Well as a WordPress developer, it was always a challenge for me to maintain speed and performance of my client's websites. I tried several service, both paid and free (not mentioning the names here) and luckily one day I found Cloudinary while search for some image optimization service for one of my new client. I tried cloudinary and found that Cloudniary is more than an image optimization service, it serves images as CDN and has lot more feature that helped me offload my image data that made the website speed blazing fast. I found it pretty easy to setup, just signed up on Cloudinary, installed the plugin in WordPress and it did rest of the hard work it self. I've been contacted Cloudinary support team several times and everytime I found them really professional and always resolved any issue that I faced. Now it's my regular practice that I refer Cloudinary to all my new clients and must integrate Cloudniary on their websites. Best of all, Cloudinary's free plan is more than enough for new websites, so now I can proudly say that I've got dozens of happy clients:)
Pros
Well it's a bit difficult question because this service has a several services that makes it stand out from the rest of similar services. But the thing that I like about Cloudinary most is their "Transformations" features. It has made my life easier as it resize, auto change image quality (as per my needs) and auto change formats from several extensions like png, jpeg or even in WebP formats that helps me to save tons of bandwidth.
The other best thing is their really cooperative and nice technical support. They provide industry's best technical support even if you're using their free service.
Cons
Honestly speaking, this service is already providing more than everything that you need for your website image optimization and image delivery. So as far as I'm concerned, I'm totally satisfied with Cloudinary and I really don't like anything least about it.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 10/10
Our clients often need a centralised DAM which can store large quantities of assets. One client wished to run a competition which required them to upload a video from a website, Cloudinary proved the perfect service to integrate with. The development team quickly integrated with the platform and issues during testing were ironed out with the help of the Cloudinary support team. Based on this experience we have rolled out the platform to several other clients over the past 18 months.
Pros
- Great support from the Cloudinary development team
- Willingness to enhance the product based on your requirements
- Good features which can be deployed when required
- Good API and widgets available for developers
- Competitive pricing
Cons
- Some features can be confusing to activate such as automatically transcoding videos
- Annual pricing offer was not clear in sign-up process
- Web interface needed some experimentation to learn
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 9/10
Pros
Very easy and quick to implement.
Great technical solutions which covers all kind of image delivery aspects.
Simple but effective user interface.
A lot of online resources and best practice cases.
Cons
I am using their service with two different projects for a couple of years now.
To be fair I have to fully differentiate between the use cases and the expectations one might have as a user.
- We have implemented Cloudinary in an application with millions of images and I must say the value for money is not great compared to some of their competitors, especially if you do not use all their features. Though that is something one knows in advance and can very well factor in. But what is not acceptable to us is the fact that e-mails go unanswered for a couple of days and the support on the business side is very weak. Be prepared paying thousands of dollars without any support.
- For one project we are still on the free plan and their is actually nothing to complain about as it technically works perfect and it is superbe value for money.
To my point Cloudinary is great for very small and small projects but if your intention is to integrate Cloudinary in a business solution which might need support once a year think again.
Rating breakdown
Cloudinary is a highly flexible digital asset storage and distribution plaform.
Pros
Cloudinary provides end-to-end solution from digital asset storage, asset size optimization to image resizing by automizing these processes.
Cons
For plus plan, 225 GB bandwidth for $89per month is pretty high.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 10/10
Pros
I've been building SaaS products for years and never found a great digital asset management solution that worked for our end clients and wasn't prohibitively expensive. We generally rolled our own solution on top of AWS or something similar. Cloudinary is the the first affordable solution that has both a great API and SDKs as well as a great user interface. And, the available transformations mean that we don't have to do any image processing on our end. This is a great solution for serverless architectures.
Cons
The pricing, while very reasonable, was a little hard to understand at first. That said, they moved to a "credits" system that allows us the flexibility to use the product our way and get the most value for our credits.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 10/10
FREE
75, 000 Total Images.
7,500 Monthly Images.
Basic
$44 / Month
1 Million Total Images
75,000 Monthly Images
Plus
$134 / Month
3 Million Total Images
200,000 Monthly Images
Advanced
$224 / Month
5 Million Total Images
400,000 Monthly Image
Enterprise / Custom Plans
Terabytes+
Millions+ Monthly Images