BlazingCDN vs Cloudinary
Cloudinary turns your images and video into whatever each page needs, then delivers them. We only do the delivering. That single difference explains almost everything about the price.
Our rate is printed on the pricing page. You can check it before you talk to anyone.
Cloudinary bills in credits. One credit buys 1 GB of image bandwidth or 2 GB of video, and the same credit also pays for transformations and storage. Convert it and delivery lands around $207 to $440 a terabyte.
Or open the full pricing table and read the rate yourself.
Which one actually fits your traffic
We would rather lose the click than lose a month of your team’s time. Here is the honest split.
Pick BlazingCDN if
- Your images and video are already processed and just need delivering
- Terabytes drive your bill, and you have outgrown a credit allowance
- You want one rate across our regions, with no geo multipliers
- You still want resizing and cropping at the edge, just not at platform prices
- You are adding a delivery layer next to the platform you already run
Pick Cloudinary if
- You need transformations, not just delivery: crops, formats, AI background removal
- You want a media library your marketing team can actually use
- You want a player, an upload widget and SDKs for every framework, out of the box
- Your volume is small enough that a plan covers it, and your time is worth more than the bandwidth
Side by side
Pricing model
Per terabyte delivered
A monthly plan with a credit allowance, shared across transformations, storage and delivery
Published price
Yes. $5 down to $2.50 per TB in progressive tiers, the full table printed on the pricing page
Yes. Free 25 credits, Plus $99 for 225, Advanced $249 for 600, then Enterprise on quote
Regional pricing
One rate across our regions
One plan price, with no regional rate card published
Heavy video and large files
What the network is built and priced for
Video costs half a credit per GB, but the published plans stop at 1.2 TB
Time to a number
Same day, by email
Published up to Advanced. Above that, a sales conversation
What a credit actually costs per terabyte
Cloudinary publishes the conversion on its own pricing page, so this is arithmetic, not opinion.
“1 credit = 1,000 transformations, or 1GB managed storage, or 1GB image bandwidth, or 2GB video bandwidth”
Plus is $99 a month for 225 credits. Advanced is $249 for 600.
Cloudinary pricing page. Checked 28 August 2026. Read it on their site
What it means in practice
Spend the whole Advanced plan on video and 600 credits buys 1.2 TB, which is $207 a terabyte. Spend it on images and 600 credits buys 600 GB, which is $415 a terabyte. On Plus the same maths gives $220 and $440. And those are the best cases, because every credit you spend on a transformation or on storage is one you did not spend on delivery.
Why ours is just a rate
We charge $5 a terabyte delivered, stepping down to $2.50, and nothing else consumes it. Transformations, cached variants, purges and logs are not metered. The $25 monthly minimum buys 5 TB. See the full tier table and what is included.
Tell us your monthly terabytes. We send back the number.
No account needed to get a price. One email, one answer.
Speed tests look similar on both networks. The invoice does not. Here is the same traffic, priced two ways.
Our monthly minimum, and it buys 5 TB of delivery at the $5 entry rate. Transformations at the edge and cached variants cost nothing on top.
Cloudinary Advanced, their largest published plan. Spent entirely on video it delivers 1.2 TB, and that is before a single transformation or gigabyte of storage takes a credit. Above it there is no published price.
Run your own volume through it
50 TB a month
$4.30 a terabyte effective. Cloudinary has no published plan that reaches this volume: Advanced tops out at 1.2 TB of video before Enterprise.
200 TB a month
Where most video and software teams sit. $3.83 a terabyte effective. At Cloudinary’s published Advanced rate of $207 a terabyte, the same 200 TB would be roughly $41,000, which is why nobody buys delivery this way.
1 PB a month
1,000 TB billed down through the tiers, $3.32 a terabyte effective. This is delivery volume, not platform volume, and it is the point where the two products stop being comparable at all.
Our pricing is progressive, like tax brackets: $5 on the first 5 TB, stepping down to $2.50 above 1,000 TB. Cloudinary figures are calculated from their published credit conversions and plan prices, checked 28 August 2026, and assume every credit goes to delivery, which is the most favourable case for them.
