Cloudinary
Image and video API with a CDN, on-the-fly transformations and digital asset management.
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About Cloudinary
Cloudinary is a hosted media platform for websites and apps. Developers upload images and video through its API, upload widget or SDKs, then request resized, cropped, reformatted or compressed versions simply by changing the delivery URL; the results are cached and served through a CDN. Video gets transcoding and adaptive streaming, and there are AI features such as automatic cropping, tagging and background removal. On top of the developer APIs sits a digital asset management product that marketing and content teams use to organise, search and share files, plus low-code workflow tools. It is one of the most widely used services in this space, with SDKs for most web and mobile stacks and integrations for Shopify, WordPress, Contentful and others. Pricing is credit-based: a free plan covers small projects, and paid plans add more credits, users and features, with enterprise contracts for large media libraries. It runs entirely as a cloud service.
Best for: Teams that want one hosted service for media uploads, transformations, delivery and asset management.
Pros and cons
What works
- URL-based transformations for both images and video
- SDKs for most popular web and mobile frameworks
- Includes a full DAM for non-developers
- Free plan with no credit card required
Why people leave
- Credit-based pricing is hard to predict as traffic grows
- Paid plans start far above simpler image CDNs
- Cloud only, with no self-hosted option
Top Cloudinary alternatives
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Bunny Stream38.6Much cheaper video hosting with free encoding if you mainly need to stream video.
Why people left Cloudinary
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Cloudinary: common questions
Is Cloudinary free?
Cloudinary has a free plan and paid plans. Free plan: Yes, 25 monthly credits (checked on Cloudinary's own site).
Is Cloudinary open source?
No, Cloudinary is not open source.
What platforms does Cloudinary run on?
Cloudinary is available for Web.
What are the best alternatives to Cloudinary?
The highest-ranked Cloudinary alternatives right now are Bunny Stream. See the full ranked list for pricing, platforms and verified facts.