Cloudinary Reviews

I use the solution to host files and documents. I use it when I have an application where I want to store files online. I use the Cloudinary server to host the files, and I use the API to integrate the platform with my back end to save files and documents.

One of the best features of the platform is that we have a generous free tire that I can use for some of my projects without worrying about the platform's cost. The free-tier version is one of the biggest pros of Cloudinary. The API integration in Cloudinary is quite easy and straightforward.

I believe there is some scope for improvement in areas like the dashboard, specifically the user dashboard and the browser where you can navigate the platform. Sometimes, it can be a little bit difficult to navigate the platform. I think if the tool can improve the navigation around Cloudinary's console and make it more intuitive, it would be more helpful for users.

I want the UI for the console and dashboard to be better.

I have been using Cloudinary for two years. I am a user of the tool.

I don't have any server issues. The website I use Cloudinary for is still running, and there has been no downtime with the API or server.

It is  scalable solution.

I work as a freelancer, and I mostly use it to share files with my clients. I know that two of my friends also use Cloudinary. I remember that Cloudinary was introduced to me by someone from my past.

On some occasions, I have spoken with the product's support team. The solution's technical support was quite prompt in their responses. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

For the cases in which I have used Cloudinary, I just use the API. The truth is the documentation is quite good, and it is straightforward to integrate the API with whatever framework or language you are using to write your application.

The solution is deployed using the cloud services offered by Cloudinary.

The tool is quite cheap because it gives a certain amount of free gigs for trials. If you are just starting out, the tool is actually free. You don't have to pay any fee, except if you have a large volume of files and documents you want to host. If you are just starting out, you don't need to pay anything to use Cloudinary. When you eventually want to scale, then you have to pay to use to get more for a little more space on the platform.

The tool's documentation is great, and everything is seamless.

I suggest others try using the product because it provides a generous free-tier version that you can use for test purposes. If you are still in developer mode, you can use it as a dev server to host files. If you don't want to write in the back end and you just have a front-end application, you can easily store your files on Cloudinary and access them without having to spin up a server. It is quite easy to use, and the generous free-tier version makes it more appealing to use.

Beginners who want to learn to use the product can look at the free documentation on the product's console. If you have any issues, Cloudinary has a huge community. Many engineers and developers use Cloudinary. In case you run into any issues, you can find something online or on YouTube that can help you fix it. Overall, it's quite easy to use.

I had only had good experiences using the platform apart from when I had the issue, and I contacted the support. They were quite prompt with their responses. I have not had any issues with the platform.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

I used the solution just to learn about the platform, and I used it for a couple of personal websites. Mainly, the websites have a lot of images or galleries. What I liked was that previously, when I was making websites, I had to create a lot of images manually to a certain size to be responsive for screens of different sizes. Then I learned about Cloudinary and how it does it all for you. You can upload your assets to Cloudinary, and it automatically detects the user's browser and sets up the image in the right format to optimize the right size, which is amazing.

When you're starting off, it can be a little bit overwhelming. I am just gonna look at the screen now. Once you log in, you have a management console and many different things, so you won't really know where to go. The onboarding could be made a bit easier. I did Cloudinary's courses. If you use the tool's UI, there are different icons on the left screen, and you won't know where to go first and what is important. The UX can be improved a bit.

When you open the product's management console, it can just be a little bit overwhelming at first until you figure it out. Cloudinary just needs to relook at how to simplify the tool or use the tool's guidance walkthroughs for new users.

The product needs to get noticed, it is important to have someone from Cloudinary on Stack Overflow or Syntax.fm and talk with the developer community.

I have been using Cloudinary for six months. I am a customer of the tool.

I have not seen any bugs or breakdowns. The tool's performance when the site loads up is good. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I am using the tool for myself. In my organization, where I work, they don't use Cloudinary. In our company, we do have a kind of CDN, but it is not the same sort of use as Cloudinary. All our assets are of a fixed size and dimension.

The ease or difficulty of the product's initial setup phase depends on what you are doing. I think it is fairly easy because there are a lot of samples to show you how things work in the tool. For instance, in my case, I use Netlify to deploy sites, and then there is a plug-in there that integrates with your project, so those kinds of plug-ins are great. I think it is easy enough since there are enough samples to get you going.

I use the free plan, and that is enough for one or two websites. Though I felt that the product price is reasonable, I don't have any price details of any tools to help me make comparisons.

The tool's automation features save time and resources. Previously, images used to have watermarks, especially the ones in Photoshop, and that was very tedious, but Cloudinary is a huge time saver. Cloudinary automatically optimizes the images for the browser, so instead of making a choice yourself for images like JPEG, PNG, AVIF, or WEBP, the client or end user's browser might support them, but Cloudinary takes that decision for you, and it just serves the right image or the best-optimized image, which is sort of safe. You don't have to go through the steps manually to optimize the size of an image.

