Cloudinary
Image and video API for developers
As of 13 November 2026, Cloudinary has a free plan and paid plans start at $99/month. Cloud platform for uploading, transforming, optimizing, and delivering images and video through a developer API. Softwr lists it under Databases.
Overview
What Cloudinary does
Cloud platform for uploading, transforming, optimizing, and delivering images and video through a developer API.
What people use it for
- Automating image transformations and delivery across multiple devices
- Generating AI-powered image captions and alternative text at scale
- Transcoding and optimizing video with automatic subtitle generation
- Building workflow automation for content teams without coding
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Cloudinary.
- Free plan includes only 25 monthly credits and is limited to 3 users and 1 account
- Enterprise plan pricing is custom; rates not published
- Monthly billing is more expensive than annual; yearly plan is $89/month for Plus ($224/month for Advanced)
Pricing
What Cloudinary costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Free
Free
- Upload widget
- API
- Search
- Remote fetch
- Auto-backup
- Revision tracking
Plus
$99 /mo
- All Free features
- S3 bucket backup
- Auto-tagging search
- Paid add-ons access
- Expedited support
- Allowlist and blocklist
Advanced
$249 /mo
- All Plus features
- Custom domain (CNAME)
- Optional HTTPS SSL
- Authentication options
Enterprise
On request
- Multi-CDN infrastructure
- Enterprise SLAs
- Designated success manager
- Custom contracts
- SSO
- Provisioning API
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
What are included in Cloudinary's free plan?
Cloudinary's free plan includes upload widget, API access, search, remote fetch, auto-backup, revision tracking, image and video transformations, video transcoding, and CDN delivery. The free plan includes 25 monthly credits, 3 users, and 1 account with community support.
SourceHow does Cloudinary's credit system work?
Cloudinary credits measure usage: one credit equals 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB managed storage, or 1 GB image bandwidth, or 2 GB video bandwidth. The free plan grants 25 credits per month, Plus plan 225 monthly credits, and Advanced plan 600 monthly credits.
SourceWhat is the difference between Cloudinary Plus and Advanced plans?
Plus plan costs $99/month (or $89/month annually) and includes S3 backup, auto-tagging, and expedited support for up to 3 users across 2 accounts with 225 credits. Advanced is $249/month ($224/month annually), adds custom domain (CNAME) and SSL options for 5 users across 3 accounts with 600 credits.
SourceDoes Cloudinary offer annual billing discounts?
Yes. Cloudinary's annual billing provides discounts: Plus plan is $89/month when billed yearly (versus $99/month monthly), and Advanced plan is $224/month when billed yearly (versus $249/month monthly).
SourceKeep looking
Where to go from Cloudinary
- Cloudinary alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Cloudinary pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Cloudinary badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Databases softwareThe full category
- Best Databases softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Databases software for
Compare Cloudinary with
- Marqo
- MongoDB
- VerneMQ
- NATS
- Vitess
- Tinybird
- Dgraph
- Airtable
- Cockroach Labs
- PostgreSQL
- Apache Kafka
- Microsoft SQL Server
- QuestDB
- Aiven
- BigQuery
- DataStax
- MongoDB Atlas
- CosmosDB
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Cloudinary, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Cloudinary
Cloudinary alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Cloudinary pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Cloudinary
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Cloudinary badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
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