The three questions everyone asks next
But we need the transformations
Then keep them. Leave Cloudinary doing what it is good at and let it hand the finished asset to us for delivery. The expensive part of a media bill is almost never the transformation, it is the millionth time the result gets served.
Do I have to move everything?
No. Most teams move the heavy traffic first, video, builds and downloads, and leave the rest where it is.
Can you resize images at all?
Yes, at the edge: fit or fill, crop around nine gravity anchors, one dimension with the aspect ratio kept, all from a query string on your own domain. Variants are cached like any other file and cost nothing extra. It is a fraction of what Cloudinary does, and for a lot of sites it is the fraction they actually use.
Keep it. Move the heavy traffic to us.
You do not have to pick a winner. Keep Cloudinary for the transformations and the media library, and point the finished assets, the ones being served millions of times, at a network priced per terabyte.
- One pull zone, pointed at the origin you already use
- From $5 down to $2.50 per TB, published, no negotiation to see it
- Roll back by changing one CNAME if you do not like the result
Get your rate
Four fields. We reply with a written price for your volume, usually the same day.
We use this only to price your traffic and reply to you.
Splitting the traffic takes an afternoon
Create a pull zone
Point it at the same origin, or at Cloudinary itself as the origin. Nothing changes in your pipeline.
Move the heavy paths
Video segments, installers, patches, archives. The paths that generate the terabytes on your invoice.
Compare one invoice
One billing cycle is enough to see the difference. If it is not better, change the CNAME back.
What the plan buys before delivery is counted
We sell a rate. They sell an allowance that three different things eat from.
Where you start
$5 per TB delivered, pay as you go, with a $25 monthly minimum that covers 5 TB
Free plan, 25 credits a month. That is 25 GB of images or 50 GB of video, if you spend none of it on transformations
Mid tier
The same tier table. Your rate steps down as volume grows, with nothing to re-sign
Plus at $99 a month for 225 credits, or $89 on annual billing
The tier that carries heavy traffic
$2.50 per TB on the top tier, and no platform fee at any volume
Advanced at $249 a month for 600 credits. That is the largest published plan; above it, Enterprise on quote
Commitment
None. Monthly, stop whenever you like
Monthly or annual. Annual billing takes about 10% off the plan price
What gets billed
Delivered traffic only. Cache volume is never billed
The plan fee. Transformations, storage and delivery all draw down the same credit balance
Cloudinary figures are their published plan prices and credit conversions, checked 28 August 2026. Every per-terabyte figure on this page assumes the entire credit allowance goes to delivery, which is the most generous reading of their pricing, not the likely one.
CDN feature by feature
Static files, downloads, images and APIs. Everything on our side is taken from our product documentation, and we have left in the rows where they are ahead.
Routing
Anycast with built in failover. 50+ signals weighed per request, routes re-evaluated in real time
Delivery over their own CDN layer, built on commercial CDNs rather than their own network
Cache control
TTL up to 365 days, a separate TTL per HTTP status code, minimum requests to cache from 1 to 10, inherit or ignore origin headers
Cache settings per asset type and per delivery profile
Per-path rules
Locations: a rule set matched to an HTTP route, so different parts of one resource get different delivery settings. Extension proxying, URL parameter truncation, HLS and DASH handling and image processing, all per path
Named transformations and delivery profiles, applied by URL
Purge
By path, in bulk, or total purge in one action. Plus cache warm-up through the API before a release
Invalidate on upload or through the admin API, with rate limits on the API
Origin Shield
Included. Automatic, or pinned to a region you choose
Not exposed as a setting; origin behaviour is theirs to manage
Compression
gzip, Brotli and zstd. At the edge or at origin, with a separate cache per encoding
Automatic format and quality selection, which is genuinely good and does reduce bytes
Delivery speed control
A download speed cap you set per account, per domain or per URL, plus rate matched delivery so one big file does not take the whole pipe. Request intensity limits per client or subnet on top of that
No delivery speed control. Bandwidth is metered out of the credit balance instead
Signed URLs
Validity window, signature bound to a client IP, a limit of 1 to 5 unique IPs per link, two secrets for rotation, partial path signing and URL encryption
Signed delivery URLs, and strict transformation signing
Country and IP lists
