Meet the best alternative to Cloudinary
How does Bytescale compare with Cloudinary? Which platform is better for file & image uploading? What is the best Cloudinary alternative? We'll answer all these questions, and will show you why Bytescale is a great alternative to Cloudinary.
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Looking for Cloudinary alternatives?
Cloudinary was established in 2012 by Itai Lahan (CEO), Tal Lev-Ami (CTO) and Nadav Soferman (CPO). Founded in Israel, Cloudinary also has offices in Poland, Singapore, England and California. Initially famous for its image hosting APIs, Cloudinary has since expanded into Digital Asset Management (DAM) and now serves a larger, mixed audience.
Bytescale and Cloudinary both started with similar products: a set of developer APIs to simplify the file & image upload process. Cloudinary has since gone upmarket to offer its Digital Asset Management (DAM) services to larger media organisations.
Bytescale continues to focus on developers & startups. We have been developer-centric since day one, and continue to serve our audience each day by prioritising new features, bugs and documentation, rather than new products for alternative markets. We promise to keep our core platform modern and bleeding-edge.
Here's a few more reasons to consider using Bytescale:
Reason #1
A modern, streamlined dashboard.
Bytescale has a sleek, modern, and intuitive web interface that makes key metrics and common operations very easy to access.
With Bytescale, you can look up monthly and daily bandwidth usage, storage usage trends, and processing usage trends for file transformations with the blink of an eye.
All of our plans support team access, allowing you to share your account with your trusted colleagues.
Reason #2
Lightweight developer SDKs.
Our developer SDKs are smaller, which means they load faster:
Cloudinary's SDK is 21KB and its upload widget is 974KB.
Our upload widget is 3% the size of Cloudinary's.
Did you know: webpage speed is a ranking factor for Google.
import { Upload } from "upload-js";
// Call once per app.const upload = Upload({ apiKey: "free" });
// <input type="file" onchange="onChange(event)" />async function onChange(event) { const [ file ] = event.target.files; const { fileUrl } = await upload.uploadFile(file); console.log(`File uploaded: ${fileUrl}`);}Reason #3
Faster to integrate.
With Bytescale, you get clear and simple documentation. Our READMEs tell you exactly what to do, and how to do it. No long manuals. No initial configuration. Everything just works.
You can integrate with Bytescale in about 60 seconds, right now, simply by copying these code samples:
Reason #4
Advanced traffic management.
Being able to quickly add file uploads to your website is great.
However, what about preventing abuse? How many file uploads per IP address is acceptable? What about the total size of those files? What about the size of each of those files? What about blocking users and IP addresses?
Cloudinary's support here is limited. By contrast, Bytescale allows you to control each of these independently, with its state-of-the-art traffic management system, which is fully customizable and seamlessly integrated into the Bytescale Dashboard.
Reason #5
Support for AWS S3, R2, and more.
Bytescale supports AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, DigitalOcean, Google Storage, and Azure Storage as primary storage.
You can register multiple buckets via the Bytescale Dashboard, and we'll use them as primary storage for the folders you've assigned them to.
By contrast:
Cloudinary only supports AWS S3 on Enterprise Plans.
Your S3 bucket must conform to a specific key structure, which makes it hard to move away from Cloudinary in the future, and to move existing buckets to Cloudinary.
Reason #6
Support for reverse proxying.
Bytescale can optionally be used as a reverse proxy.
When used as a reverse proxy, Bytescale effectively becomes a CDN that optimizes your existing images on-demand.
This means you get all of Bytescale's image processing functionality, without needing to move any of your source images.
Reason #7
Expert help from skilled developers.
Need help? We let you talk directly to the development team.
We don't use support technicians or summer interns to handle technical requests: these questions get routed straight to the development team, so you'll always be speaking with a person who is capable of solving your problem.
Reason #8
We're cheaper, too*
While Cloudinary offers a free tier, its middle and upper tiers are less affordable and less economical tha Bytescale's:
Affordability: Bytescale's middle tier is $35pm whereas Cloudinary's middle tier is $99pm.
Economics: Bytescale's middle tier is $0.23 per credit* whereas Cloudinary's middle tier is $0.44 per credit.
* We've used Cloudinary's credit-based pricing to compare the two plans. We've converted the Bytescale plan to Cloudinary's pricing model by summing its storage, bandwidth and processing quotas to arrive at a Cloudinary-style credit quota.
