Cloudinary vs. Extensis Portfolio

Cloudinary handles pretty much anything you have related to images. From serving them up efficiently to adding transformations on the fly, there's really little this service doesn't do. Their pricing plans allow you to grow into the right levels and their website dashboards are very helpful. I would easily recommend this for all but the simplest of use cases.

Incentivized

Extensis Portfolio is perfect for organizing photos as long as everything is keyworded correctly. If it is not part of a group's workflow to add a description or keywords to your photos, then you'd be dumping your photos into a pool with no way to search for them. Extensis Portfolio is best utilized when you give it the ability to help you search (by keywords yourself).

Incentivized

• Cloudinary is the best in the market for photo and video transformations.
• Cloudinary takes customer's requests for special features and implements them very quickly.

Incentivized

• Watch folders: Extensis allows for multiple watch folders to be commissioned on a variety of network connected data shares--NAS, direct connect external HDs, etc.. We have our workflow such that each photographer can upload their job into their own folder, and Portfolio automatically injests the image assets.
• Metadata injecting: a key component of our archiving needs are met with Portfolio's fully- customizatable and automatic metadata injection. This allows us to set standard fields across all the assets, while also allowing for custom variations in categories, keywords, and tags. Absolutely key to our workflow.
• Integration with Adobe CC is seamless through the built-in connector.
• Finally, the support team is OUTSTANDING! We absolutely LOVE our support engineer. We are a small org compared to the rest of his portfolio, but he always puts in the extra effort and takes the time to allow us to feel like we are totally supported.

Incentivized

• Currently, they don't have an officially supported Drupal module -so it's quite painful to implement.
• If you have a site that has a lot of visitors then it's possible to get quite large bills out of the blue if you get a massive spike e.g. black Friday.
• The UI for the backend and documentation could do with a lot of improvements.

Incentivized

• Learning curve. It can be very intimidating and difficult to learn for people who are not experienced with similar software.
• Ease of adding new users. It's currently a long process to bring anyone new onto the platform. We have to go through our DAM manager and only they have the ability to add or remove people.
• Thumbnail previews sometimes blank. Sometimes the thumbnails for photos don't load or need to be refreshed manually, which can be frustrating when needing to search through multiple folders and photos.

Incentivized

Cloudinary is very easy to use and offers fast way to upload your images, files and videos to their servers. Then they give you quick ways t implement those files or images onto your website using their API or just a normal URL. They also give you very fast ways to make edits to those files and include them in the url.

Incentivized

We rarely use their support. But when we need it they are always there. They provide great consultation and suggestions to help us manage our costs and resources better. In the last 8 years perhaps we have contacted them 3 or 4 times - which is really really great

Incentivized

Because our organization tends to run software on older equipment, finding someone to support our particular configuration was a challenge. Additionally, trying to explain to someone In tech support about our issues was difficult because a lot of the issues were quirks within the software that had to be seen to be understood.

Incentivized

My experience with AEM has been limited to interacting with it through others, and so this information should be taken with that in mind, but my impressions from talking with the service engineers managing this system in our enterprise (in a previous role) was that it could be challenging to integrate effectively into a large-scale organization with demands on security. The biggest reason I selected Cloudinary was price-based; their free plan serves my needs as a freelancer quite well.

Incentivized

We have been with Extensis for many years-- so the comparisons are outdated at this point. Companies like WebDAM, Adobe's Lightroom, mediavalet, and others, just don't have the robust catalogue management Portfolio does. There is a solidness and assurance of functionality we experience when using Portfolio-- nothing clunky or web-cloud shaky

Incentivized

• Images are essential to our product and using Cloudinary has allowed us to serve them up in a cost-effective and efficient way. Not having to worry about your images frees you up to tackle the real challenges for your product.

Incentivized

• Allows quick and easy image and asset searches.
• Has been an invaluable tool for our organization by freeing up database employees to tackle other tasks.

Incentivized