Cloudinary alternatives: ten options, current prices, what moving takes

The short answer

• Keep your Cloudinary URLs: ImageKit, through its Cloudinary URL Rewriter, or Flatpix, which is ours.
• Lowest fixed price: Bunny Optimizer, $9.50 a month per website. CDN bandwidth is billed separately.
• Already on Cloudflare: Cloudflare Images. 5,000 unique transformations a month are free.
• Building on Next.js: the next/image component, and your host's rates. On Vercel that is metered.
• Files as well as images: Uploadcare, which also takes uploads.
• Run it yourself: imgproxy or Thumbor. The software is free. The servers and the time are not.

The prices are not comparable one to one. Each service charges for something different: credits, bandwidth, unique transformations, operations, or a flat monthly fee. Read the table for the unit, then the section for the details.

The comparison

Prices are the ones each service publishes, read on 28 October 2026. Storage, video, support and add-ons differ and are covered in the sections below, not in the table.

Sources: each service's pricing page, linked in the sections and in the sources, 28 October 2026.

Why people look

Cloudinary bills in credits. One credit is 1,000 transformations, 1 GB of storage or 1 GB of bandwidth, in any mix. Storage includes a cached copy of every size you make. The steps between plans are steep: Plus to Advanced adds $150 a month for 375 more credits. The pricing guide explains all of it, and the cost calculator estimates your own credits from a page of your site.

A bill that is hard to predict, a feature that sits on a higher plan, and wanting your images and URLs somewhere you control are three reasons to look elsewhere. Which alternative fits depends on which of the three is yours.

The ten, one by one

ImageKit

How it charges. Mostly by bandwidth. The Free plan has 20 GB of bandwidth, 3 GB of media storage and 2 users. Lite is $9 a month with 40 GB of bandwidth, then $0.50 per GB, and 10 GB of storage. Pro is $89 a month with 225 GB, then $0.45 per GB, and 225 GB of storage. Paid plans allow overage, so you pay for what you use instead of changing plan.

Source: ImageKit plans, 28 October 2026.

Moving from Cloudinary. ImageKit documents a path that keeps your URLs. Its Cloudinary URL Rewriter reads the transformations and versioning in a Cloudinary URL and translates them. With a custom domain the URL looks like the one you have today, so the move can be a DNS change. You connect your storage first: S3, Google Cloud Storage or your Cloudinary backup bucket. Named transformations are not translated. You recreate them in the dashboard under the same name. By default the rewriter ignores a transformation it does not support, so compare the output on real images. ImageKit advises setting up a second domain and running both in parallel.

Source: ImageKit: Migrate from Cloudinary, 28 October 2026.

Worth knowing. Its plans page lists a custom domain under Pro. Its migration guide says all paid plans offer one. Confirm which before you buy. Its own URLs look like ?tr=w-400, and it can pick format and quality without parameters.

Fits. Teams that want a hosted replacement with a media library and bandwidth-based billing, and want to keep their URLs.

imgix

How it charges. Credits, like Cloudinary but with different weights. Image cache storage and metadata cost 2 credits per GB a month. Delivery costs 1 credit per GB. Transformations vary by feature. Monthly bundles: $25 for 100 credits, $75 for 375, $150 for 830, $300 for 1,875 and $500 for 3,570. The page advertises 15% to 17% off for annual billing, and a 30-day trial with 100 credits and no card.

Source: imgix pricing, 28 October 2026.

Moving from Cloudinary. imgix has its own parameters in the query string, like w=150&h=150, fit=clip and auto=compress,format. You connect a source for your originals and rewrite the URLs in your code or templates. We found no Cloudinary URL support in the pages we read.

Source: imgix Rendering API: auto, 28 October 2026.

Fits. Teams that want a mature rendering API and accept a credit model again. You trade one credit formula for another, so run your numbers before you move.

Cloudflare Images

How it charges. It has two modes. To optimize images that live elsewhere, such as R2 or your own server, you pay for unique transformations. The Free plan allows 5,000 a month. Past that, new transformations return an error and nothing is billed. The Paid plan includes the first 5,000 and then charges $0.50 per 1,000. To store images in Cloudflare Images you pay $5 per 100,000 images stored and $1 per 100,000 delivered. A transformation is unique by source image and parameters, counted once per calendar month. Format and quality do not make a new one.

Source: Cloudflare Images pricing, last updated 19 October 2026, read 28 October 2026.

Moving from Cloudinary. URLs change to https://<ZONE>/cdn-cgi/image/<OPTIONS>/<SOURCE-IMAGE>, with options like width=300,height=200,format=auto. The domain must be a zone on Cloudflare. Your originals need an address Cloudflare can fetch, or storage in Cloudflare. If you do not want to rewrite URLs across a site, you can write a Worker that does it. That is code you maintain.

Source: Cloudflare Images: transform via URL, 28 October 2026.