When integrating with other tools, the hectic part is just really the time or laboriousness of the process. First of all, you've got to have some sort of image editing tool, and then you have got to be comfortable using it, but luckily, I have a background. I have used Photoshop for many years, but I think it is not so easy for many developers since you may be used to working with codes but not necessarily optimizing images unless you are a designer. I think it solves the aforementioned problem very nicely because you are just focusing on using the API.

It is a really good product. It has some features that I struggled to find elsewhere since you automatically crop your image. It can use AI to determine that there is a person in the image, and we can make that person the focus of the image.

I have only played around with the tool's AI part.

I recommend the tool to others.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We use Cloudinary to store various media related to the vehicles, such as engine sound recordings and images of the vehicle from different angles, including the interior. Recently, we've also started storing short engine videos, around 15 seconds. Additionally, vehicle documents are stored on the platform, and the front-end team uses it to handle user uploads.

The Cloudinary Dart package is poorly implemented. It works for simple use cases but fails when implementing more advanced features, like handling signatures. It appears to be outsourced, and several important elements are missing. For instance, some necessary class exports are absent, meaning if you need a class to create a request, you must import it manually. It relies on hard-coded strings, making it nearly unusable for anything beyond basic tasks. While it might work without signatures or advanced features, it's unreliable for more complex use cases.

Unlike Firebase Storage, Cloudinary handles media-specific tasks like re-encoding uploads. For example, when users upload a video from an Apple device, it's often encoded in a proprietary Apple codec. Cloudinary automatically reduces the file size and re-encodes it into a more open format suitable for the web or other devices. We had issues with our engine sound recordings when using Firebase, as it would simply accept the file and make it available without validating the audio. After switching to Cloudinary, it validates the files, and if any are corrupted, the upload fails with an appropriate error message. This validation helped us identify corrupted audio files we couldn't play before.

The main issue with the package is how it handles errors. It swallows errors and throws its own, but without preserving the stack trace, making debugging nearly impossible. It ends with a vague argument error, without any clue where or why it happened. 

I have been using Cloudinary for one year.

Cloudinary does experience occasional downtimes or unavailability, slightly more often than Firebase. But you can't really compare the two, as Firebase is backed by Google and has servers all over the world. This is understandable, given that Cloudinary is a smaller company, and their pricing reflects that difference.

50 users are using this solution.

We’ve always been able to find answers either directly in the documentation or, in the worst case, by searching online. Cloudinary has a support forum where more complex or uncommon issues are discussed. If you Google the error message or code, you can easily find the right fix.

We switched from Firebase to Cloudinary mainly because Cloudinary was already used in other departments. As part of addressing technical debt, we questioned why we were still using Firebase when Cloudinary was available. Previously, media from vehicle inspectors was uploaded to Firebase; then, the backend would re-upload it to Cloudinary, duplicating the work. To streamline this process and cut costs, we eliminated Firebase and uploaded media directly to Cloudinary. 

The initial setup was easy because we rewrote much of it ourselves. I submitted a pull request to fix some signature-related issues, but we uncovered more problems with the code afterward. As a result, we created a class tailored to our needs, and it's been working well since then. The main problem lies with the Dart package itself. The product documentation, features, and API are pretty clear so we can implement them without issues. The documentation is acceptable; the Dart package caused the trouble.

It is reasonably priced.

If you're working with documents like JSON or TXT files, I'm not entirely sure Cloudinary would be the best fit for that. But it's an excellent option for dealing with media files, mainly due to its media validation. Cloudinary will check for corrupted video or audio files and can re-encode them into different formats without much effort—you modify the URL, and it handles everything server-side.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven or eight out of ten.

I use the solution in my company while developing an app. I use it as a way to store our company's images for the websites that I made.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that I like that the tool takes care of transforming the images. For example, you can have an image that is 15 MB in size, and Cloudinary can take that image, upload it to the servers, and compress it. When developing the websites, I can get the images stored in Cloudinary in any format that I want and resize them as I wish.

The high price of the tool is an area of concern where improvements are required.

Cloudinary's documentation part has certain shortcomings when compared to the ones provided by the other tools on the market, so I think it needs to be improved. The documentation part is not that easy to follow, especially for beginners.

I have been using Cloudinary for a year. I am a customer of the tool.

I haven't faced any stability issues with the product over the year that I have used it. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I don't remember about the product's scalability part, but I think the tool has limits. When you go through the tool's plans, you will see that the solution has plans like 250 credits, which accounts for 250 GB or something. After that, you have to contact the tool's support to scale more. I am not sure about the tool's scaling ability. If one day, my business had 600 GB of storage, and I needed to scale it up, then it wouldn't be easy for me. I have to contact the solution team and figure it out. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Around six people in my company use the product.

