18 years helping British businesses
choose better software
Cloudinary
What is Cloudinary?
Cloudinary provides a dynamic asset management product for companies interested in delivering rich media to support greater customer engagement. Supporting the full lifecycle of asset management from file upload and storage all the way to real-time transformations and personalized delivery, the Cloudinary digital asset management solution enables brands to publish content faster, maximize the value of existing assets, and streamline collaboration across development, marketing and creative teams.
Who Uses Cloudinary?
Markets where rich media is critical for customer engagement. These markets include e-Commerce and Retail, Travel and Hospitality, AdTech, Food and Beverage, Sports, Media, Entertainment, Social Media
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Reviews of Cloudinary
Great solution for media files
Comments: Amazing solution for managing media assets.
Pros:
Easy for media uploads and transformations.
Cons:
Pricing can get high for larger storage needs.
Great Cloud Storage Provider
Comments: I primarily use Cloudinary for cloud storage for web applications I build and deploy on Heroku. Since initially using it, I’ve begun storing many types of files within it.
Pros:
Cloudinary’s powerful API allows any developer to easily implement file storage for any kind of internet-connected app quickly. It’s API takes it a step further and allows for transformations when retrieving photo type files.
Cons:
The onboarding process could be improved. At first, it wasn’t easy to find the information needed to connect to the API. Once you know where to find it, things are much easier.
It's most remarkable features is its ability to help you keep collaborations, edits, and adjustments in mind.
Comments: Cloudinary changed the way I handle the media assets. There, I used it to tweak images used in a marketing campaign, and the CDN guaranteed rapid delivery to anyone on any device. It has now become an essential tool to keep your website interesting and in good shape.
Pros:
My favorite thing is Image and Video Optimization. For example, I used it to resize and compress images for my site that resulted in a 30% improvement in page load times. The AI-assisted features (automatic cropping, background removal, etc.) are very helpful.
Cons:
Pricing may catch up businesses with big media libraries, and there is a steep learning curve for advanced features such as transformations and API integrations.
Performs well, but is overpriced
Comments: It works well, and loads links fast. Our developers like it. It's just not worth it from a cost perspective though.
Pros:
We were locked into a lower legacy rate which made using Cloudinary a really good deal. It was simple and easy to use, and the links would load fairly quickly.
Cons:
It really doesn't make sense price wise compared to many other competitors. If we weren't locked into a legacy rate, we would not use Cloudinary. The UI is also quite dated.
Alternatives Considered:
Loaded features, but complicated and unorganized documentation
Comments: Been using it in production for about 1-2 years now, but have since moved on to another image service for ease of use (Imagekit.io).
Pros:
Easily able to transform images and generate various versions of it for content creation. A decent form is available for support questions, but turnaround time can be long.
Cons:
Cloudinary's documentation is loaded with content, but not well organized and can be difficult to find what you are looking for. It's similar to the disorganization like AWS documentation. The search tool is not easy to use and does not find the relevant information you are searching for. There is no discord server available where one could get instant feedback or help with issues. Not easy to use with modern SSR platforms like Nuxt/NextJS.
