#1 most frequent
United States of America
59.8%48,434 installations of 80,976
What is Cloudinary?
Cloudinary is an image and video management tool enabling users to manage, optimize, and deliver images, videos and other media across every device and channel.
Categories & Use Cases
Videos
Top Performing Features
Uploading assets
Ingestion of digital assets into a DAM platform can typically be made individually or in bulk and can occur through a native browser interface. Drag-and-drop features can streamline file ingestion.
Category average: 7.8
Downloading assets
Downloads allow for role-based file conversions into multiple formats. Download settings can be configured to ensure compliance with licenses and copyrights. Assets may also be embedded into design files (like Adobe) for auto-updating other assets when versioning occurs.
Category average: 8.3
Asset storage
Centralized storage capacity and accessibility for centralized storage of marketing and brand assets. These can be anything from documents, audio files, videos, images, creative files (Adobe, etc.), etc. Outdated assets can be archived.
Category average: 8.7
Areas for Improvement
Metadata
Descriptive information about data that can be indexed to assets to facilitate discovery and automation. This also allows asset use cases to be identified.
Category average: 7
User access
Time or role-based access to stored and downloadable assets. This helps ensure that content is both up to date and accessible to only authorized individuals or groups for a predetermined amount of time.
Category average: 7.3
Content analytics
Allow users to track digital asset usage and user engagement metrics across multiple channels.
Category average: 7.1
Who Buys & Uses Cloudinary
#2 most frequent
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
7.1%5,726 installations of 80,976
#3 most frequent
Canada
3.5%2,849 installations of 80,976
Cloudinary Review
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Cloudinary is used as our primary CDN for seamless and fluid delivery of content to our customers. We were in the market for a new CDN and the suite of features that Cloudinary offered checked all of the boxes. It allows us to operate at scale while not compromising on quality.
Pros
- Image and Asset Management
- Customer Support and Reply Times
- Ease of Use and Internal Adoption
Cons
- Storage limitations and restrictions
- Learning curve for advanced features
- Pricing model
Return on Investment
- Increased delivery of content/assets
- Scalability to match market surges and needs
- Relatively easy integration into our existing tech stack
Alternatives Considered
Wistia and Twilio
Principal Engineer
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- Pricing is a bit high, and this is the area where they need to adjust.
- They are great in scaling but they may need to do bit more for infinite scaling.
Return on Investment
- It is best for generating optimal photo/video variants.
- Network bandwidth decreased, and UX became much better.
Other Software Used
Google BigQuery, BigTable, Leanplum, Firebase, MongoDB
Your one-stop shop for everything images.
Pros
- Cloudinary gives you the ability to transform your images whichever way you need. It comes loaded with filters, size optimizations, and formatting options. This makes it extremely powerful in that you can apply all of these things with just a few commands and without having to do anything special with the image prior to uploading.
- Cloudinary works either by allowing you to save the images in an S3 bucket, for example, or by saving it in their optimized CDN. After trying the former on a prior project, we switched to the latter and haven't looked back. Pretty much zero downtime and speedy delivery of assets.
- With their built-in viewer, you can dig a little deeper into your assets and also come up with your own organizational structure to more easily keep track of them.
- Their documentation really helps understand the multitude of features that are available.
Cons
- Their biggest strength is also one of their weaknesses. There is SO much in terms of features and things you can do, that I feel we probably only use about half of what's possible. Organizing all of those features and making you aware of them can be a challenge, despite their good documentation.
- Their plans can be a bit confusing to calculate since they're based on several quotas on different categories like bandwidth, storage, and transformations. To their credit, they're fairly flexible and allow you to easily upgrade or downgrade plans on demand.
Return on Investment
- 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.
Other Software Used
Trello, GitHub
Cloudinary - Possibly the last digital resource manager you will ever need
Pros
- It is super-fast at serving images, which takes the load off your web services and saves you big-time on file storage space.
- A powerful and feature-rich API that allows you to transform your images on the fly as they are served up, which could hardly be easier to use.
- Automatic backup of all your media on your Cloudinary account, allowing you to rest easy that your image and video files are safe.
Cons
- Their API does require URLs that can get quite lengthy and not always easy to parse on sight.
- Documentation on how transformations work and what they actually do to your image could be clearer (what does force_strip actually mean?).
- Although a free tier exists and is quite generous, should you need to acquire a premium plan for your needs the pricing at scale can climb quickly.
Return on Investment
- Cloudinary has saved me hundreds of dollars on my small business each year by allowing me to avoid in site hosting fees for additional space for large image files to be stored internally.
- I've saved hours by not having to run each image through an editing tool myself to reduce the resolution and file size, or crop and scale images.
- My websites load much more quickly as a result and their guaranteed uptime has meant I've never seen my images fail to load, creating client confidence and resulting in additional revenue opportunities.
Alternatives Considered
Adobe Experience Manager
Other Software Used
WordPress, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Chrome DevTools
Awesome Awesome product - keep it going. YOu make image management a breeze.
Pros
- dynamic image resizing
- dynamic image format change based on broswer
- dynamic video resizing
Cons
- We believe the costs could be a bit more affordable.
Return on Investment
- Accelerated development time
- Improve competitiveness of our product.