TrustRadius Insights for Cloudinary are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Powerful Image Transformation Capabilities: Many users have found Cloudinary to be extremely powerful in its ability to transform images. They appreciate the wide range of filters, size optimization options, and formatting choices that come preloaded with the software. Users can easily apply these transformations with just a few commands, eliminating the need for any special preprocessing of the images.
Efficient Delivery of Assets: Several reviewers have praised Cloudinary's efficient delivery of assets. By offering two options for saving images - an S3 bucket or their optimized CDN - Cloudinary ensures near-zero downtime and speedy asset delivery. Users who switched from using an S3 bucket reported significant improvements in uptime and quicker access to their media files.
Comprehensive Documentation: Users highly value the comprehensive documentation provided by Cloudinary. It helps them understand and leverage the multitude of features available within the software. The documentation is instrumental in exploring and utilizing various capabilities, making it easier for users to make the most out of Cloudinary's offerings.
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
Likelihood to Recommend
It's an excellent solution for storage management of assets and delivery of said assets. The multiple points of presence that come inherently with Cloudinary make the delivery of content as seamless as possible. I would not recommend this product to smaller scale organizations/companies as it does come with a sizable pricetag depending on usage/features.
Cloudinary takes away a lot of the muck that we need to manage images and creatives. Simplotel is like a Shopify for hotels and our hotel customers upload a large number of images and videos. We are able to leverage dynamic transformation of image and videos, resizing, quality parameter setting, format changing, cropping to provide an awesome experience to our customers. It saves us tons of development time and gives our customers a great experience.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Awesome product. Great account management. Very easy to use technology. Great documentation and blogs. We are very very happy with all the aspects of cloudinary. works like a complete charm.
We currently use Cloudinary to host image files on both our website and Help website. We love using the service and being able to utilize their API and make changes to images on the fly without having to go back and edit the image again. Also the ability overwrite an image if we need to change one is another great feature. We also host some CSS and video files there which is great that they do more than just images.
Pros
A Great CDN
Image Hosting
File Hosting
Cons
Better Navigation in Admin
Documentation
Integration
Likelihood to Recommend
Cloudinary works best if you are looking for a place to host some files, images and videos for your website to leverage the load of you web server.
Cloudinary is not for people who have heavy video files and need to host thousands of images or files and have them all linked to their website.
We are using Cloudinary for our Timeline feature. People post photos and videos, and we transform them to generate different variants for different device groups with better compression. It is used by the Engineering team in the server-side generation of photo/video variant generations. It helps us in optimizing the size of photos and making the user experience better. Network bandwidth gets reduced with it.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is best for photo/video transformation. We did use it for adaptive streaming of videos with the generation of m3u8 variant files. Async transformation with web hooks works great for larger videos.
Cloudinary is being used by the product team to serve up all of the images for our website. On occasions, we also use it as a more general repository for files that need to be served up to clients. Properly handling and serving up Images can be one of the most time-consuming things a product can have, especially one that is more visually focused. There are many elements that need to be taken care of ranging from the size of the photos to their speedy delivery, which is made fairly effortless by Cloudinary.
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.
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.
Most high-quality stock images have dense resolutions which translate into large file sizes, which when used on a website can mean a major drag on performance as your users have to wait for their browser to pull them down. Cloudinary solves this problem for you by allowing you to host your images on their servers while you simply link to them from your site, and allowing your site to load far more quickly as a result. If that was all they did it would be a major help, but they take that hosting to the next level by offering a powerful API through which you can transform your images as they come down. Getting an image as a thumbnail, scaling it up or down, giving it a sepia filter, giving it a watercolor feel, all of it can be done on the fly by sending the right parameters through their API. I've never worked with anything else like it.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Cloudinary is ideal for situations where you need to save on storage space for your site or web application, whether you're operating a large-scale e-commerce site or just need to show images on your fly-fishing blog. It will allow you to easily scale and transform your images in a variety of ways without having to learn Photoshop or other image editing tools, and its speedy image serving will take the load off your web server and result in a much more responsive, fast-loading site than you would get trying to handle all that yourself.
Cloudinary would not be appropriate for situations where you need to secure sensitive images (such as those relating to components or technology covered by a patent) or where you would want more control over how others in your organization could access and manipulate images being served.
We use cloudinary on our own sites to speed up the delivery of images and video and automatically optimize them for end users browsers. We really like how it can optimize for quality as well as format to reduce the amount of development work we needed to do on the platform which meant that our dev team had less to do.
Pros
Automatically optimizes the images format to support user's browser - e.g. Chrome users get WebP formats
Automatically optimizes for quality so you can set up a flag to automatically optimize the quality
Cool additional things like face detection, or integrating with other APIs are simple - like adding flags to the URL
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have an out of the box solution where you can easily manipulate the URLs to add in cloudinary - then it works like a dream. They have built-in support for platforms like Magento and wordpress which means that it can be a case of just downloading and installing. For other platforms like drupal it can be a massive headache to implement and get working fast. There is also SEO that needs to be considered when adopting Cloudinary and a poor implementation can cost your Organic visits!
