Cloudinary vs. PicPerf

Cloudinary is a media processing and delivery service used by many websites and applications for delivering images and video. It’s got a mature suite of tools, and is a bit of a legend for popularizing a URL-based approach to transforming images. Even so, it might not be a great fit for everyone — there are good reasons you might want to consider PicPerf as an Cloudinary alternative.

1. PicPerf is just focused on making images fast.

Cloudinary knows what it’s doing in transforming media of all sorts, and it’s breadth of tools proves it. However, that variety can be overwhelming, and maybe an unreasonable amount of features to make available when you just don’t need them.

PicPerf, on the other hand, is ultra-focused on doing one thing: making images light, fast, and distributed. Using PicPerf, you won’t need to wade through a pile of features. It does images. And it does them real good.

2. More predictable pricing.

The Cloudinary pricing approach uses a credit-based system, which can be rather confusing to wrap your head around, as well as determine the number of credits need. And on top of that, there are size and bandwidth restrictions that may impact the decision as well.

PicPerf, however, offers flat, fixed monthly or annual plans, and simple, usage-based agency pricing for those who need it. For people just looking for their images to be more performant, they’re simpler, more predictable pricing options.

3. No bandwidth limitations.

Like many other optimization providers, Cloudinary has some rather vague restrictions around bandwidth usage. Instead of mentioning any hard limits, they direct you to customize a plan. On the other hand, PicPerf has no bandwidth limitations. One less thing to worry about.

4. Simpler implementation.

Like PicPerf, Cloudinary supports remote image optimization with a URL-based API. But it’s certainly more complicated to configure and manage than PicPerf’s approach. With Cloudinary, you’ll need to explicitly enable this type of optimization within your product environment, and then use a more complicated URL structure to serve any images.

With PicPerf, you just prefix the URLs of your images, or use one of the official integrations (like the WordPress plugin) that does it for you. It’s a first-class feature, making it easier to get up & running.

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Hope that helps bring a little clarity to the decision-making process. If you have any questions, reach out.