Cloudinary Pricing, Features, Reviews & Comparison of Alternatives

Pros
Cloudinary is super easy to use. As the solo Email Marketer for my company, I am frequently swapping out images, setting up templates with new images, editing things, etc. and I was able to jump into the role and start cranking emails out right away. Once we get the code back from our agency, I am able to easily and quickly upload all visual assets to Cloudinary and I'm on my way with my emails! I particularly like the fact that I can upload a batch of images, and update the reference URL in the HTML file to the same prefix and everything flows through.

Cons
The search functionality to find old images you've already uploaded is pretty dismal. Not sure if it's user error on my part, but I had the exact name of the jpg file I was looking for, tried to search for it and no results were found. I tried to add image file type (.jpg and .jpeg) to the end of the name and still no dice.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Serving up photos can be a real headache when you account for the different sizes you need to serve up to different devices and situations. Cloudinary handles most of that complexity, allowing you to simply set a series of flags that will handle everything from compressions settings to cropping factors. I wouldn't know where to start if I needed to do all of that in-house.

Cons
Cloudinary has so many features and what seems to be a few different ways to set it up, that I sometimes feel I'm not getting the most out of it. Its pricing plans can also be slightly mismatched depending on your site traffic, especially when you have high storage needs.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

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

Pros
You can get exactly the image size, type, and crop you want, purely by modifying the URL. You can organize your assets into folders, and you can store any file type you need. I use it to store PDFs, ZIP files, and, of course, images.

Cons
The media library admin tool is not the most intuitive to use. The back/forward buttons on my mouse don't go back in state (I have to use the nav links in the UI to navigate back from an image to the folder its contained in, etc). Updating images can also be a pain. I've found that if I delete and re-upload an updated image, I can't click to go into editing it/generating a URL to serve it with unless I open it in a new tab.

Rating breakdown

Pros
Cloudinay allowed us to easily store all the images that we have in our application. Currently, all our profile images from our application are stored on Cloudinay.

Cons
Honestly, we did not find anything that we can not do with this application based on the purposes of the application, that is to store and apply transformations to images.

Rating breakdown