ImageEngine vs Cloudinary — Who is the fastest gun (CDN) alive?
This is part two of a comparison between two similar services for optimizing images; ImageEngine and Cloudinary. You’ll find part I here.
Using images to enhance your website is great until it starts impacting your performance. This can drive away users and punish your search engine rankings.
An image CDN can efficiently accelerate the loading time of images on your website. With that in mind, we’re here to compare the potential performance improvement you can expect of two top contenders in this sphere: ImageEngine and Cloudinary.
ImageEngine is a dedicated device-aware image CDN. It makes use of WURFL device-detection built into the business-logic of each of their global PoPs to offer unprecedented adaptability according to different browsing contexts.
Cloudinary, on the other hand, is a complete digital asset management platform — although they don’t sell themselves short when it comes to their integrated CDN. Actually, three CDNs working in tandem; Akamai, Amazon Cloudfront, and Fastly.
They are two very different platforms, and we’ve taken a closer look at the user experience and features they have to offer here.
So, let’s get to it.
Web Page Acceleration and Image Optimization Performance
First up, let’s look at what these two platforms offer when it comes to performance enhancements by optimizing your images. For both, I only used whatever automatic image optimization they have to offer. Remember that both also offer a CDN which also has a role to play in speeding up delivery.
Running a Google Lighthouse audit on the unoptimized page, we get the following results:
The page includes about 12 MB of raw images. With WordPress’ built-in responsive image syntax, the overall page size is about 2.5 MB.
So, yeah, not great…
Looking at the opportunities, we see that we can benefit from next-gen formats, efficient encoding, and reducing the overall payload:
Across multiple test runs, Cloudinary didn’t manage to reduce the total payload to under 2,000 KB. That’s virtually the exact same payload size you would have with standard responsive syntax.
Here is the result we get after using Cloudinary to serve the images. Note that I set both the format and quality settings for images to auto so that Cloudinary was in full control of any optimization:
As you can see, there’s already a massive improvement. First contentful paint, first meaningful paint, and the Speed Index times — all vital user-centric performance metrics — are already much improved.
When it comes to the opportunities for improvement, Cloudinary took care of serving images in next-gen formats. However, Lighthouse still flagged properly resizing images as an opportunity to improve performance further.
Now, let’s see if ImageEngine can do any better. I didn’t touch any of ImageEngine’s settings for this test, letting it do its own thing:
As you can see, ImageEngine managed to improve all user-centric performance metrics even further. Most of these savings came from even further reduction of image payloads.
However, ImageEngine still maintained the balance when it comes to image quality without any perceptible reduction in sharpness or resolution.
Over multiple audits, ImageEngine managed to reduce the overall payload to between 400 KB to 500 KB. That’s a further 80% reduction compared to the 2,000 KB that responsive syntax alone or Cloudinary generates!
Pricing & Plans
Cloudinary offers two pricing tiers on top of a completely free entry-level plan. Which tier you’re on determines your storage capacity, bandwidth, and number of image edits/amount of video processing time as well as which features you unlock. You also unlock higher maximum file sizes.
Cloudinary works on a credit system where 1 credit is equal to 1000 image transformations, 1 GB of storage, 1 GB of bandwidth, or 500 seconds of video processing.
Let’s take an example. With the free plan, you get 25 credits. That means in one month you can make 5000 image transformations (5 credits), use 5 GB of storage (another 5 credits), use 10 GB of bandwidth (5 credits), and process 2,500 seconds (or just over 41 minutes) of video (5 credits). Credits scale up to 600 with the highest-tier plan.
ImageEngine may not have a free plan, but they do offer a 60-day free trial to take their optimization engine for a test drive. They also offer two pricing plans, Basic and Standard, in addition to a Pro tier for enterprise.
ImageEngine’s pricing is based mostly on how much of your optimized image data is delivered via their network. Generously, this is based on the amount of already optimized image data (called Smart Bytes) instead of the raw unoptimized image data on your website.
As ImageEngine reduces the image payload by as much as 80%, this means 100 GB SmartBytes translates to around 500 GB of images. With the standard plan, you get 250 GB of SmartBytes = roughly 1250 GB of raw image data.
As ImageEngine already applies all necessary transformations automatically, there is no extra charge for transformations.
Let’s compare ImageEngine’s Basic and Cloudinary’s Plus plan. 225 Cloudinary-credits mean a maximum of 225 GB of bandwidth. However, taking into consideration that some portion will be used for storage and transformations, this will probably be closer to 100 GB of optimized bandwidth.
The comparison here keeps the outbound optimized payload equal at 100 GB. However, as you can see, ImageEngine’s higher payload reduction savings percentage (60% vs. 80%) provides much more bang for the buck when looking at the original payload. The estimated monthly price is also much more simple to compute with ImageEngine — no transformation or storage costs.
Because Cloudinary comes with a much larger suite of tools and features for asset management, it also costs significantly more. Cloudinary’s prices are:
- Plus: $89
- Advanced: $224
On the other hand, ImageEngine is priced at:
- Basic: $49
- Standard: $99
Both also feature a customizable top-tier plan, mostly meant for enterprise clients, that can have tailored limits and pricing according to their needs.
The good, the bad, and the slow
There’s no way to deny it: if your main goal is to accelerate page delivery and optimize your image payloads, ImageEngine is the undisputed champ. Their claim to reduce image payloads by up to 80% seems to be spot on.
However, it’s important to keep in mind that these are two very different platforms. Cloudinary is a full Data Asset Management (DAM), capable of taking care of all your media asset management needs. It also helped improve page loading times to some extent.
That being said, if you’re in need of image management as well as optimization, the way to go might be to use ImageEngine as a CDN in front of Cloudinary. While this isn’t the most cost-effective measure, you get the best of both worlds.
