ImageEngine vs. UploadCare — Performance and Pricing
This is part two of a comparison between two similar services for optimizing images; ImageEngine and Cloudinary. You’ll find part one here.
Performance and pricing are what it all comes down to in the end when talking about image CDNs. In most cases, your goals are to score higher on SERP metrics, improve user experiences, and generally enhance the performance of image-heavy websites.
In this article, I’ll put both ImageEngine and UploadCare to the test by running a Google PageSpeed audit against the same image-heavy page optimized by each in turn. This should help identify not only the overall performance of both product’s optimization and delivery acceleration capabilities but also to point out how they perform at addressing specific optimization factors.
Next, I’ll do a pricing comparison to try and gauge the value you get for your money as well as what budgets they suit.
Performance
When it comes to its global CDN, UploadCare definitely talks the talk. They claim that their global CDN infrastructure, based on Akamai, KeyCDN, and Cloudfront as well as their own proprietary CDN, supports up to 72 TBPS with 253,000 acceleration nodes. They also claim to be able to achieve up to 86% traffic compression to increase page loading speeds by 1.5x.
Via UploadCare’s Adaptive Deliver, images can be automatically optimized by:
- Responsive resizing according to different screen sizes
- Intelligent quality compression
- Formatting images to optimal formats
- Automatically applying lazy loading to images
So, what does that translate to during a Google PageSpeed audit? Here you can see how UploadCare did on a mobile site audit:
85 is pretty admirable, but UploadCare still performed relatively low across some key user-centric performance metrics, such as CLS. However, UploadCare did manage to keep FCP, SI, LCP, and TTI below crucial thresholds.
UploadCare also reduced the total image payload significantly, from around 30 MB to only 1.7 KB — around 94%.
ImageEngine, on the other hand, relies solely on its own proprietary CDN to deliver images across the globe. However, they have 20 PoPs all over the globe in the form of intelligent edge servers with WURFL device detection built-into the business logic. With device detection happening as close to end-users as possible, ImageEngine can further speed up delivery and achieve cache rates of 98%+.
In auto mode, ImageEngine takes many of the same steps to optimize image content as UploadCare. The only difference is that you will natively have to implement lazy loading. However, with WURFL device detection fully integrated, ImageEngine can more accurately and effectively compress image quality according to the viewing device.
Here are the results of a Lighthouse audit conducted on the same page using ImageEngine:
As you can see, ImageEngine performed better across almost all user-centric performance metrics. These are the metrics Google uses when factoring performance into its search engine rankings, which translates to a crucial advantage when competing for organic traffic.
ImageEngine also managed to reduce the image payloads from around 30 MB to just under 1 MB — nearly 97%
Both platforms performed similarly for desktop audits than for mobile audits. Of course, with the exception of not reducing image payloads at a lower ratio. Both platforms addressed all of Google’s opportunities for improvement, including using resizing images, efficient cache policies, using next-gen formats, and efficiently encoding images.
Pricing
UploadCare does actually offer a free plan with no time limit. However, it’s extremely limited in terms of scale. You can only upload 100 assets a month and use 100 MB of storage at any one time. Furthermore, you can only use 1 GB of delivery traffic a month, which is only adequate for very low-traffic sites.
The good news is that you can still use all Adaptive Delivery features and can make unlimited image transformations and enhancements.
Most users will want to go straight for the Start plan which costs $45/month. This plan allows 15,000 uploads, 15 GB of storage, 150 GB of delivery traffic, and unlimited intelligence operations. All paid packages come with a 14-day trial of all its features.
ImageEngine’s direct competitor would be the Basic plan that costs $49/month. Storage doesn’t apply to ImageEngine and they also don’t track the number of transformations made (an advantage both ImageEngine and UploadCare share over most competitors). All features and intelligent image optimization are also included from the get-go.
The plan also allows you to utilize up to 100 GB of CDN Smart Bytes. Smart Bytes are counted by tallying up image content delivered after it has been optimized, similar to delivery traffic for UploadCare. With ImageEngine reducing image payloads by 60–80%, that means you can effectively accommodate 400–500 GB of normal traffic.
The one issue with UploadCare is that it’s quite a leap in price to the next plan, Scale. At $385, it will be unaffordable to most individuals and small businesses. However, uploads and storage limits are expanded massively to 120,000 and 120 GB, respectively, with 800 GB of monthly traffic.
The good news is that these are “soft limits.” If you exceed your allocation for storage, bandwidth, or uploads, you can continue using your account as normal and just pay the additional overage costs.
The rates are displayed in your dashboard. Below is an example of the rates for delivery traffic:
At a rate of $0.19 to $0.25 per GB, it’s really affordable and makes UploadCare a scalable and flexible option.
ImageEngine’s top-tier, Standard, package costs $99 per month. It comes with 250 GB of Smart Bytes which translates roughly to 750 to 1,000 GB of unoptimized image content. So, you get nearly the same amount of image delivery traffic for almost a quarter of the price.
Granted, UploadCare does provide full digital asset manager (DAM) capabilities (minus a visual image editor) included with its price. However, for those looking mostly for image optimization and delivery solution, ImageEngine is the more affordable choice.
It’s worth noting that UploadCare allows you to configure your own CDN in front of their service with one of the higher-tier plans. This will enable you to use UploadCare’s asset management tools and aesthetic image transformations to improve your design workflow, but leverage ImageEngine for its superior performance if you want to squeeze out the last bit of juice.
Summary
While UploadCare can put a significant dent in your image-related performance issues, few competitors can keep up with ImageEngine’s advanced dynamic image compression capabilities — thanks to its built-in device detection. As is usually the case, ImageEngine comes out on top when purely measuring image content optimization and delivery.
Regarding pricing, both UploadCare’s Free and Start plans are relatively generous and affordable. However, especially if using it for your entire DAM pipeline, you will probably soon run into scalability issues. The problem is that the next available plan, Scale, is massively expensive, even though it’s still good value-for-money in its own right.
If you’re mainly looking to accelerate delivery, ImageEngine’s entry-level Basic plan is equally affordable. The Standard plan is also a much more accessible option to upgrade to before having to pay hundreds of dollars a month for this type of augmentation service.
You can find Part I here, featuring an ImageEngince vs UploadCare user experience and features comparison.