Country allowlist or blocklist, IP allowlist or blocklist with mask support, referrer allow and deny lists and cookie checks. Set per resource, with no security plan to buy
Access control through signed URLs and access-control settings on assets
Security stack
Their round
Access control only: country and IP lists, referrer rules, signed links. We do not sell a security product and we do not claim to
Not a security product. Neither of us sells a WAF, so this row is a draw
Certificates
Let’s Encrypt at no extra charge, renewed automatically. Upload your own, in bulk, auto-assigned to matching domains
Custom domain and certificate handling, on the higher plans
Origins and import
HTTP(S), S3, Swift, Wasabi and S3 compatible buckets, FTP, SFTP, rclone and rsync. Pull or push, pre-import or lazy, with a callback on the result
Upload into their storage, or fetch from a remote URL you nominate
Image processing
One file at origin, every variant from a query string on your own domain. Variants are cached like any other file and cost nothing extra
This is what they are for. Full transformation pipeline, AI cropping and background removal, format and quality automation, a DAM and a player. Every transformation and every stored asset draws credits
Logs and metrics
A Prometheus endpoint, Grafana, Alertmanager and OpenTelemetry on every account. Raw JSON logs for Graylog or ELK as a $50 a month add-on
Usage and media analytics in their console, plus reporting APIs
Running it from an agent
One MCP server, 52 typed tools: pull zones, cache and purge, metrics, domains and certificates, Cloud Storage and Video CDN. Read-only by default, with cache purge and warm-up; create and update are opt-in; deletes are a second opt-in limited to custom domains and Video CDN resources, and deleting pull zones, buckets or accounts is not implemented at all. Public on npm as @blazingcdn/mcp
Full REST API and SDKs for most frameworks. No MCP server that configures delivery as a typed toolset
Our column is taken from our own published feature list. The Cloudinary column describes their publicly documented product and pricing, checked 28 August 2026. Rows where they are ahead are left in, because on image and video processing they plainly are.
The two products are not the same shape
Read this before the tables, otherwise the comparison is unfair. Cloudinary is a media platform: it stores your originals, transforms them on the fly, manages them for your team and then delivers the result. We are a delivery layer. If you need the transformations, Cloudinary does something we do not. If your assets are already final, you are paying platform prices to move bytes.
BlazingCDN
A delivery layer. We cache and deliver what you already have, bill per terabyte, and include resizing and cropping at the edge without metering it.
Cloudinary
A media platform. Storage, transformation, AI editing, asset management, a player and delivery, all drawing from one credit balance.
Six places where we win
Not opinions. Each of these is a line item you can check on an invoice or in a config screen.
$5 against $207
Per terabyte delivered, against their best published plan spent entirely on video. On images it is $415. Neither figure counts the credits a real account spends on transformations and storage.
Variants cost nothing
One file at origin, every size from a query string on your own domain. Variants are cached like any other file and are never metered. On a credit model, every derived image you generate is a line item.
Cache is never billed
Cache volume is never billed. You pay for what left the edge, not for how much of your library is sitting on it.
Raw logs, no upsell
A Prometheus endpoint, Grafana, Alertmanager and OpenTelemetry on every account, raw JSON logs for Graylog or ELK as a $50 a month add-on. Elsewhere raw logs are an Enterprise line item.
Links bound to a person
A signature can be tied to a client IP with a limit of 1 to 5 addresses, signed on part of the path, with the URL encrypted and two secrets you can rotate.
Knobs a platform hides
Chunk length, keyframe alignment, pre-cached first chunks, millisecond clipping, track selection, and any origin from S3 to rsync. Delivery is the product, so it is all exposed.
And four places where they win
If any of these four is the reason you are shopping, buy Cloudinary. We would rather you read this here than find it out in month two.
- Transformations as a product: AI cropping, background removal, generative fill, format and quality automation. We resize and crop; we do not do any of that.
- A media library your non-technical team can actually use, with metadata, collaboration and approvals. We have no DAM at all.
- A player, an upload widget and SDKs for every framework. We deliver bytes and leave the front end to you.
- A free plan that genuinely works for a small site. Ours starts at a $25 monthly minimum.
Comparing more than one? See also Cloudflare pricing, Bunny CDN pricing and Gcore pricing, or start from our CDN pricing comparison.