Amazon S3 vs Cloudinary (2026): Pricing, Features & Verdict
Amazon S3 is our pick, scoring 7.8/10 against 7.2/10 for Cloudinary on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria. Its biggest advantage: higher Analytics score (8/10 vs 6/10). Only Cloudinary has a free plan.
Last updated: November 2026
A
Amazon S3
7.8/10
Amazon S3 is AWS's pay-as-you-go object storage service. Businesses use it to store files, backups, data lakes and static website assets at almost any scale.
Cloudinary
7.2/10
Cloudinary is a cloud media platform that stores, transforms, optimizes and delivers images and video through a CDN for developers and marketing teams.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
| Feature | A Amazon S3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Scores | ||
| Overall Rating | 7.8/10 | 7.2/10 |
| Integration | 10/10 | 9/10 |
| Support | 6/10 | 6/10 |
| Cost | 5/10 | 4/10 |
| Customization | 8/10 | 9/10 |
| Security | 9/10 | 8/10 |
| Reliability | 9/10 | 8/10 |
| Ease of Use | 5/10 | 7/10 |
| Analytics | 8/10 | 6/10 |
| Scalability | 10/10 | 9/10 |
| Pricing | ||
| Free plan | No | Yes |
| Cheapest paid plan | Contact for pricing | $99/mo Plus |
| Estimated cost for 10 users | Contact for pricing | Contact for pricing |
| Features | ||
| API and CLI | ||
| Automatic Backups | ||
| Multiple Regions | ||
| Uptime SLA | ||
| Content Delivery Network | Not listed | |
| Dedicated Servers | Not listed | |
| Managed Databases | Not listed | |
| Managed Kubernetes | Not listed | |
| Managed WordPress | ||
| Object Storage | Not listed | |
| Shared Hosting | ||
| VPS Hosting | Not listed | |
Amazon S3 vs Cloudinary cost by team size
| Team size | Amazon S3 | Cloudinary |
|---|---|---|
| 1 user | Contact for pricing | FreeFree |
| 5 users | Contact for pricing | $249/moAdvanced |
| 10 users | Contact for pricing | Contact for pricing |
| 25 users | Contact for pricing | Contact for pricing |
| 50 users | Contact for pricing | Contact for pricing |
The plan that fits each team size, billed monthly, before add-ons and usage charges. Each cost opens that tool's pricing calculator for the team size.
Who Amazon S3 and Cloudinary suit
| Audience | Amazon S3 | Cloudinary |
|---|---|---|
| Enterprise | 9/10It offers Object Lock, replication, audit logging and organisation-wide analytics through Storage Lens. | 8/10The Enterprise plan adds SSO, multi-CDN delivery, SLAs, EEA data residency and security reviews. |
| Startups | 7/10There are no upfront costs, and new AWS accounts get Free Tier credits. | 6/10The free 25-credit plan helps early projects, but the jump to the 99 USD Plus plan is steep. |
| Developers | 9/10S3 is managed through a widely adopted API and SDKs, and that API has become the standard interface for object storage. | 9/10It has broad official SDK coverage, REST APIs and URL-based transformations, all aimed at engineers. |
| SaaS Companies | 8/10It scales without limit for application data, and transfers to other AWS services in the same Region are free. | 8/10The Upload API and widget handle images and video that users upload inside an app. |
| E-commerce | Not rated | 9/10It optimizes and resizes product imagery at scale, and retailers such as adidas and Neiman Marcus are named customers. |
| Marketing Teams | Not rated | 7/10The DAM product and AI tagging help content teams organize and reuse brand assets. |
| Small Business | 5/10The storage rates are cheap, but reviewers say the console and the pricing model are complex. | Not rated |
Which One Should You Choose?
AWhy choose Amazon S3
- Higher Analytics score (8/10 vs 6/10)
- Higher Integration score (10/10 vs 9/10)
Why choose Cloudinary
- Has a free plan (Amazon S3 does not)
- Higher Ease of Use score (7/10 vs 5/10)
- Higher Customization score (9/10 vs 8/10)
Pros & Cons
AAmazon S3
Pros
- Very high scale: about 500 trillion objects stored and around 200 million requests per second, according to Wikipedia.
- The S3 API is the industry standard, so a wide range of tools and competing storage providers support it.
- Strong data protection: versioning, MFA Delete, Object Lock in compliance mode, and cross-Region replication with a time-bound SLA.
- Many storage classes, from Express One Zone to Glacier Deep Archive at about $0.001 per GB-month, let teams match cost to how often data is accessed.
- Reviews are consistently positive: about 4.7 out of 5 from more than 1,100 Capterra reviews.
Cons
- Internet egress costs about $0.09 per GB after the first free 100 GB a month, and competitors widely criticise these fees.
- Request, retrieval and lifecycle-transition fees make monthly bills hard to predict.
- Reviewers on Capterra and TrustRadius call the console navigation and user interface complex.
- The SLA pays only service credits toward future bills, never refunds, and infrequent-access classes have a lower 99% uptime threshold.
Cloudinary
Pros
- One credit pool covers storage, bandwidth and transformations, so a spike in one resource can be absorbed without changing plans.
- Images and video can be resized, cropped and reformatted just by changing URL parameters, which saves developers from building their own image pipelines.
- Official SDKs cover backend, frontend and mobile platforms, including Next.js, Flutter and Go.
- Integrated storage, an upload widget and video transcoding cover the whole path from upload to delivery, which imgix does not offer.
- The trust page lists SOC 2 Type II reports audited by Deloitte, a 99.9% uptime commitment and an EEA data residency option for Enterprise.
Cons
- Reviewers often describe the credit pricing as confusing, and some report unexpected overage charges.
- There is no plan between Free and the 99 USD Plus plan, a gap reviewers on Trustpilot and G2 complain about.
- Storage counts against credits every month, so costs rise steadily as the asset library grows.
- Multi-CDN delivery, SSO and formal SLAs are limited to custom-priced Enterprise contracts.
- Unused credits do not roll over, and file-size and seat caps can force an upgrade even when credits remain.
Not sold on either?
Frequently Asked Questions
Amazon S3 scores higher on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria: 7.8/10 against 7.2/10 for Cloudinary. The largest gap is in Analytics: 8/10 for Amazon S3 and 6/10 for Cloudinary.
Cloudinary has a free plan; Amazon S3 does not list one.
