Supabase Storage vs Cloudinary(2026)
Supabase Storage is better for teams that need integrated with supabase auth. Cloudinary is the stronger choice if best image transformation api. Supabase Storage is freemium (from $25/month (included in Supabase)) and Cloudinary is freemium (from $89/month).
Full feature breakdown, pricing details, and pros & cons below.
By Bikram NathLast updated
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Supabase Storage
Supabase Storage is an S3-compatible object storage built on top of S3 with Postgres RLS policies for fine-grained access control.
Starting at $25/month (included in Supabase)
Visit Supabase Storage
Cloudinary
Cloudinary is a cloud-based media management platform with on-the-fly image/video transformation, optimization, and CDN delivery.
Starting at $89/month
Visit CloudinaryHow Do Supabase Storage and Cloudinary Compare on Features?
| Feature | Supabase Storage | Cloudinary |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting price | $25/month (included in Supabase) | $89/month |
| S3-compatible | ✓ | — |
| Postgres RLS policies | ✓ | — |
| CDN delivery | ✓ | ✓ |
| Image transformations | ✓ | — |
| Resumable uploads | ✓ | — |
| Signed URLs | ✓ | — |
| On-the-fly transformations | — | ✓ |
| Auto-format & quality | — | ✓ |
| Video transcoding | — | ✓ |
| AI image tagging | — | ✓ |
| SDKs for all frameworks | — | ✓ |
Supabase Storage Pros and Cons vs Cloudinary
Supabase Storage
Cloudinary
Deep dive: Supabase Storage
When to choose Supabase Storage
Supabase Storage makes sense when a project is already running on the Supabase platform and needs file storage without adding a second vendor. The core value proposition is that storage access policies are written as Postgres RLS rules, which means the same permission model governing database rows also governs file buckets. There is no separate IAM system to learn or synchronize. Teams building user-generated content features, such as profile photos, document uploads, or media libraries, benefit most when those files are tied directly to authenticated users already managed in Supabase Auth. The S3-compatible API means existing tooling, including the AWS SDKs, can point at Supabase Storage endpoints without significant changes. Choose it when the team wants image transformations, CDN delivery, and resumable uploads without stitching together Cloudinary, a separate CDN, and a custom upload endpoint. Avoid it if the project is not already on Supabase, if compliance requirements demand specific data residency in regions Supabase does not currently serve, or if the storage workload is very high volume where S3 direct pricing would be meaningfully cheaper. It is also a poor fit for teams who need advanced lifecycle policies, intelligent tiering, or deep AWS ecosystem integrations like Lambda triggers on object creation, all of which S3 native handles with more maturity.
Real-world use case
A solo developer building a Next.js multi-tenant SaaS where each tenant uploads contract PDFs and profile images for around 200 active organizations. With Supabase Storage, the developer writes one RLS policy that checks the authenticated user's organization ID against a column in the objects metadata table, restricting reads and writes without any application-layer filtering code. The image transformation endpoint handles resizing profile photos to thumbnails on the fly, eliminating a Cloudinary subscription. Resumable uploads handle the occasional large PDF without custom chunking logic. The tradeoff: the developer is now deep in the Supabase ecosystem and every infrastructure decision, from region selection to scaling the database, is coupled to a single vendor. If Supabase raises prices or deprecates a feature, migrating storage means also migrating auth, the database, and edge functions simultaneously. For a solo developer at 200 tenants this coupling is probably worth the reduced operational surface. At 2000 tenants with serious SLA requirements, the lack of multi-region replication and the relative immaturity compared to S3 would be a real concern.
Hidden gotchas
The objects table in the storage schema is a real Postgres table, which means every file upload inserts a row. On the free tier and Pro tier, this table is not automatically vacuumed separately from application tables, and teams uploading thousands of small files can accumulate significant dead tuples that hurt query performance on the broader database. Monitoring autovacuum on storage.objects is something the documentation does not emphasize. Image transformations are proxied through a separate service and the first request for a transformed variant is noticeably slow, typically several hundred milliseconds, because the transform is computed on demand before being cached. There is a per-bucket file size limit and a per-project storage limit that applies to total bytes across all buckets, and hitting the project-level limit silently fails uploads rather than returning a clear error in some SDK versions. Signed URLs have a maximum expiry of around one week, which creates friction for use cases like long-lived download links in email campaigns. The CDN is not globally distributed at the same density as Cloudflare or AWS CloudFront, so latency to users in Southeast Asia or Africa can be noticeably higher than first-party CDN solutions. RLS policies on storage objects join against the auth.users table, which means a poorly written policy can produce a full table scan at upload time rather than an index lookup, and this does not surface as an obvious slow query without deliberate profiling.
Pricing breakdown
Supabase Storage is included in the Supabase Pro plan at $25 per month per project, which also covers the database and auth. The Pro plan includes 100 GB of storage and 200 GB of egress bandwidth per month. Beyond that, storage costs around $0.021 per GB per month and egress costs around $0.09 per GB. A project storing 500 GB of user files and serving 300 GB of egress monthly would pay roughly $25 base plus $8.40 for extra storage (400 GB at $0.021) plus $9.00 for extra egress (100 GB at $0.09), landing near $42 per month. Image transformation requests are billed separately at around $5 per 1000 origin requests beyond the free quota. For comparison, S3 plus CloudFront for the same workload would cost around $11 to $15 monthly at current AWS rates, though without the integrated auth and RLS layer.
