Cloudinary, Frontify, imgix, HyperCMS

Side by side on what we have verified on each vendor’s own pages. Where a fact was not checked, the table says so rather than leaving a blank that reads as “no”.

What decides it · Runs on your own servers

If the files genuinely cannot leave your infrastructure, this is not a close race — the platforms marked No below should not be on the call at all.

Cloudinary

Frontify

imgix

HyperCMS

Yes

Everything else

Cloudinary

Frontify

imgix

HyperCMS

Verdict

A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.

A brand-management platform built around a single, always-current source of truth for guidelines, logos and templates, aimed at brand teams working with internal staff and external agencies.

Not checked

Price published

Yes

Billed on

Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth

Monthly active users

Consumption-based credits, sold in monthly tiers ($25–$500/mo self-serve, custom above that). Credits are spent on Management (2 credits/GB/month for stored assets), Delivery (1 credit/GB bandwidth), and Transformation (variable by operation). Per-credit rate drops as plan tier rises ($0.25 down to $0.12, monthly billing; slightly cheaper on annual commitment). Each plan also states an implied storage/bandwidth cap in GB.

Cloud service: billed by storage capacity (GB) plus which optional modules you select; user accounts are unlimited/uncapped. No public price list — pricing is obtained via a configurator/calculator or by requesting a quote. On-premise/hosted deployments use Free, Standard, and Enterprise license editions (feature-gated), also quote-only. A non-commercial Free Edition exists with no disclosed price.

Deployment

Cloud

Cloud, On-premise

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

60%

30%

Not checked

Most common complaint

Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price

The MAU model favours occasional users, but there is no figure to verify that with

Not checked

“Not checked” means exactly that: we have not verified it, not that the platform lacks it. Every other value was read off the vendor’s own pages on the date shown on each platform page.

What to ask on the demo

One question per platform, drawn from what actually goes wrong with it — not a generic checklist. Vendors run the demo; this hands the agenda back to you.

Cloudinary Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

Frontify The MAU model favours occasional users, but there is no figure to verify that with — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.