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About Cloudinary

Cloudinary provides a dynamic asset management solution, helping brands to customize media assets for any use case.

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Pros:

But the thing that I like about Cloudinary most is their "Transformations" features.

Cons:

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.

Cloudinary ratings

Average score

Ease of Use
4.4
Customer Service
4.2
Features
4.7
Value for Money
4.3

Likelihood to recommend

8.8/10

Cloudinary has an overall rating of 4.6 out 5 stars based on 53 user reviews on Capterra.

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Filter reviews (53)

Christian
Christian
Programmer Analyst in US
Verified LinkedIn User
Computer Software, Self Employed
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Great Cloud Storage Provider

5.0 2 years ago

Comments: I primarily use Cloudinary for cloud storage for web applications I build and deploy on Heroku. Since initially using it, I’ve begun storing many types of files within it.

Pros:

Cloudinary’s powerful API allows any developer to easily implement file storage for any kind of internet-connected app quickly. It’s API takes it a step further and allows for transformations when retrieving photo type files.

Cons:

The onboarding process could be improved. At first, it wasn’t easy to find the information needed to connect to the API. Once you know where to find it, things are much easier.

Nick
software engineer in US
Computer Software, Self Employed
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

Alternatives Considered:

Loaded features, but complicated and unorganized documentation

4.0 2 years ago

Comments: Been using it in production for about 1-2 years now, but have since moved on to another image service for ease of use (Imagekit.io).

Pros:

Easily able to transform images and generate various versions of it for content creation. A decent form is available for support questions, but turnaround time can be long.

Cons:

Cloudinary's documentation is loaded with content, but not well organized and can be difficult to find what you are looking for. It's similar to the disorganization like AWS documentation. The search tool is not easy to use and does not find the relevant information you are searching for. There is no discord server available where one could get instant feedback or help with issues. Not easy to use with modern SSR platforms like Nuxt/NextJS.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Environmental Services
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Very easy to implement, too costly for what it is and unfortunately a terrible support.

3.0 7 years ago

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.

Prem
Automation Freelancer in India
Information Technology & Services, Self Employed
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Alternatives Considered:

Best media resizing, Transformation, Storage and sharing platform

5.0 2 years ago

Comments: The best cloud storage and management with immense capabilities with easy in URL sharing and transformation features with easy to understand documentation, Super fast customer responses

Pros:

Easy upload and in URL transformation feature

Cons:

Less in built fonts, Template creation is not available

Mayank
CEO, Founder in Netherlands
Animation Software, 2–10 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Alternatives Considered:

Flexible and dynamic digital asset management platform

5.0 4 years ago

Comments: 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.

Graham
Solution Architect in UK
Marketing & Advertising, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Alternatives Considered:

The DAM which grows with your requirements

5.0 5 years ago

Comments: 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

Ryan
SEO manager in UK
Automotive, 501–1,000 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Cloudinary review

5.0 last year

Comments: Very easy to use and pretty self intuitive, would recommend to anyone looking for a digital asset management platform

Pros:

The ability to set 'quality' parameters across images to compress the file size along with the height and width. Essential for SEO image optimisation and page speed (Core Web Vitals)

Cons:

As an SEO setting up quality parameters is relatively simple but for other users who focus more on content or uploading content it can be quite difficult for them verify how big the image file is. Would be good if Cloudinary could surface the image file size on the parameter URL or even file size savings

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Computer Software, 2–10 Employees
Used the Software for: 1-5 months
Reviewer Source

Alternatives Considered:

Cloudinary Review

5.0 last year

Pros:

We use Cloudinary primarily for Image and Video storage, it helps us with secure image and video storage instead of using other on premise solutions or other solutions that are a little harder to use and implement, its also got an ecosystem of products that extend well with each other which is really nice to have.

Cons:

I think the only con with Cloudinary is vendor lock in is very easy to fall into, because they have an ecosystem of video and image products and api's, it can be quite difficult or impossible to mix it with your other solutions.