The tool's support team is very prompt. When I gave the tool's support team a clear description of my problem, they gave me the help I wanted and directed me to the solution to my issue. The team is good when it comes to response time and knowledge. I rate the tool's support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have used AWS, but it was not focused on specializing in images. It is just a storage tool.

The tool's pricing is very high. If you are an established company, I think it is worth the money since getting images on the web with the highest quality is very hard, but Cloudinary is good at handling such areas.

To use the integration capabilities of the product, I use the product's documentation to integrate it with my other tools, like Node.js.

I have not used or integrated with the AI capabilities of the product.

I would recommend the tool to people who are starting out because Cloudinary has initial plans in which it gives you 25 GB of storage, which is very good for someone who is just starting out and needs to assess their business.

Considering the expensive nature of the product, I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

I use Cloudinary to create an online platform to manage images. I’ve handled over a thousand images. Additionally, I use Cloudinary to store similar components, treating them as object storage.

A developer who wants to work with an automated demo project might typically store images as blobs in the database or an external folder. However, this approach can lead to issues with managing and retrieving the images. Cloudinary offers a solution by providing an easy-to-use platform for managing media files. It’s user-friendly and accessible, making it a good choice for new and experienced developers.

Unlike other object storage platforms like Google Cloud Storage or IBM Cloud Object Storage, Cloudinary offers a more straightforward and often more affordable solution. While other platforms can have a steep learning curve and may charge based on the number of requests or storage used, Cloudinary provides a free tier that is quite generous.

For instance, I worked with a client to set up an online auction platform and uploaded many files. Despite the substantial data, I received no issues or notifications from Cloudinary about overuse, highlighting their effective and scalable service.

It blocked our account, prevented us from uploading files, and showed a message about file adjustments. It wasn't well integrated with the project's storage and didn't streamline the application. 

I have been using Cloudinary for over a year.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

While developing my application, I was able to easily scale to multiple instances, and this scaling did not negatively affect my Cloudinary account. I can effectively store and manage my application’s media. However, when integrating the Cloudinary API, I must ensure proper installation and configuration.

I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

Cloudinary provides a free plan for developers wanting to get started or explore its capabilities. The free plan includes access to the app's API, which is useful for developers looking to experiment and understand the platform's potential.

Cloudinary provides an API that can be integrated into server- and client-side applications. You can connect the API to your server-side application for backend operations, and for front-end developers, Cloudinary also offers a way to integrate directly into client-side applications. You don't need to create a new website or backend system to use Cloudinary; you can seamlessly incorporate it into your existing client-side code.

I recommend using Cloudinary. For one, it offers a generous free tier that can benefit beginners and small projects. Cloudinary's free plan provides ample resources for managing and optimizing media, which can be ideal when working with a low budget.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I use the product for all of my web development projects. For instance, I used it to create a photo-sharing website.

Cloudinary's AI features, like ad copy and image transformation, have significantly streamlined my projects.

The platform is very easy to use. The documentation is excellent, and the implementation involves only a few simple steps. It is accessible to users with varying levels of expertise.

The platform's API features need enhancement. 

I have been using Cloudinary for about a year.

I rate the product stability an eight.

The product is scalable. 

I have not used the product's paid subscription, as the free tier is sufficient for most users.

I recommend Cloudinary to others and rate it a nine. 

I primarily use Cloudinary to upload images to the cloud and retrieve URLs.

The platform has improved my projects by providing a fast and efficient way to manage images. It has been practical and has worked well every time I use it.

The product's most valuable feature is the ability to upload images quickly and retrieve URLs. It integrates well with code, providing a seamless experience.

The product could be improved by being more user-friendly for beginner programmers.

The product is stable. 

The product is scalable. 

The initial setup was a bit complicated. However, after some time and research, I found it manageable.

I implemented the product myself. 

The product's free tier licensing plan is beneficial for individual developers to learn about its functionality. 

I rate Cloudinary a ten out of ten. 

I use the solution for posting images.

The solution should be made more user-friendly because sometimes it's hard to understand.

I have been using Cloudinary for two months.

I have faced many bugs while using the solution.

Around five people are using the solution in our organization.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

The solution’s pricing is moderate.

The solution is deployed on the cloud in our organization. I didn't have to use my card to use Cloudinary. I recommend Cloudinary to other users because Amazon is a bit expensive for me. It is easy for somebody new to learn to use Cloudinary for the first time.

Overall, I rate the solution eight and a half out of ten.