Cloudinary vs. DigitalOcean

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cloudinary
Score 9.8 out of 10
N/A
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.
$49
per month
DigitalOcean
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
DigitalOcean is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform from the company of the same name headquartered in New York. It is known for its support of managed Kubernetes clusters and “droplets” feature.
$5
Starting Price Per Month
Pricing
CloudinaryDigitalOcean
Editions & Modules
Media Optimizer - Scale
$49
per month
Programmable Media - Plus
$99
per month
Programmable Media - Advanced
$249
per month
Programmable Media - Enterprise
Custom Pricing
Digital Asset Management
Custom Pricing
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CloudinaryDigitalOcean
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CloudinaryDigitalOcean
Features
CloudinaryDigitalOcean
Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Cloudinary
9.0
Ratings
23% above category average
DigitalOcean
-
Ratings
Dashboards9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Standard reports9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data exportability9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Content analytics9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
DAM Features
Comparison of DAM Features features of Product A and Product B
Cloudinary
9.6
Ratings
14% above category average
DigitalOcean
-
Ratings
Uploading assets10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Downloading assets10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Categories9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Asset storage10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Asset sharing10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Asset search10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Tagging system9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Content editing9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Metadata9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
User access9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
DAM Integrations10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
DAM API10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Cloudinary
-
Ratings
DigitalOcean
8.3
Ratings
3% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings9.20 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
CloudinaryDigitalOcean
Small Businesses
CoSchedule Marketing Suite
CoSchedule Marketing Suite
Score 10.0 out of 10
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
CoSchedule Marketing Suite
CoSchedule Marketing Suite
Score 10.0 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
MediaValet
MediaValet
Score 9.1 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CloudinaryDigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
CloudinaryDigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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DigitalOcean is a powerful tool with respect to the services and pricing that it offers. It is easier than other products and also provides servers that are inexpensive with great performance. DigitalOcean also offers additional add-ons such as additional IP addresses, scheduling of backups, etc. One of the best advantages is that it is efficient and is open source. Although, it is suited for a firm that is looking to cut down cost. Also, it is not suited for an organization where the dev/platform/DBA team is less experienced.
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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.
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  • Ease of use - You can get set up with a new server in a matter of minutes. It doesn't get any easier than that.
  • Support - The public forums are incredibly helpful as are the official help articles. I've never needed to contact the support team because of this. All of the information is at my fingertips.
  • Pricing - We're only paying $10/mo for a solution that gives our customers more confidence in us and is a selling point for us.
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Cons
  • 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.
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  • Some products/services available on other Cloud providers aren't available, but they seem to be catching up as they add new products like Managed SQL DBs.
  • While they have FreeBSD droplets (VMs), support for *BSD OSs is limited. I.e. the new monitoring agent only works on Linux.
  • There are no regions available on South America.
  • They don't seem to offer enterprise-level products, even basic ones as Windows Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle products, etc.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
I've been very happy with it for my purposes and I plan to continue to use DigitalOcean for the foreseeable future!
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Usability
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.
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With DigitalOcean it is very easy to start up a server/droplet. They have several templates and server images to select from, and they have good instructions on how to get a server set up and started. The monitoring tools in the dashboard look good and are easy to understand.
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.
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Support Rating
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
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They have always been fast, and the process has been straight-forward. I haven't had to use it enough to be frustrated with it, to be honest, and when I have an issue they fix it. As with all support, I wish it felt more human, but they are doing aces.
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Alternatives Considered
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.
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I chose DigitalOcean over Oracle Cloud because it's simpler, more cost-effective, and quicker to deploy. DigitalOcean’s intuitive interface allows me to manage servers easily, while Oracle Cloud is more complex and suited for larger enterprises. Also, DigitalOcean’s transparent pricing helps control costs, unlike Oracle’s more intricate and complex pricing model.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.
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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.
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  • DigitalOcean has very competitive egress pricing, which has been positive for reducing our costs when running services with a large amounts of data transfer
  • DigitalOcean templates have helped us quickly launch services that would otherwise require a lot of configuration (saving time)
  • We haven't had much in the way of negative ROI impacts using DigitalOcean as we don't use it extensively for our core product, but based on personal project experience it can require more engineering time to get up and running with than some other infrastructure services like Heroku. This has been one of the greatest barriers in pushing its adoption in our organization.
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ScreenShots