Nadish
Nadish
Web Developer in Pakistan
Verified LinkedIn User
Marketing & Advertising, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

Simply the best media optimizer for websites

5.0 4 years ago

Comments: 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.

Frank
Frank
Co-Founder, CTO and Product Lead in US
Verified LinkedIn User
Hospitality, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Cloudinary serves up your images admirably with powerful features to spare

4.0 6 years ago

Comments: Cloudinary provides an indispensable service for anyone managing an image-heavy website. It's also incredibly reliable and works seamlessly once it's been set up. Replicating Cloudinary's features would be a tall order for any development team.

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.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Computer Software, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Highly effective for buidling image heavy applications

5.0 3 years ago

Comments: Cloudinary helps in our developers focussing on our core problems by taking care of the image manipulation work which saved in a lot of time & head-ache for the team.

Pros:

1) The software completely outsourcing the process of image manipulation work for developers to make the applications work seamlessly across multiple touch-points. 2) Makes it easy to manage the digital assets of a company/application for non-developers that developers can easily use in the development process.

Cons:

1) The software right now misses key features to manage audio assets in its platform to help voice experience designers work with speech/audio data. 2) The software still doesn't provide an app for sharing image assets easily like how cloudApp/jumpshare does.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Computer Software, Self Employed
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Transformative Image Management

5.0 4 years ago

Comments: Overall it's been terrific. Customer support is responsive, the SDKs are great, and the features are innovative and outstanding.

Pros:

I absolutely love the fact that I can upload an image and perform nearly any kind of transformation to it that I need in order to get it to display the way I need it to in my web applications.

Cons:

The cost structure for using the platform includes transformations. However, it does not appear to let you make these a 'permanent' feature, so every time a request is made against your transformation it is counted toward your credits. It would be nice to see a way to make this more efficient, i.e. a one-time transformation cost for the image. If you have a thousand images being repeatedly transformed into the same transformation a million times a month, those transformations become extremely costly. And that's only one of the different metrics for the billing credits.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Education Management, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

Best alternative cloud storage you can use

4.0 6 years ago

Pros:

When I starte using appybuilder software to make application I only know about firebase console of Google for cloud storage but later appybuilder updated more options for cloud storage then one day I saw about cloudinary storage and I started search for this software and when I saw the features and functions of this software I really amazed because they are very simple and easy.just create folders whatever you want name the folder and upload your videos or photos.It will give you a url link for your videos or photos that's it share them where ever you want.Great option for cloud storage I ever used

Cons:

It comes in free version and paid version i used free version and the storage comes 25gb per month on free version.it is some a little less for who needs more storage because i created a whatsapp status videos app but i uploaded videos up to my free storage and i waited for next month for my quota.when someone uses free version if it's good then he will definitely go for paid version.I think some more storage need to give under free version

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

Easy to use, intuitive interface, great for Email Marketing team of 1

4.0 7 years ago

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.

Paul
CTO in US
Computer Software, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Exactly what we needed

5.0 4 years ago

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.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Information Technology & Services, 10,000+ Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Access the image from cloud instead of local.

5.0 5 years ago

Comments: Overall best experience.Helps me in my project page speed improvement.

Pros:

Using the cloudinary images and fonts in my web development projects for accessing the image and fonts from server instead of my local static images.As it will load the image and font much faster and also store in the cache.It helps in page speed improvement for the website.Much recommended 😊

Cons:

Everything is perfect only.Using this regularly and not facing any issues.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Sports, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Great interface, easy to implement

5.0 4 years ago

Comments: If you want to implement image or video uploading in a very quick way - use it now.

Pros:

It was super easy to implement it inside our software. It's super helpful in image managing

Cons:

It's a little too much for what we need and therefore the pricing is not the best for us. I would prefer to have some much thiner product if it could make it cheaper. we don't use all the functions

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Computer Software, 501–1,000 Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

Feature-rich, flexible, and just a joy to work with.

