Meet the best alternative to Filestack
How does Upload compare with Filestack? Which platform is better for file & image uploading? What is the best Filestack alternative? We'll answer all these questions, and will show you why Upload is a great alternative to Filestack.
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Looking for Filestack alternatives?
Filestack was founded in 2012 as FilePicker.io. The original founding team consisted of four MIT students: Brett Van Zuiden (CEO & co-founder), Liyan David Chang (co-founder), Anand Dass (co-founder), and Thomas Georgiou (co-founder). The company was rebranded to Ink in 2013, and to Filestack in 2015. Filestack has since been acquired twice, seen 3 different CEOs, and by May 2014 lost the 4th and final member of its founding team. The company is now owned by private equity firms.
Upload and Filestack both started with the same goal: to make developers' lives easier when adding file uploads to websites. Filestack, which was acquired by Idera, Inc. in 2022 (a software conglomerate wholly-owned by private equity firms), now focuses on making a return for its new owners.
By contrast, Upload continues to focus on developers. Rather than increasing our bottom line, Upload is focused on growing its user base by providing an awe-inspiring experience to developers who need a streamlined file upload process for their web apps.
Here's why you should consider Upload:
Reason #1
A modern, streamlined dashboard.
Upload's dashboard is sleek, modern, and intuitively puts key metrics and actions in easy-to-access areas.
With Upload, you can look up monthly and daily bandwidth usage, storage usage trends, and CPU usage with the blink of an eye.
All of our plans support team access, allowing you to share your account with your trusted colleagues.
Reason #2
Lightweight developer SDKs.
Our developer SDKs are smaller, which means they load faster:
Filestack's SDK is 73KB and its upload widget is 183KB.
Our SDK is 6KB and our upload widget is 33KB.
Our core SDK is 10% the size of Filestack's.
Did you know: webpage speed is a ranking factor for Google.
import { Upload } from "upload-js";
// Call once per app.const upload = Upload({ apiKey: "free" });
// <input type="file" onchange="onChange(event)" />async function onChange(event) { const [ file ] = event.target.files; const { fileUrl } = await upload.uploadFile(file); console.log(`File uploaded: ${fileUrl}`);}Reason #3
Quick to integrate.
With Upload, you get clear and simple documentation. Our READMEs show you exactly what to do, and how to do it.
You can have Upload integrated in approx. 60 seconds using the following live code snippets:
Reason #4
Advanced traffic management.
Being able to quickly add file uploads to your website is great.
However, what about preventing abuse? How many file uploads per IP address is acceptable? What about the total size of those files? What about the size of each of those files? What about blocking users and IP addresses?
Filestack doesn't allow you to control all of these settings. By contrast, Upload allows you to control each and every one, with its state-of-the-art traffic management system, which is seamlessly integrated into the Upload Dashboard.
Reason #5
Reverse proxy support.
Only Upload allows you to transform files hosted on external sites.
This means you can treat Upload as a CDN — enabling you to transform, optimize, resize and crop images on your website, without moving them to Upload's storage.
By contrast, Filestack only allows you to transform files you've uploaded to the service.
Reason #6
Support for custom code execution.
Upload is built for developers, and our support for custom code execution is testament to that.
Both Filestack and Upload support image transformations, but only Upload supports file transformations using custom code.
This allows you to grow with the Upload platform, giving you the ability to build transformations that can invoke native binaries like TensorFlow, FFmpeg and ImageMagick.
Reason #7
Customer support, with no delays.
Customers who leave Filestack often claim that slow customer support, unanswered emails, and unannounced breaking changes are among their biggest reasons for leaving.
With Upload you can talk directly with our development team through our instant chat button. Furthermore, our internal processes ensure we never introduce breaking changes, without telling you first. We also enjoy inviting customers to Slack to provide integration assistance, which we're usually able to wrap-up in an afternoon.
Reason #8
We're much cheaper, too*
While Filestack offers a free tier, its paid tiers are less affordable and less economical than Upload's:
Affordability: Upload's middle tier is $35pm whereas Filestack's lowest paid tier is $59pm (and provides 60% less storage space than Upload's tier).
Economics: Upload's middle tier is $0.23 per GB of storage, whereas Filestack's equivalent tier is $0.98 per GB of storage*.
* Calculated by taking the price of the plan, dividing it by 3 (to account for storage, bandwidth and CPU quotas), and then dividing the resulting number by the GBs of storage included in the plan. (Prices taken on 30th May 2022.)
