Cloudinary, Optimizely, Lytho, Uploadcare

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 · Publishes a price

One of these tells you the order of magnitude before you speak to anyone, and the others do not. That difference sets how long your evaluation takes, whatever the software does.

Cloudinary

Yes

Optimizely

Lytho

Uploadcare

Yes

Everything else

Cloudinary

Optimizely

Lytho

Uploadcare

Verdict

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

A DAM module bundled inside the Optimizely CMS/Content Marketing Platform/DXP, for teams already on Optimizely who don't need best-of-breed asset management, bulk operations, or metadata governance.

A combined creative-operations platform pairing brand-portal DAM with proofing and approval workflows, for in-house teams that want both under one roof rather than a DAM-only search specialist.

A developer-first file upload and CDN/media-processing API for apps, pitched as a lighter, faster-to-integrate alternative to Cloudinary for teams that don't need its full DAM/video/AI stack.

Price published

Yes

Billed on

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

Quoted per customer

Team size, product mix and configuration

Operations, traffic and storage, with published overage rates

Deployment

Cloud

Free plan

Yes

Free trial

Yes

Transparency index

60%

10%

70%

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

Not one tier and not one figure on the pricing page

The tiers are named but cannot be compared on cost

The free tier is stated as personal use only

“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.

Optimizely Not one tier and not one figure on the pricing page — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

Lytho The tiers are named but cannot be compared on cost — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

Uploadcare The free tier is stated as personal use only — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.