Fits. Sites that already run on Cloudflare, with images in R2 or on their own origin, and a modest number of sizes.

Bunny Optimizer

How it charges. A flat $9.50 a month per website, with unlimited requests, optimizations and image transformations. CDN bandwidth costs are applied separately. There is a 14-day free trial, and the pricing page offers hourly billing. Its pricing page lists Bunny CDN from $0.002 per GB.

Sources: Bunny Optimizer pricing and Bunny Optimizer, 28 October 2026.

Moving from Cloudinary. Bunny's Transform API resizes and crops with URL query parameters, so your URLs change. Optimizer is built to sit in front of a website you connect and optimize its images. The pages we read do not describe an upload API or a media library, so images should already live on your site or origin.

Fits. Sites that want a low, fixed price for resizing and format conversion and do not need a media library.

Uploadcare

How it charges. By operations, traffic and storage. Free is $0 with 1,000 operations a month, 5 GB of traffic and 1 GB of storage, and is for personal use only. Pro is $79 a month, or $66 on yearly billing: 5,000 operations, 25 GB of traffic and 10 GB of storage, then $1.60 per 1,000 operations and $0.35 per GB. Business is $199 a month, or $166 yearly: 50,000 operations, 125 GB of traffic and 50 GB of storage, then $0.80 per 1,000 operations and $0.25 per GB. A custom CDN CNAME is a Business feature. Enterprise is custom and lists free migration.

Source: Uploadcare pricing, 28 October 2026.

Moving from Cloudinary. Transformations go in the path after the file ID, like /-/resize/200x/, so URLs change. Uploadcare also documents a proxy that processes images stored on your own site, so you do not have to upload everything first.

Source: Uploadcare: image transformations, 28 October 2026.

Fits. Products that take uploads from users and want the uploader, storage and delivery from one vendor.

Sirv

How it charges. By storage and transfer. Free is $0, with 0.5 GB of storage, 2 GB of transfer a month and 5,000 new image processing requests a month. Business starts at $19 a month, and the page offers storage tiers up to 500 GB. Enterprise is custom. Limits are soft: if you pass your storage or transfer allowance, the account keeps working and you have 30 days to upgrade or come back under. A custom domain (CNAME) is on the feature list, and extra domains cost $5 a month.

Source: Sirv pricing, 28 October 2026.

Moving from Cloudinary. Sirv edits images with options in the URL, like looks.jpg?w=300. It lists more than 100 options. URLs change. Sirv converts to AVIF or WebP when it can.

Source: Sirv: dynamic imaging, 28 October 2026.

Fits. Smaller stores and sites that want a hosted service with a low entry price and soft limits.

imgproxy

How it charges. It is software you host. The open-source version is MIT licensed and free to use and modify. imgproxy Pro is a commercial license from $49 a month or $499 a year, with a 14-day trial. It adds features such as advanced compression, dynamic watermarks and video previews, plus priority support. Either way you pay your own provider for the servers.

Sources: imgproxy and imgproxy FAQ, 28 October 2026.

Moving from Cloudinary. You put the processing options and the output format in the image URL, in imgproxy's own syntax, so URLs change. It works with your own image storage and processes images on the fly. You also run a CDN or cache in front of it, and you do the monitoring and the upgrades.

Fits. Teams with engineers who want fixed, predictable costs and full control, and who do not need a hosted media library.

Thumbor

How it charges. It is free, MIT-licensed software from globo.com, written in Python. You pay for the servers and the people. There is no vendor plan to buy.

Source: Thumbor on GitHub, 28 October 2026.

Moving from Cloudinary. Thumbor URLs carry the size, alignment, filters and the image address, like /300x200/smart/filters:..., so URLs change. Its documentation describes smart cropping that uses detection of focal points. As with imgproxy, you run it behind a CDN.

Source: Thumbor: usage, 28 October 2026.

Fits. Teams that want content-aware cropping in software they control and are comfortable running a Python service.

Next.js image component and Vercel

How it charges. Next.js resizes and converts images through its next/image component and a built-in optimization API. You pay whatever your host charges. On Vercel the Hobby plan includes 5,000 transformations, 300,000 cache reads and 100,000 cache writes a month, for non-commercial use. The on-demand rates are $0.05 to $0.0812 per 1,000 transformations, $0.40 to $0.64 per million cache reads and $4.00 to $6.40 per million cache writes, depending on region. Fast data transfer and CDN requests are billed on top when the images are delivered. On Hobby, new images fail with an error once you pass the limits, and cached ones keep working.

Sources: Vercel: limits and pricing for Image Optimization, last updated 11 August 2026, read 28 October 2026, and Next.js: Image component.

Moving from Cloudinary. This is not a URL swap. You change the component or the loader. A custom loader function can build URLs for any service, and remotePatterns lists the remote hosts you allow. Your originals need an address Next.js can reach.