Deep dive: Cloudinary
When to choose Cloudinary
Cloudinary makes sense when image and video transformation is a core product requirement, not an afterthought. If the application needs to serve the same source asset at multiple dimensions, formats, and quality levels without pre-generating every variant, Cloudinary's URL-based transformation pipeline is the right fit. A product that lets users upload profile photos, product images, or media content and then needs to display those assets responsively across mobile and desktop will get immediate value from automatic WebP and AVIF conversion and lazy quality negotiation. Teams that lack the infrastructure time to run their own Sharp or FFmpeg pipelines at scale should evaluate Cloudinary seriously. It also fits well when video transcoding is part of the workflow and standing up a separate service like Mux feels like overkill for the volume involved. Cloudinary is a poor fit for simple file storage where assets are served as-is with no transformation needed. In that case, S3 plus CloudFront or Cloudflare R2 is cheaper by an order of magnitude. It is also a poor fit for teams that need full control over CDN cache headers, custom domains without additional configuration, or where the per-transformation credit model would create unpredictable billing spikes. Startups that expect to scale upload volume quickly should model the credit consumption carefully before committing, because the pricing cliff between tiers is steep. Teams already invested in Imgix or Bunny.net's optimizer should not switch without a concrete feature gap to justify the migration cost.
Real-world use case
A solo developer building a Next.js marketplace where sellers upload product photos is a representative scenario. The developer uses Cloudinary's upload widget on the seller dashboard, stores only the public ID in the database, and constructs transformation URLs at render time using the Next.js image loader integration. For a product card, the same source image is served at 400px wide in WebP with auto-quality. For the detail page, it is served at 1200px. For the thumbnail in search results, it is served at 80px with aggressive compression. No pre-processing pipeline is needed. The tradeoff is that each unique transformation URL counts against the monthly transformation credit quota. If the marketplace grows to thousands of sellers with dozens of SKUs each, and each product page generates several transformation variants per image, the credit burn can exceed the free tier within months. The developer then faces a jump to a paid plan priced around $89 per month for the Plus tier, which may not match the revenue stage of the product. Additionally, the developer must decide whether to lock transformation parameters or let them vary by context, because an unbounded set of transformation parameters means an unbounded credit consumption rate. Caching at the CDN edge reduces repeat charges, but cold requests on new variants still consume credits.
Hidden gotchas
Transformation credits are not the same as storage credits, and many developers conflate them until the first billing surprise. A single page load that requests four differently-sized variants of the same image consumes four transformation credits, not one. Cloudinary caches the transformed output at the CDN, so repeat requests for the same URL do not re-bill, but any parameter variation, including quality adjustments driven by auto-quality negotiation, can produce a new cache key and a new credit. The auto-format feature, which automatically serves WebP or AVIF based on Accept headers, can interact unexpectedly with some CDN or proxy configurations that strip Accept headers before reaching Cloudinary's origin. The result is that users receive JPEG instead of the expected modern format, and the auto-format credit was still consumed. Eager transformations, which pre-generate variants on upload, bypass the per-request credit model but count against upload transformation credits instead, and the distinction is easy to miss in billing dashboards. Named transformations help control this but require upfront discipline to define and enforce. On the SDK side, the Node.js SDK and the React SDK do not share the same configuration model, and teams that mix both in a Next.js project with API routes and React Server Components can end up with two separate Cloudinary instances with divergent credential handling. Signed uploads are required to allow public upload without exposing the API secret, but the signature generation must happen server-side, adding a round-trip that surprises developers who expect the widget to be fully client-autonomous. Video transcoding jobs are asynchronous and do not block the upload response, so polling or webhook handling is required before a transcoded URL is safe to display, a detail the quickstart documentation undersells.
Pricing breakdown
The free tier includes 25 monthly credits, where one credit covers around 1GB of managed storage, 1GB of net viewing bandwidth, or 1000 transformations depending on how the quota is allocated. In practice, a small app with a few hundred images and moderate traffic can stay on the free tier for a meaningful period. The Plus plan starts at around $89 per month and includes 225 credits. At that level, a team storing around 50GB of assets, serving around 100GB of bandwidth per month, and running around 50,000 transformations per month is within budget. Beyond that, additional credits are purchased in blocks, and the per-credit rate decreases at higher volumes. Teams with high transformation volume relative to storage should model credit consumption before committing, because a video-heavy product can exhaust 225 credits on bandwidth and transcoding alone before storage is factored in. Annual billing provides a discount of around 20 percent versus monthly.
Should You Use Supabase Storage or Cloudinary?
Choose Supabase Storage if…
- •Integrated with Supabase auth
- •Row-level security for storage
- •Good free tier
Choose Cloudinary if…
- •Best image transformation API
- •Auto-optimization (WebP/AVIF)
- •Generous free tier