Is Cloudinary or FaunaDB better?

Neither clearly leads. Cloudinary starts at Free and FaunaDB at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.

Which is cheaper, Cloudinary or FaunaDB?

Cloudinary starts at Free and FaunaDB at Free.

Does Cloudinary or FaunaDB run on more platforms?

Both run on Web, so platform support will not decide this one for you.

Can I use Cloudinary for free?

Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.

What is Cloudinary best used for?

Cloudinary is most often used 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. Of those, automating image transformations and delivery across multiple devices and generating ai-powered image captions and alternative text at scale are not what FaunaDB is typically brought in for.

What can Cloudinary do that FaunaDB cannot?

FaunaDB covers Document-relational model, FQL v10, Distributed ACID transactions, HTTPS access.

Databases · head to head

Cloudinary vs FaunaDB

Cloudinary

Databases

Image and video API for developers

From: Free
Rated: -

Full review Website

FaunaDB

Databases

Document-relational database whose hosted service closed in 2025 and whose core is now unmaintained Apache 2.0 code.

From: Free
Rated: -

Full review Website

The short version

Each has a real cost: Cloudinary free plan includes only 25 monthly credits and is limited to 3 users and 1 account; FaunaDB the hosted service was wound down in 2025, so there is no managed Fauna to buy; every remaining user either operates a JVM cluster themselves or migrates, and both are projects rather than tasks.
Prices and features above were last checked on 30 August 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Cloudinary and FaunaDB actually diverge.

Attributes where Cloudinary and FaunaDB differ
Attribute	Cloudinary	FaunaDB
Founded	Unknown	2012

Identical on both: starting price (Free), pricing model (freemium), free tier (Yes), platforms (Web), user rating (Not yet rated), category (Databases).

What each one covers

Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.

Only in Cloudinary

Nothing recorded that FaunaDB does not also cover.

Only in FaunaDB

Document-relational model
FQL v10
Distributed ACID transactions
HTTPS access
User-defined functions
Attribute-based access control
Document history
Event streaming

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

Cloudinary

Automating image transformations and delivery across multiple devicesnot FaunaDB
Generating AI-powered image captions and alternative text at scalenot FaunaDB
Transcoding and optimizing video with automatic subtitle generationnot FaunaDB
Building workflow automation for content teams without codingnot FaunaDB

FaunaDB

Keeping an existing Fauna-backed application alive on self-hosted infrastructure while a migration is planned and fundednot Cloudinary
Extracting historical data from a Fauna dataset that can no longer be reached through the hosted APInot Cloudinary
Studying a production implementation of deterministic distributed transactions, since the full server source is now readable under Apache 2.0not Cloudinary
Forking the engine deliberately, where an organisation has JVM and distributed-systems staff and wants a document-relational store it fully controlsnot Cloudinary

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

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)

FaunaDB

The hosted service was wound down in 2025, so there is no managed Fauna to buy; every remaining user either operates a JVM cluster themselves or migrates, and both are projects rather than tasks.
The open-sourced repository has had no substantive activity since May 2025 and the drivers were frozen alongside it, so you inherit responsibility for security patches in a Scala distributed database that almost nobody else is running.
FQL has no wire or dialect compatibility with anything else, so migrating off is a rewrite of every query, index and access rule in the application rather than a data export.
No BI tool, ORM or CDC connector speaks FQL, so reporting and analytics always required exporting the data first, and that export tooling is now also unmaintained.
The community was small before the shutdown and has dispersed since, so operational answers, tuning advice and people who have run a Fauna cluster in anger are all scarce when something breaks.

Pricing, plan by plan

Cloudinary

Free

FreeFree
- Upload widget
- API
- Search
Plus$99/month
- All Free features
- S3 bucket backup
- Auto-tagging search
Advanced$249/month
- All Plus features
- Custom domain (CNAME)
- Optional HTTPS SSL
Enterprise$null/custom
- Multi-CDN infrastructure
- Enterprise SLAs
- Designated success manager

FaunaDB

Free

FreeFree
- 100K read ops
- 50K write ops
- 1GB storage
Pro$25/month
- Pay per use
- Priority support
- Advanced features

Which should you pick?

Choose Cloudinary if

You want to start without paying.

Cloudinary review

Choose FaunaDB if

You need document-relational model.
You want to start without paying.
You also want fql v10.

FaunaDB review

Questions people ask

Is Cloudinary or FaunaDB better?: Neither clearly leads. Cloudinary starts at Free and FaunaDB at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Cloudinary or FaunaDB?: Cloudinary starts at Free and FaunaDB at Free.
Does Cloudinary or FaunaDB run on more platforms?: Both run on Web, so platform support will not decide this one for you.
Can I use Cloudinary for free?: Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.
What is Cloudinary best used for?: Cloudinary is most often used 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. Of those, automating image transformations and delivery across multiple devices and generating ai-powered image captions and alternative text at scale are not what FaunaDB is typically brought in for.
What can Cloudinary do that FaunaDB cannot?: FaunaDB covers Document-relational model, FQL v10, Distributed ACID transactions, HTTPS access.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Cloudinary: 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.

Source

FaunaDB: Can I still sign up for Fauna as a service?

No. Fauna Inc. wound down the hosted service in 2025 and the company website is no longer serving. The only way to run Fauna now is to build and operate the open-sourced server yourself.

Cloudinary: How 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.

Source

FaunaDB: What licence is the open-sourced code under?

Apache 2.0, with the copyright held by a FaunaDB Foundation. That is a permissive OSI licence with no competing-use clause, so you may run it, modify it and even offer it as a service.

Cloudinary: What 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.

Source

FaunaDB: Is the open source version the same software that ran the cloud?

It is the core database engine. The control plane, billing, dashboard and multi-tenant operational tooling that made it a service are not part of the release, so you are running the engine, not the product.

Cloudinary: Does 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).

Source

FaunaDB: What should I migrate to?

There is no drop-in target. Teams that valued the document model with relationships usually land on Postgres with JSONB, and teams that valued the serverless HTTP access pattern usually land on DynamoDB or a managed Postgres with an HTTP driver. Either way the query layer is rewritten.

FaunaDB: How hard is it to self-host?

It builds as a fat JAR and runs as a multi-node JVM cluster. There is an OPERATING.md, but no supported packaging, no operator, no upstream releases and no support contract, so budget for a distributed-systems engineer, not a container.

Cloudinary vs FaunaDB

Cloudinary

FaunaDB

The short version

Where they differ

What each one covers

Only in Cloudinary

Only in FaunaDB

What people use each for

Cloudinary

FaunaDB

Where each one falls short

Cloudinary

FaunaDB

Pricing, plan by plan

Cloudinary

FaunaDB

Which should you pick?

Choose Cloudinary if

Choose FaunaDB if

Questions people ask

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Related pages

More on Cloudinary

More on FaunaDB

Keep looking

Other head to heads