise brand DAM with facial recognition, branded portals, PIM, and governed asset distribution, no. They serve different purposes.

Which is better for small teams?

Fabric. Canto's pricing and feature set are oriented toward mid-to-large marketing organisations. Small teams that need to store, search, and work with content intelligently will find Fabric more appropriate and more affordable.