ImageEngine vs Cloudinary — What’s the difference?
This is part one of a comparison between two similar services for optimizing images; ImageEngine and Cloudinary. You’ll find part II here.
Images pose two problems to website administrators:
- When using thousands of images across a large website, asset management can be a burden, especially when not using a CMS.
- They are one of the main contributors to slow page load times, particularly on mobile.
Luckily, some smart folks have already developed platforms to help admins with these exact issues.
In this article, we’ll compare two superb examples: Cloudinary, the digital asset management suite that needs little introduction, and ImageEngine, a device-aware image CDN.
Both are extremely useful weapons against slow page load times to have in your arsenal. However, they provide very different user experiences and are focused on different classes of problems. We’ll look at these differences so you can pick the best one for your needs.
Getting Started and Overall User Experience
Signing up for Cloudinary, you only have to provide the most basic of information like your
your name, email, password, and some other optional fields.
After a quick introduction, you’ll have the opportunity to set some important account settings, like enabling automatic backups, setting your cloud name (or, delivery URL), etc. So far, so good. However, this is where newcomers might start running into some problems.
This is the Cloudinary dashboard, just look at how much is going on:
This is where things only really get started with Cloudinary. As a full suite of asset management tools, there are quite a lot of features to wrap your head around. Expect a learning curve.
To optimize images using Cloudinary, you’ll first need to upload them to the platform. You can upload images to your Cloudinary media library in a number of ways. You can upload them from your computer or specify a URL from an online source.
You can then transform, edit, and optimize your images. Whenever you transform an image, Cloudinary automatically applies some optimization. However, you’ll need to make some adjustments yourself to get more out of it.
To add images from your Cloudinary library to your website pages, you can simply use the Cloudinary source URL. There is also a Cloudinary plugin that associates your WordPress and Cloudinary media libraries.
ImageEngine
When signing up for ImageEngine, you provide virtually the same information as signing up to Cloudinary:
- Create a user account with your email and a password, alternatively with your Github or Google account:
2. Next, create your first Engine by defining the origin of your images.
This can be a Google Cloud Storage or Amazon S3 bucket or any other publicly accessible web location. If you need help finding the origin your website uses, hit the “?” button on the right, enter your website URL, and scan your site. A few origins will then be suggested for you. If you’re still not sure, you can always skip this step and reach out to the customer success team.
ImageEngine will now create a subdomain for you where your optimized images will be served from. ImageEngine will automatically, pull, optimize, and start serving your images without any further setup needed.
3. After this, ImageEngine will provide you with the domain (Delivery Address) your images will be served from:
There’s already an important difference between the two platforms here. Once you sign up for ImageEngine, it will instantly configure your optimization service, without any more input from you.
Once you’re done, you can log straight into your ImageEngine dashboard:
This is the second difference between the two. Without being burdened by all the uploading, extra features, and Data Asset Management (DAM) tools, ImageEngine has a much simpler, cleaner dashboard. It’s clear that ImageEngine is focusing more on providing CDN features than DAM features.
The third difference is that ImageEngine will already work its magic in the background by pulling images from the origin you provide and apply its full range of optimization techniques on them.
The only thing left for you to do is to ensure you serve your optimized images via the hostname ImageEngine provided you. All you need to do to make this happen is to alter your images src attributes in their tag to the new hostname ImageEngine provided you with. As you can see in the image above, it should be something like:
http://mysite.cdn.imgeng.in/path/image.jpg
Currently, ImageEngine doesn’t feature as many native integrations or plugins for certain CMSs as Cloudinary. So, you’ll mostly either need to change the src attributes of your images manually (which can be time-consuming) or run a simple script to do it for you. For example, here’s how to do it using Sitecore, Kentico, and Magento. However, for Magento, ImageEngine also features a native plugin which will simplify the process.
Comparing apples with apples, Cloudinary also doesn’t take care of automatic image optimization to the same extent as ImageEngine. So, with Cloudinary you’ll have to do some more of the groundwork yourself.
Features
Both platforms provide some pretty heavyweight features, albeit with a focus on somewhat different areas. While Cloudinary’s key attraction lies in its powerful DAM capabilities, ImageEngine impresses with equally striking automated image optimization.
