Cloudinary Alternatives

ImageKit is the alternative that copies Cloudinary's job most closely: a URL API for images and video, a CDN in front, and a media library behind. It delivers each image in AVIF or WebP depending on the viewer's device, offers more than 50 URL-based transformations, and can serve from its own DAM or from your existing S3, Google Cloud Storage or Azure Blob storage. That last point matters for a migration: you can point ImageKit at the bucket you already have and switch URLs page by page.

The pricing reads very differently from Cloudinary's. The Forever free plan includes 20 GB of bandwidth a month, 3 GB of DAM storage, 500 video units and 2 users, with fixed monthly limits. Lite costs $9 a month with 40 GB of bandwidth, then $0.50 per GB, and 10 GB of storage, then $0.10 per GB. Pro costs $89 a month with 225 GB of bandwidth, then $0.45 per GB, 225 GB of storage and 5 users, then $9 per extra user. Put Pro next to Cloudinary Plus on monthly billing: $99 buys 225 shared credits at Cloudinary, while $89 buys 225 GB of bandwidth plus 225 GB of storage, metered separately, at ImageKit.

The limits sit in the detail of each plan. Automatic AVIF optimization is listed as available on demand on Pro, and a custom domain such as images.example.com is only included from Pro (0 on Free and Lite, then $9 per extra domain). Lite keeps the 500 video units of the free plan as a monthly limit, so a video-heavy site moves to Pro quickly. And once your monthly usage passes $300, ImageKit says it will reach out about a custom plan.

imgix has been the reference image API for years, and its setup is the simplest on this list for a team that already stores images in the cloud. You connect S3, Google Cloud, Azure or a web folder, get an imgix domain, and add parameters such as auto=format,compress to the URL. Your images keep their paths, so a migration from Cloudinary is mostly a matter of rewriting URLs. It handles video too: one URL can pull a poster frame from an MP4 and deliver it in the lightest format the browser supports.

imgix now bills in credits, like Cloudinary, but with published unit costs. Image cache storage and metadata use 2 credits per GB per month, delivery uses 1 credit per GB, and transformations vary by feature. Starter costs $25 a month for 100 credits, Basic $75 for 375, Midrange $150 for 830, Growth $300 for 1,875 and Growth Plus $500 for 3,570. Annual billing saves 17%: Starter becomes $250 a year. On monthly billing, the $25 Starter sits between Cloudinary's free plan and its $99 Plus.

The limit is that you are still modeling credits. A gigabyte stored costs twice what a gigabyte delivered costs, so a large library with little traffic burns credits faster than it looks. On an annual contract bundle, credits refresh once a year rather than each month, which helps seasonal sites and hurts teams that burn them early. And you start with a 30-day trial, not a permanent free plan.

Bunny Optimizer is the answer for teams whose Cloudinary bill swings with traffic. It sits on top of Bunny CDN and optimizes what your site already serves: it resizes and compresses images based on the visitor's device, converts them to WebP, minifies CSS and JavaScript, and offers a Transform API to resize, crop and modify images with URL query parameters. Setup is a connection to your site, with no plugin or file changes.

The price is the pitch. Optimizer costs $9.50 per website per month, with unlimited requests, optimizations and image transformations. CDN bandwidth is billed separately: $0.01 per GB in Europe and North America, $0.03 in Asia and Oceania, $0.045 in South America and $0.06 in the Middle East and Africa, with a $1 monthly minimum. A site serving 100 GB a month in Europe and North America pays about $10.50 in total. Cloudinary Plus costs $99 a month on monthly billing for the same traffic, and there you would still be counting transformations.

The limit is scope. Bunny is an optimization and delivery layer built for websites: its Transform API resizes, crops and modifies images by query parameter, so check that the effects you use on Cloudinary are on its list before you move. The price is also per website: five sites cost $47.50 a month before bandwidth, and past 20 websites Bunny asks you to contact sales. To compare the CDN itself with others, see our CDN ranking.

Cloudflare Images does two jobs. It can transform images stored somewhere else, such as R2 or your own server, and it can store images in Cloudflare and serve them in predefined or flexible variants. Either way, the edge network picks the best format for the browser (WebP, AVIF or JPEG) and the right size for the device. For a site already on Cloudflare, it is the alternative with the least new infrastructure.