Filestack vs Upload
Let's see how Upload compares as a Filestack alternative:
  |   | |
|---|---|---|
| Highest plan The highest plan the vendor lists on their pricing page. Both offer a custom plan with effectively unlimited usage, available on request. | $359/month* | $195/month |
| Middle plan The middle plan offered by this vendor. | $59/month* | $35/month |
| Lowest plan The lowest tier offered by this vendor. | Free | $7/month |
| Price of storage For Upload, this is calculated by dividing the middle plan's price by 3 (to account for storage, bandwidth and transformation quotas), and then dividing that number by the plan's storage quota in GBs. For the vendor, this is calculated by dividing their most-equivalent paid plan's price by 3 (to account for storage, bandwidth and transformation quotas), and then dividing that number by the plan's storage quota in GBs. | $0.98 per GB | $0.23 per GB |
| Invite team members Invite multiple team members to manage your account. | ||
| Removable branding The ability to remove the vendor's branding from UI components, such as Upload Widgets, that your users will see. | $359/month plan only | |
| Cloud-based file storage Store and host files with the vendor using their cloud storage. | ||
| URL-based file transformations Run URL-based file transformations to transform your files in real-time. | ||
| Perma-caching Serve transformed files (e.g. resized images & thumbnails) to users via a perma-cache to avoid processing delays on all subsequent requests, forever. | ||
| Worldwide CDN A content delivery network (CDN) serves your files from many locations around the world, ensuring minimal download latency for your users. | ||
| Folders Create folders and sub-folders for your files, e.g. to organise content by user, project, time, etc. | ||
| Image optimization Optimize images, e.g. by producing small WEBP thumbnails from larger JPEG photographs. | ||
| Image conversion Convert images to other formats, e.g. WEBP, PNG and JPG. | ||
| Image resizing Resize images in real-time via the URL. | ||
| Image cropping Crop images in real-time by manually providing crop dimensions. | ||
| Image cropping with AI Crop images in real-time using automatic AI-based smart cropping. | ||
| WEBP support The ability to read WEBP images, and to save images as WEBP. | ||
| Extract image metadata (EXIF) The ability to extract the EXIF metadata embedded within JPEGs. | ||
| Fast support Get ultra-fast responses to your technical questions and support tickets. | ||
| Support via Slack Friendly and professional support over Slack. | - | |
| Support via email Friendly and professional support with an expert team, via email. | ||
| Usage monitoring Monitor your storage, processing & bandwidth usage over time using our beautiful dashboards. | ||
| SSL (HTTPS) All uploads, downloads and file transformations run over HTTPS, keeping you and your users safe. | ||
| Expiring links The ability to expire files after a period of time has elapsed. | ||
| Expiring links with messages After a file expires, the ability to redirect users to an alternative URL, or to display a custom error message. | ||
| Max file size management The ability to set limits on the size of the files your users can upload. | One Limit (Project-Wide) | Many Limits (Rule-Based) |
| Rate limit management The ability to rate-limit uploads using custom dimensions and frequencies. For example: "100 uploads per day per IP" or "5 video uploads per hour per user" | ||
| Advanced traffic management The ability to limit upload traffic using custom dimensions and frequencies. For example: "1 GB per day per IP" or "100 MB of images per hour per user" | ||
| IP blacklist management The ability to reject upload attempts based on custom dimensions, including the source IP address. | ||
| Authenticated URLs Upload supports federated access control, meaning you can authenticate & authorize access to your files via your application's own security system. | ||
| Proxy support The ability to transform files (e.g. resize images) that are hosted on existing websites, without needing to move the files to the vendor's storage. | ||
| Custom CNAME Make Upload your own by using a custom CNAME: your users will never know we're here. | ||
| Video transcoding Convert uploaded videos to streamable formats. | Coming Soon | |
| Custom S3 bucket Bring your own AWS S3 bucket to store your files. | ||
| REST API Upload, list and delete file via a REST API. | ||
| Core JavaScript SDK The ability to build a custom file upload UI, using a minimal amount of JavaScript code from the vendor. | ||
| Core JavaScript SDK (size) The size of the core JavaScript SDK (smaller is better). | 73KB | 6KB |
| File upload widget Add a file upload UI to your website using a drop-in widget. | ||
| File upload widget (size) The size of the file upload widget (smaller is better). | 183KB | 33KB |
| Compare Compare the pricing for yourself: we've provided a link to the price page for each option. | See pricing | See pricing |
Ready to try Upload?
We believe we've built a superior product to Filestack. We think you'll agree. Create your account today to play with our intuitive dashboards and advanced features, and then decide for yourself:
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Storage & CDN, built-in.
Upload provides cloud-based file storage, file transformations, and a worldwide CDN, all fully integrated.
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