Cloudinary
Cloudinary offers a full stack of image, video, and media asset management tools. We could go on for days listing every single feature of the platform, so we’ll just stick to the most important ones.
- File upload and storage: Cloudinary acts as a cloud-based repository for all your media assets. Not only can you upload your own assets, but you can also use the API to upload user-generated content straight to your Cloudinary library.
- Cloud asset management: You can manage your assets stored on the cloud just as you would in any other media library. You can create folders to organize files, rename them, edit them, etc. You can also use Cloudinary’s API to manage your media remotely or using commands.
- Image and Video manipulation: You can directly edit and transform media assets in your Cloudinary library. For example, you can resize, crop, change format, adjust the resolution and aspect ratio, apply watermarks, etc. You can even use face detection and other advanced tools to tag or organize files.
- Optimization & fast delivery: You can edit your media files in various ways to optimize them and reduce the payload. Cloudinary also has certain built-in optimization as part of its service which we’ll compare to ImageEngine below. Cloudinary also serves content via multiple CDNs for greater global reach and performance.
- Presentation: Cloudinary provides built-in media presentation widgets like galleries, product pages, and video players. Most of these can be added to your website using pre-generated scripts.
One of Cloudinary’s most outstanding features is that it makes use of three different CDNs — Akamai, Fastly, and Amazon Cloudfront — and automatically switches between them. This allows Cloudinary to switch around bottlenecks or other services disruptions on any one network.
So, as you can see, when it comes to managing your media assets, there’s not much that Cloudinary can’t do.
ImageEngine
As an image CDN with dedicated, automatic image optimization built in, all of ImageEngine’s features relate to improving your website’s page load times by optimizing images and speeding up delivery. As such, the biggest difference in features also comes down to the fact that you don’t manage your image assets via ImageEngine.
That being said, ImageEngine does come with numerous image optimization features. The killer-feature is perhaps ImageEngine’s WURFL device detection library. This gives ImageEngine an unparalleled insight into which devices visitors are using to access your website.
It can identify the type of device, OS, browser, and screen size. It can then choose the best way to render the image based on the optimal format, compression, size, and pixel ratio.
Furthermore, ImageEngine’s adaptive compression adjusts the level of compression based on the accessing device’s pixels per inch (PPI).
This has a number of important implications, one being that ImageEngine is perhaps the only image CDN that can render images according to a percentage of the device width. Another, is that ImageEngine has a greater potential range for detecting and responding to different situations.
This capability is built into the business-logic of each of ImageEngine’s device-aware edge servers. So, each of ImageEngine’s 20 PoP’s around the globe can act independently to deliver optimal images as fast as possible.
ImageEngine also fully supports converting images into advanced formats like JPEG-2000 for iOS and macOS, and WebP. Only the latter is supported by Cloudinary. GIFs will also be converted into either a WebP or MP4 depending on the context.
Both platforms support both client hints and save data. Many other services don’t, despite both features potential for extra performance and user experience improvements.
Lastly, both Cloudinary and ImageEngine also support manually setting optimization or image delivery settings using directives in URL parameters.
Cloudinary or ImageEngine? Why not both?
Hopefully, by now, you realize just how different these two platforms are.
To illustrate the difference between these two platforms, you could even use them together as part of your asset management/optimization stack.
In this case, you would use Cloudinary as usual to upload and manage your media assets. You could still edit and transform your images and videos as you wish as well as organize them in folders.
You can then use ImageEngine as a CDN in front of Cloudinary. ImageEngine will apply its own optimization on top of any transformations made via Cloudinary. You’ll also get the added benefit of another CDN plus even more globally positioned PoPs.
This could be a pretty great setup as you’ll get to use a powerful asset management tool in the form of Cloudinary, but leave all your image optimization up to ImageEngine.
Of course, for some, the main reason to look into either of these would be to speed up their website by optimizing image content and accelerating page delivery. In this case, it’s a much more straightforward dash to the finish line between the two.
We’ve gone ahead and tested the optimization capabilities between these two contenders as well as compared the capacity each offer based on their pricing plans. You can check out the results here.
Performance and pricing
In part II of this article, we’ll have a closer look at what you’ll get for your investment in image CDN.