Pricing is per image, not per gigabyte. Every account starts on Images Free, which includes up to 5,000 unique transformations a month for images stored outside Cloudflare Images. Past 5,000, cached transformations keep being served, new ones return a 9422 error, and you are not charged. The Paid plan includes the first 5,000 unique transformations, then costs $0.50 per 1,000, plus $5 per 100,000 images stored per month and $1 per 100,000 images delivered per month for images stored in Cloudflare Images. Serving 2,000 images in five sizes makes 10,000 unique transformations, so $2.50 for the month.

The limit is the shape of your library. Each source image and set of parameters is a unique transformation, so a catalog of 20,000 photos requested in ten sizes in the same month is 200,000 transformations, or $97.50 beyond the included 5,000. And the 9422 error on the free plan is a trap for a growing site: new pages show broken images until you upgrade. If you are weighing R2 for the originals, read our Cloudflare R2 alternatives as well.

Uploadcare starts where the others stop: at the upload. Its drop-in File Uploader accepts files from a device, the camera, Dropbox, Google Drive or a link, and the rest of the pipeline follows: malware protection, MIME type filtering, image transformations by URL, adaptive bitrate streaming for video and delivery through a CDN. If your Cloudinary account mostly holds user-generated images, Uploadcare replaces the upload widget and the image CDN in one move.

It bills on operations, traffic and storage. Free includes 1,000 operations a month, 5 GB of traffic and 1 GB of storage, for personal use only. Pro costs $66 a month billed yearly or $79 monthly, with 5,000 operations, 25 GB of traffic then $0.35 per GB, 10 GB of storage then $0.35 per GB, 1 GB max file size and 3 team members. Business costs $166 a month billed yearly or $199 monthly, with 50,000 operations, 125 GB of traffic and 50 GB of storage. Compared with Cloudinary Plus at $89 a month billed yearly, Pro is cheaper at entry but meters three things instead of one pool.

Watch two details. Automated AVIF compression is a Business feature; Pro gets automatic WebP. And on the Free plan, going over the limits means a temporary suspension until the start of the next month, while paid plans keep going and bill the overage. To push new uploads into other tools, see our Uploadcare and Make integration.

Sirv is an image CDN with a merchandising layer. Besides resizing, compression and automatic next-gen formats (it delivers AVIF when possible), it builds 360 spins, deep zoom, image hotspots and 3D model viewers, and serves video streams. For a store that used Cloudinary to deliver product photos and then bolted on a separate spin or zoom tool, Sirv puts both in one account, with plugins, an API, FTP and S3 access for uploads.

Plans are sized by storage, with a monthly transfer allowance attached. Free gives 0.5 GB of storage and 2 GB of transfer, 3 users, and 5,000 image processing operations a month, with Sirv branding on spins and zooms. Business starts at $19 a month for 5 GB of storage and 20 GB of monthly transfer, or $18 a month billed annually at $209. The 12 GB plan with 48 GB of transfer costs $39 a month ($36 billed annually at $429), and 20 GB with 80 GB costs $59 a month ($55 billed annually at $649). Enterprise starts at $999 a month. A store on the 5 GB plan billed annually pays $71 a month less than Cloudinary Plus at $89 billed yearly, with spins and zoom included.

The limit is predictability for heavy processing. Image processing is capped at 5,000 a month on Free and falls under fair usage on Business, rather than a published number, and extra users cost $3 a month each on Business. Its soft limits are friendly: if you exceed storage or transfer, the account keeps working and you have 30 days to upgrade or come back under. For other CDNs built for stores, see our ecommerce CDN ranking.

imgproxy is a fast, standalone server that resizes, processes and converts images on the fly. You run it yourself, from a Docker image or Linux packages, put it behind your own CDN and point it at your storage. Your application only generates imgproxy URLs with the processing options; imgproxy fetches the source, processes it and returns the result. Built on libvips, the open-source edition handles JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, AVIF and JPEG XL, resizing, cropping, watermarks, filters and simple smart cropping.

The open-source edition is free under the Apache License 2.0, and the repository moved to it from the MIT license, so check older notes that still say MIT. imgproxy Pro adds object detection, advanced smart cropping, auto-quality by SSIM, video and PDF previews and advanced compression. It is priced by the number of workers across your instances, from $49 a month or $499 a year, with a 14-day trial. Your real bill is a server, CDN bandwidth and storage. Paired with object storage such as the options in our object storage ranking, that often stays a fixed cost, which is what a developer described in a 2026 thread with R2, imgproxy and a CDN.

The limit is that you own everything: scaling, cache headers, security and uptime. imgproxy helps on security with signed URLs, checks on real image dimensions against image bombs, and authorization by HTTP header. It is a processing server: uploads, a dashboard and a media library are yours to build or buy.