Best image CDN providers comparison

Are you looking for an Image CDN service provider? Well, you probably came across Cloudinary, Cloudflare, Imagekit, Imgix and Sirv. Erm...but how about Uploadcare? ;)

The choice might be overwhelming, but forget about the tables full of features. Even the best feature might be useless when it requires you to spend hours implementing it.

Let’s be real, in this article, we will give you a bunch of reasons to integrate with Uploadcare. However, we’ll not only focus on our outstanding customer service. You’ll get to know a bit more about companies that claim to speed up the delivery of your web content.

We had a chance to speak to lots of people looking for a fast and reliable CDN solution and here’s what they’re looking for:

Take your time to grow. Start for free

According to Ahrefs data (as of Nov 18th 2021), over 1.6K people search for “best cdn” term monthly. Let’s face it: there’s also a group of devs looking for “best free cdn”.  Saving is ultimately the first step to investing, we get that.

Below, we compared several free plans from most famous CDN providers:

Even if you’re OK with a complex setup (which is the case for some of the companies, e.g. Google Cloud CDN), you probably want your product to last.

If you need a CDN for longer than half a year, Uploadcare’s free plan gives you the most free bandwidth. With our simple pay-as-you-grow plan, as well as a polished generous free plan, we are way ahead of our competitors.

What’s the catch? Usually companies don’t change file handling providers over time. Grow with us, scale up, pay — it’s that simple.

Become the most reliable person in the room

Toby Marsden from Shopify UploadKit plugin said:

If something bad happens with uploads, it’s never Uploadcare.

That’s something, isn't it? However, by the end of the day, no review / magician from customer service can fool you when the product doesn’t do the job.

You’re 'hiring' to get a job done and there are several KPIs people usually take into account when looking for a CDN provider.

We googled and researched the best performing articles on how to pick the best CDN provider. It’s not a surprise that you want your product to:

• Be fast
• Have a large network
• Be secure
• Solve problems

Here’s the table with some basic metrics for Uploadcare and it’s competitors:

The more edge locations the faster the delivery. Add World’s best server uptime, top-rated customer support and you have all the ingredients for fast and reliable content delivery.

Build in a team

Of all our testimonials, there’s one thing that surely stands out. Everyone loves our fast and supportive Customer Support team! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ We answer questions over calls, email, on Stack Overflow, and sometimes even on Twitter!

The responses are always personal, relevant and timely. All the requests are answered within 24 hours, and it’s always for free, even if you need us to help you integrate.

Scroll down to see what people say about our CS team!

5 more reasons to choose Uploadcare

Take advantage of the fastest image resize algo

It’s our innovative algorithm that utilizes AI and it powers our on the fly image processing. Our image resize algorithm (for x86 processors) is the fastest in the world! Alex, our engineer and the creator, made it open source and it’s called Pillow-SIMD. It was forked from Pillow (initially PIL) lib but soon it became the biggest toad in the puddle.

We resize images on Intel processors faster than Intel does!

Choose the tech stack that fits your project, not the other way round

We’re integrated with all major programming stacks:

• 4 File Uploader wrappers
• 8 API clients to choose from (for Upload and REST APIs)
• Mobile software developments kits that support both iOS (Swift) and Android
• Next.js and Webpack for image processing and proxy pattern implementation

Check our integrations page for more info.

Get rid of stress with foolproof storage

A few times, we helped to restore tons of accidentally deleted data. Our infrastructure is bulletproof, it is backed up with tests, figures, and real-life situations we’ve encountered while working on it for over 10 years.

Save with the highest AI compression

How to make your image-heavy website load faster? We offer maximum possible image compression with no visible quality loss.

We’re building a tool that compares Uploadcare’s image compression with our competitors. As an example, here is a picture that our colleague Renata took earlier this year when she was climbing Elbrus:

The file is originally 1.8 MB, and below is a table showing results of its compression by us and some of our competitors.

You may click on each size figure shown above to see the compressed image.

Highest compression means lower bandwidth usage. In other words, we compress, and you save. In this case, a figure is worth a thousand words, so we trust the numbers to speak for us.

Your files are safe

We’re safe. We’re GDPR and HIPAA compliant. Safety is the core of all our actions. With us, any project you create is secure.

Control who can upload files and when they can do that. Control who can request files and when. Validate the source before accepting requests with our secure webhooks. They sign each webhook payload with a custom secret determined by you.

You set the rules, we execute them.

Some extra love from our users