Stop guessing which one. Put them side by side.

The grid says what these tools are. This says what builders did about it — one decision per person, changeable whenever you change your mind.

# Tool comparison — Cloudinary vs Sharp vs Uppy

Source: Kbaise, a directory of tools that work with Lovable projects.
Pick one and tell me why before writing any integration code.

## Cloudinary (cloudinary)
- URL: https://cloudinary.com
- Category: Images, video & files
- Cost: mixed — Free 25 credits/mo; Plus $99/mo (225 credits); Advanced $249/mo (600 credits). 1 credit = 1,000 transformations or 1 GB storage or 1 GB bandwidth
- What it is: Hosted media platform combining upload, storage, a URL-based transformation API and CDN delivery. Handles automatic format negotiation via f_auto and quality via q_auto, emitting AVIF or WebP per browser. Includes a DAM layer, AI cropping and video transcoding.
- Why builders pick it: The most complete single-vendor answer: upload, transform, optimize and deliver without stitching services together. f_auto,q_auto alone typically cuts image weight 40-70% and improves LCP with a one-line URL change.
- Trap: The credit model blends storage, bandwidth and transformations into one pool, so a traffic spike burns the same budget as a storage spike — hard to forecast. Transformation URLs are Cloudinary-shaped, so migrating means rewriting every image URL in your content.
- Wiring: npm i cloudinary
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/cloudinary

## Sharp (sharp)
- URL: https://sharp.pixelplumbing.com
- Category: Images, video & files
- Cost: free — Free and open source under Apache-2.0. Infrastructure cost only — you run it on your own compute
- What it is: High-performance Node.js image processing built on libvips. Reads and writes JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, TIFF and SVG, and resizes roughly 4-5x faster than ImageMagick by streaming small regions of uncompressed data instead of loading whole images into memory.
- Why builders pick it: The engine underneath most hosted services and Next.js image optimization. Use it to pre-generate AVIF and WebP derivatives at build time and serve them as static files — zero per-transformation cost, forever.
- Trap: You own the caching, invalidation, URL scheme and CDN — Sharp is a library, not a service. Native libvips binaries can complicate deployment on some serverless targets and on Alpine or musl-based containers.
- Wiring: npm i sharp
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/sharp

## Uppy (uppy)
- URL: https://uppy.io
- Category: Images, video & files
- Cost: free — Free and MIT licensed, no paid edition — all plugins ship in the base package. Self-host the optional Companion server, or use the one Transloadit hosts
- What it is: Modular JavaScript upload UI: drag and drop, progress, retries, resumable tus uploads, crash recovery, image cropping before upload and 40 locales. The optional Companion server pulls files straight from Google Drive, Dropbox, Instagram or a URL without routing through the user's device.
- Why builders pick it: The best upload front end you can get without building one. Resumable uploads and remote-source imports work against any backend — S3, tus, XHR or Transloadit — and nothing about it locks you to a vendor.
- Trap: Uppy only handles the client side; storage, transformation and delivery are still yours to build. Remote sources require running and securing the Companion server plus your own OAuth credentials.
- Wiring: npm i @uppy/core @uppy/dashboard @uppy/tus
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/uppy

## Quick read

- Free with no card: Sharp, Uppy.

## Rules
1. Prefer the free tier when no budget was stated, and say what the ceiling is.
2. Read the full dossier before integrating.
3. Fetch /api/public/models before writing any AI model ID.

Agents can fetch the same thing: GET /api/public/compare?slugs=cloudinary,sharp,uppy