Fits. Next.js apps with a modest number of images that want no extra vendor. A large library with many sizes can get expensive when metered per transformation.

Flatpix (ours)

Flatpix is our product. We built it because the Cloudinary bill is hard to predict, so weigh this section as the vendor's own.

How it charges. A flat monthly plan. Starter is $39 a month: 25,000 original images and 500 GB delivered. Growth is $99: 250,000 original images, 2 TB delivered, print-file previews and migration from Cloudinary. Scale is $249: unlimited original images, 10 TB delivered and priority support. Your first month is free. There are no credits and no overage bills. Your originals stay in a bucket you own (S3, R2 or Google Cloud Storage), so that storage is a separate bill.

Source: the Flatpix home page, 28 October 2026.

Moving from Cloudinary. Flatpix reads Cloudinary-style URLs. w_, h_, c_fill, c_fit, c_thumb, g_auto, f_auto, q_auto, dpr and named transformations work from day one. You change the domain and keep the parameters. It also renders PDF, AI, EPS, PSD, TIFF and HEIC files to web images. Send us your URLs and we tell you which transformations are covered before you switch.

Limits. Flatpix has no video, no media library and no add-ons. It is not a full replacement if you depend on those. ImageKit's rewriter also keeps Cloudinary URLs working. The difference is the pricing model: flat with no overage on our side, usage-based with a media library on theirs.

Fits. Stores and apps with image-heavy traffic where the Cloudinary bill moves from month to month, and stores whose customers upload print artwork.

What moving off Cloudinary involves

The price list is the easy part. The work is in the URLs and the originals. Here is the same resize, 400 pixels wide with automatic format and quality, in each service's syntax. Names like acme and example.com are made up.

Sources: the pages linked in each section. ImageKit with the rewriter has no format or quality parameters of its own, because it picks them automatically. imgix's auto=compress,format is the closest match to f_auto,q_auto, not an exact one.

A move has seven parts, whichever service you pick.

1. List what you use. Search your code for res.cloudinary.com and your own Cloudinary domain. The cost calculator scans one page and lists the cloud names, the transformation strings and whether f_auto and q_auto are in use.
2. Decide where the originals live. Cloudinary's Plus plan and above can back up to your own S3 bucket. Services that read from your storage, like ImageKit, Flatpix, imgproxy and Thumbor, need originals at an address they can fetch. Hosted services like Uploadcare and Cloudflare's hosted images need an upload.
3. Map the transformations. A crop with automatic gravity is one option in Cloudinary and another elsewhere. Compare the output on real images, especially crops and quality.
4. Recreate named transformations. A name like t_thumb is a setting in Cloudinary. Other services need it set up again.
5. Handle the domain. If you use a custom domain with Cloudinary, set up a second one on the new service, test, then switch DNS. ImageKit's guide recommends this.
6. Check video separately. If you serve video from Cloudinary, none of the image options above replaces it by default. Flatpix has no video. ImageKit's plans list video units. Check the rest against your needs.
7. Run both for a month. Watch both bills. A new service has cold caches, so the first weeks cost more than a steady month.

Where Flatpix fits

If your bill is predictable and your plan fits, stay where you are. If it is not, and you want to keep your URLs, ImageKit and Flatpix are the two options in this guide that do that. If you want the lowest fixed price and can change your URLs, look at Bunny Optimizer. If you want to run it yourself, look at imgproxy.

Flatpix is for teams that want one price they can read: $39, $99 or $249 a month, no credits and no overage bills. It is not for teams that depend on Cloudinary's video tools, its media library or its add-ons.

Questions

Sources

All pages were read on 28 October 2026. Prices and limits change, so confirm them at the source.

1. Cloudinary: Pricing. The plans and prices used for reference.
2. ImageKit: Plans. Free, Lite and Pro prices, bandwidth, storage and overage rates.
3. ImageKit: Migrate from Cloudinary. The Cloudinary URL Rewriter, named transformations, custom domains, the parallel domain advice.
4. ImageKit: Cloudinary alternative. ImageKit's own comparison and its migration summary.
5. imgix: Pricing. Credit bundles, credit rules, the trial and annual savings.
6. imgix: Rendering API, auto and fit. The URL parameters.
7. Cloudflare Images: Pricing and transform via URL. Prices, the free limit, how a transformation is counted, the URL syntax.
8. Bunny Optimizer: Pricing and Bunny Optimizer. The flat price, the trial and the Transform API.
9. Uploadcare: Pricing and image transformations. Plans, overage rates, the URL syntax and the proxy.
10. Sirv: Pricing and dynamic imaging. Plans, soft limits, custom domains and the URL options.
11. imgproxy and its FAQ. Pro pricing, the MIT license and how it runs.
12. Thumbor on GitHub and its usage guide. The license, smart cropping and the URL format.
13. Vercel: Limits and Pricing for Image Optimization and Next.js: Image component. Prices, the Hobby limits, the loader and remote patterns.