5.0 7 years ago

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.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Amazing software to store images and apply transformations

4.0 7 years ago

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.

Richard
Richard
Software Developer in Canada
Verified LinkedIn User
Computer Software, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

Great service, does exactly what it advertises

5.0 7 years ago

Comments: We need to do image storing, optimizing, resizing & manipulation. Rather than do that ourselves, this service does it all for us. It's saved us a lot of time and money.

Pros:

They have lots of clients for use in any language. Their api is intuitive and easy to use. I've had to contact their customer support a handful of times, they've always been super quick to respond and are able to fix my problem. Their service is top notch - sometimes it's a little slow, but that can be fixed with optimizations.

Cons:

It can be a little overwhelming because it does SO MUCH. And their docs could be laid out a little neater.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Great tool to upload your images

5.0 7 years ago

Comments: With cloudinary we use it to upload our users photos. After that we can transform them via url, to reduce bandwidth our cut it.

Pros:

We using cloudinary to upload the user pictures. This is fantastic because , we can transform the user photos to reduce the bandwidth and cut photos for example.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Sporting Goods, 501–1,000 Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

Cheaper and Easier

5.0 5 years ago

Comments: The initial demo we got blew us away and the product has continued to be just as advertised. We save money using Cloudinary and our site performs better. I'd recommend it to anyone considering Cloudinary

Pros:

Cloudinary has allowed us to replace our previous asset management software on our site. It is much cheaper and easier to design with. It also integrates much more seamlessly with our order processing tool than the tool we previously used.

Cons:

We really didn't have any issues. Switching to Cloudinary was a no brianer and the transition has been very painless.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Publishing, Self Employed
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Great API Image and Video Editor and Store

4.0 4 years ago

Comments: As a blogger I'm free to store my images and work on them in a place unbound to my website.

Pros:

I use Cloudinary to edit and store images I use for my blog. It has many features, more than I use. It provides me an API code (I use html usually), I copy on my blog. Cloudinary gives me reports, so I can see how my images work. The Free Classic Plan is enough for what I need. If I share it with my friends, I get extras for free. The dashboard is friendly and easy to use.

Cons:

I don't see any cons with it. The Plus and Advances Plans are expensive for my pockets, but I don't need them for my work.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Media Production, 2–10 Employees
Used the Software for: 1-5 months
Reviewer Source

An impressive online Image editing tool.

5.0 6 years ago

Comments: Monthly 20gb free storage and bandwidth just free, with optimization of your software and lots of integration and plugins to support any platform. It is best for my type of work.

Pros:

I have to share the preview picture with the client on a project basis before final production. I am very happy with 20gb space that came with registration and same for bandwidth. Now some of my problems are solved. For social media upload, I can just resize uploaded image on the go using URL, which is a very nice feature. The online optimization of images for web use saves lots of my bandwidth. It is very easy to control and add effects just a few clicks. As it, workes from the browser and I don't have to install anything on my computer, less headed for data loss.

Cons:

But I don't like taking all the memory by this software, that's all the problem I can find for this software.

Mitch
Mitch
Founder in Canada
Verified LinkedIn User
Used the Software for: 1-5 months
Reviewer Source

Cut our file sizes in half!

5.0 7 years ago

Comments: We cut our user uploaded file sizes in less than half which means faster load times, less server space, and Cloudinary was able to do this for us without any perceivable loss in quality - it all just happens like magic!

Pros:

There is a LOT you can do with Cloudinary, so if image manipulation is your thing you will be very pleasantly surprised once you look at all options you have to work with your data. The reason we went to Cloudinary was to optimize the images, and without any noticeable loss in quality Cloudinary has helped us reduce the image file sizes by 50-60+%, which is a huge space savings for us.

Cons:

The strength of Cloudinary could also be seen as con with so many options to choose from it was a little daunting to get setup initially.