Cloudinary vs Bytescale
Let's see how Bytescale compares as a Cloudinary alternative:
  |   | |
|---|---|---|
| Highest plan The highest plan the vendor lists on their pricing page. Both offer a custom plan with effectively unlimited usage, available on request. | $249/month | $195/month |
| Middle plan The middle plan offered by this vendor. | $99/month | $35/month |
| Lowest plan The lowest tier offered by this vendor. | Free | $7/month |
| Price of storage For Bytescale, this is calculated by dividing the middle plan's price by 3 (to account for storage, bandwidth and transformation quotas), and then dividing that number by the plan's storage quota in GBs. For vendors that use a single/shared resource quota, like Cloudinary, the storage quota is derived by dividing the shared quota evenly by the number of resources it abstracts (e.g. divided by 3 in Cloudinary's case, as their credit system abstracts storage, bandwidth and transformations). | $0.44 per GB | $0.23 per GB |
| Invite team members Invite multiple team members to manage your account. | Paid Plans Only | |
| Removable branding The ability to remove the vendor's branding from UI components, such as Upload Widgets, that your users will see. | Paid Plans Only | |
| Cloud-based file storage Store and host files with the vendor using their cloud storage. | ||
| URL-based file transformations Run URL-based file transformations to transform your files in real-time. | ||
| Perma-caching Serve transformed files (e.g. resized images & thumbnails) to users via a perma-cache to avoid processing delays on all subsequent requests, forever. | ||
| Worldwide CDN A content delivery network (CDN) serves your files from many locations around the world, ensuring minimal download latency for your users. | ||
| Folders Create folders and sub-folders for your files, e.g. to organise content by user, project, time, etc. | ||
| Image optimization Optimize images, e.g. by producing small WEBP thumbnails from larger JPEG photographs. | ||
| Image conversion Convert images to other formats, e.g. WEBP, PNG and JPG. | ||
| Image resizing Resize images in real-time via the URL. | ||
| Image cropping Crop images in real-time by manually providing crop dimensions. | ||
| Image cropping with AI Crop images in real-time using automatic AI-based smart cropping. | ||
| AVIF support AVIF is a modern image format, which offers better image quality and smaller file sizes compared to JPEGs. Bytescale's Image Processing API supports AVIF images as both an input and an output format. | ||
| WEBP support WEBP is a modern image format, which offers better image quality and smaller file sizes compared to JPEGs. Bytescale's Image Processing API supports WEBP images as both an input and an output format. | ||
| BlurHash support BlurHash is a modern image technology, which offers instant blurred placeholders for your images, through compact 16-character strings that can be stored in your database that efficiently represent the blur of an image. | ||
| Extract image metadata (EXIF) The ability to extract the EXIF metadata embedded within JPEGs. | ||
| Fast support Get ultra-fast responses to your technical questions and support tickets. | - | |
| Support via Slack Friendly and professional support over Slack. | ||
| Support via email Friendly and professional support with an expert team, via email. | ||
| Usage monitoring Monitor your storage, processing & bandwidth usage over time using our beautiful dashboards. | ||
| SSL (HTTPS) All uploads, downloads and file transformations run over HTTPS, keeping you and your users safe. | ||
| Expiring links The ability to expire files after a period of time has elapsed. | ||
| Max file size management The ability to set limits on the size of the files your users can upload. | Client-Side Only | Client-Side & Server-Side |
| Rate limit management The ability to rate-limit uploads using custom dimensions and frequencies. For example: "100 uploads per day per IP" or "5 video uploads per hour per user" | ||
| Advanced traffic management The ability to limit upload traffic using custom dimensions and frequencies. For example: "1 GB per day per IP" or "100 MB of images per hour per user" | ||
| IP blacklist management The ability to reject upload attempts based on custom dimensions, including the source IP address. | ||
| Authenticated URLs Bytescale supports federated access control, meaning you can authenticate & authorize access to your files via your application's own security system. | ||
| Proxy support The ability to transform files (e.g. resize images) that are hosted on existing websites, without needing to move the files to the vendor's storage. | ||
| Custom CNAME Make Bytescale your own by using a custom CNAME: your users will never know we're here. | ||
| Real-time video transcoding Convert uploaded videos to web-safe formats and stream the result in seconds, while the video is being transcoded. | ||
| Real-time video thumbnailing Generate multiple thumbnails from videos using a single GET request, as opposed to an asynchronous workflow using a POST request and multiple GET poll requests. | ||
| Video transcoding Convert uploaded videos to web-safe formats. | ||
| Video thumbnailing Generate multiple thumbnails from videos. | ||
| AWS S3 Use your own AWS S3 bucket as your account's primary storage. | Enterprise Plans Only | |
| DigitalOcean Spaces Use your own DigitalOcean Space as your account's primary storage. | ||
| JavaScript SDK size The size of the core JavaScript SDK (smaller is better). | 21KB | 6KB |
| File upload widget size The size of the file upload widget (smaller is better). | 974KB | 33KB |
| Compare Compare the pricing for yourself: we've provided a link to the price page for each option. | See pricing | See pricing |
Did we make a mistake? Please let us know!
Ready to try Bytescale?
We believe we've built a superior product to Cloudinary. We think you'll agree. Create your account today to play with our intuitive dashboards and advanced features, and then decide for yourself:
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Storage & CDN, built-in.
Bytescale provides cloud-based file storage, file transformations, and a worldwide CDN, all fully integrated.
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