Cloudinary vs. Xinet

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

As a legacy DAM system, Xinet is great. But historically they have been slow to develop new features and they have allowed their competitors to take the lead with more modern features like video and digital/social support and more intuitive interfaces. It seems that most DAM companies have a cloud-first view on their storage, while Xinet, which emerged from on-premises servers, has only recently begun to move into that space. That said, Xinet is a niche product perfect for anyone needing to manage large, still photoshoots and rights-managed assets, and then share them with large teams since it is not based on a per-user pricing structure.

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

• Organize assets by metadata.
• Grouping assets in a smart manner.
• Search capability.

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

• Automated triggers and actions could be a little more intelligent and could use a better interface (visual) for setting them up.
• Drag and drop file movements in the web portal would be a tremendous improvement.
• 3D file previewing for max and maya files would make the software invaluable to our teams.

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

Xinet is intuitive to use. It is perhaps the only DAM that features a traditional mounted volume, so anyone working in an environment with local servers will love it. Search is accurate and faceted searches allow users to narrow search results. Setup requires a lot of training if you want to leverage all of its complex workflow capabilities.

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

Support is handled by third-party server integrators. Our partner, NAPC, has always been there when we've needed them and also develops unique plugins to expand XInet's capabilities.

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 selected Xinet based on having a large number of potential users and wanted unlimited web seats. Paying a one time software fee versus a monthly seat payment was a big draw. Telescope was four to five times more expensive and was not feasible at the time. We liked Basecamp but we needed a local solution for storage, not hosted.

Xinet is a great platform to build off of. We use it in combination with Enfocus Switch which has greatly improved the automation capabilities and we use Xinet as the portal for external users. Our internal users very rarely interact with the Xinet GUI.

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

• Increased employee efficiency
• Proper usage of assets
• Client management and control

Incentivized