Meet the best alternative to Filestack
How does Bytescale 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 Bytescale 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 and has had 3 new CEOs. Filestack's original founding team left the company in 2014.
Bytescale 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 is now wholy owned by private equity firms.
Bytescale is affordable, feature-rich, and provides fast support. Rather than increasing our bottom line, Bytescale 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 — our prices are much lower, too.
Here's more reasons why you should switch to Bytescale:
Reason #1
A modern, streamlined dashboard.
Bytescale's dashboard is sleek, modern, and intuitively puts key metrics and actions in easy-to-access areas.
With Bytescale, you can look up monthly and daily bandwidth usage, storage usage trends, and processing 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 8% the size of Filestack's.
Did you know: webpage speed is a ranking factor for Google.
Reason #3
Fast customer support.
Customers who leave Filestack often claim that slow customer support, unanswered emails, and unannounced breaking changes are among their biggest reasons for leaving.
With Bytescale you can talk directly with our development team at any time. We also ensure no breaking changes through a rigorous internal process — and better yet — we're fast at implementing new features that our customers propose (assuming they benefit the wider platform, of course!).
Reason #4
Permanent file caching.
Filestack caches transformed images for 30 days.
Bytescale caches transformed images forever.
You will notice faster image downloads and a cheaper bill when using Bytescale, as we don't reprocess images every 30 days.
Reason #5
Upload acceleration.
Bytescale offers file upload acceleration, which provides upload speed boosts to all users around the world.
Bytescale's file upload acceleration can speed up file transfers by as much as 50-500% for long-distance uploads of larger files.
Users on mobile devices with variable upload and download speeds will benefit from Bytescale's file upload acceleration feature, as it reduces the variability in Internet routing and congestion.
Reason #6
Transforming external files.
Bytescale can optimize every image on your website, without you needing to move your images to Bytescale's storage.
Many of our customers use Bytescale as a CDN for their images, benefiting them with faster downloads and higher Google PageSpeed scores, without needing to move any files.
Reason #7
Folder-based storage.
Filestack uses flat storage: all your files are stored in a single folder. This can lead to unmanageable media libraries.
Bytescale uses hierarchical storage: this means you can create an unlimited number of folders and sub-folders for your files.
Wait! It gets better: each folder gets its own file permissions and storage layer. Folders can optionally be mapped to existing S3 buckets or HTTP sources, giving you full external storage support.
Bytescale gives you complete control.
Reason #8
Powerful REST API.
Bytescale's REST API uses industry-leading API documentation and also includes an OpenAPI specification. We support file listing, file copying, folder copying, batch file operations, and more.
Filestack's REST API offers very limited file management support. You cannot list files with the Filestack API. To list files, you must login to Filestack and manually list files via a user interface.
Reason #9
Real-time video transcoding
Bytescale supports real-time video transcoding, allowing you to play web-optimized videos within seconds of uploading them.
Filestack, by contrast, only supports asynchronous video transcoding. This requires you to wait for video transcoding jobs to complete before playing videos.
Your users could be waiting for tens of minutes.
This often necessitates changes to your app's code and UX, e.g. to introduce email notifications and loading screens, which take time to implement.
With real-time video transcoding, your videos are ready within seconds, meaning your app's code and UX remain simple.
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 #10
Clear documentation.
Bytescale's REST API and SDK documentation is best-in-class.
Every feature is clearly and concisely documented, with lots of copy-and-paste examples. We're also happy to answer your questions over instant chat at any time.
These code snippets demonstrate the simplicity of our SDKs:
Reason #11
We're much cheaper, too*
While Filestack offers a free tier, its paid tiers are less affordable and less economical than Bytescale's:
Affordability: Bytescale's middle tier is $35pm whereas Filestack's lowest paid tier is $59pm (and provides 60% less storage space than Bytescale's tier).
Economics: Bytescale'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 processing quotas), and then dividing the resulting number by the GBs of storage included in the plan. (Prices taken on 30th May 2022.)
Filestack vs Bytescale
Let's see how Bytescale 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 Bytescale, 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. | ||
| AVIF support AVIF is a modern image format, which offers better image quality and smaller file sizes compared to JPEGs. Bytescale's Image Processing API supports AVIF images as both an input and an output format. | ||
| WEBP support WEBP is a modern image format, which offers better image quality and smaller file sizes compared to JPEGs. Bytescale's Image Processing API supports WEBP images as both an input and an output format. | ||
| BlurHash support BlurHash is a modern image technology, which offers instant blurred placeholders for your images, through compact 16-character strings that can be stored in your database that efficiently represent the blur of an image. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 Bytescale 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 Bytescale your own by using a custom CNAME: your users will never know we're here. | ||
| Real-time video transcoding Convert uploaded videos to web-safe formats and stream the result in seconds, while the video is being transcoded. | ||
| Real-time video thumbnailing Generate multiple thumbnails from videos using a single GET request, as opposed to an asynchronous workflow using a POST request and multiple GET poll requests. | ||
| Video transcoding Convert uploaded videos to web-safe formats. | ||
| Video thumbnailing Generate multiple thumbnails from videos. | ||
| AWS S3 Use your own AWS S3 bucket as your account's primary storage. | ||
| DigitalOcean Spaces Use your own DigitalOcean Space as your account's primary storage. | ||
| JavaScript SDK size The size of the core JavaScript SDK (smaller is better). | 73KB | 6KB |
| 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 |
Did we make a mistake? Please let us know!
Ready to try Bytescale?
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.
Bytescale provides cloud-based file storage, file transformations, and a worldwide CDN, all fully integrated.
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