Best Image CDN for E-commerce: 2026 Comparison
Honest comparison of the top image CDNs for e-commerce in 2026: Sirv, Cloudinary, imgix, ImageKit, and Cloudflare Images. Features, pricing, and where each one falls short.
Disclosure: This article is published on the Sirv blog. We’ve done our best to provide an honest comparison, including Sirv’s limitations alongside its strengths. We encourage you to test multiple providers with your own images before deciding.
Your product images are doing the heavy lifting. Shoppers can’t touch your products, can’t try them on, can’t flip them over in their hands. All they have is what you show them. But great photos come with a price tag: file size. And when your catalog hits thousands of SKUs, even small inefficiencies snowball into slow pages, lost sales, and shoppers who bounce before the hero image loads.
That’s where an image CDN comes in. One built specifically for online retail.
Why E-commerce Stores Need a Dedicated Image CDN
A traditional CDN like Cloudflare or AWS CloudFront caches your files on edge servers around the world. That helps with latency, sure. But it delivers your images exactly as you uploaded them. A 3 MB product photo served to a mobile shopper on a 4G connection? Still 3 MB.
An image CDN adds real-time processing on top of delivery. It resizes, crops, converts formats, and compresses images on the fly, all from URL parameters. Upload one high-resolution master image and the CDN generates every variant your store needs. Every device, every screen size. You don’t touch a thing.
For e-commerce, this matters because:
- Catalog scale: Stores with thousands of SKUs can’t manually optimize every image for every breakpoint. Nobody has time for that.
- Page speed directly affects revenue: Google’s research consistently shows that each extra second of load time kills conversions. For product pages loaded with imagery, an image CDN is the single biggest optimization you can make.
- SEO depends on Core Web Vitals: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is heavily influenced by image delivery speed. Faster images, better rankings.
- Multiple image types: Product photography, lifestyle shots, 360-degree spins, zoom views. E-commerce uses more diverse image formats than almost any other vertical.
What Features Actually Matter?
Not every image CDN is built with e-commerce in mind. Here’s what to prioritize.
Automatic Format Conversion
The CDN should detect browser support and serve WebP to Chrome, AVIF where supported, and fall back to JPEG or PNG when needed. All without changing your markup. This alone can cut image payload by 30-60%.
On-the-fly Resizing and Responsive Images
Look for URL-based parameters that let you request any dimension. Bonus points if the CDN can generate srcset markup automatically, so you don’t have to manage dozens of image sizes per product.
360-Degree Product Views and Deep Zoom
For e-commerce, serving interactive 360 spins and high-resolution zoom views from the same CDN is a huge advantage. Most image CDNs don’t offer this. You’d need a separate service, adding complexity and cost.
Digital Asset Management (DAM)
A built-in DAM lets your team upload, organize, and manage product images in one place. If the CDN also handles storage and team collaboration, that’s one fewer tool in your stack.
Platform Integrations
Native plugins for Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and BigCommerce cut setup time massively. The best integrations are install-and-go, requiring little to no code changes.
Top Image CDNs Compared
Sirv
Sirv is purpose-built for e-commerce image delivery. It bundles an image CDN, 360 spin viewer, deep zoom, and digital asset management into a single platform.
Strengths:
- Built-in 360-degree product viewer: upload a set of images and Sirv generates an interactive spin automatically
- Deep zoom for images up to 1 gigapixel, with fast tile-based loading
- Automatic WebP conversion with real-time resizing via URL parameters
- DAM with team roles, shared folders, and batch processing
- Native integrations for Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, PrestaShop, and more
- CDN with 24 edge locations and sub-millisecond cached response times
Pricing: Free plan with 500 MB storage and 2 GB bandwidth. Business plans start at $19/month with 5 GB storage and 20 GB bandwidth, scaling up to 500 GB. Enterprise from $999/month with custom bandwidth, failover, and 99.999% uptime SLA.
Limitations: Smaller CDN footprint than Cloudinary or imgix (24 PoPs vs 60+). No AI-powered features like auto-tagging or background removal. The free tier is tight (500 MB storage, 2 GB bandwidth). Video capabilities are limited to HLS streaming with no transcoding or editing API.
Best for: E-commerce stores that need 360 views, zoom, and image optimization in one platform without stitching together multiple services.
Cloudinary
Cloudinary is one of the most established names in image and video management. Broad feature set covering image and video transformation, AI-based tagging, and a huge API surface.
Strengths:
- Very mature API with hundreds of transformation options
- AI-powered features like auto-cropping, background removal, and content-aware resizing
- Strong video processing alongside images
- Large ecosystem with SDKs for most languages and frameworks
Pricing: Free plan with 25 credits/month (1 credit = 1 GB storage, 1 GB bandwidth, or 1,000 transformations). Plus plan at $89/month, Advanced at $224/month. The credit-based billing can make costs hard to predict at scale.
Best for: Teams that need advanced video processing alongside images, or developers building media-heavy applications who want a massive API.
imgix
imgix focuses on real-time image processing via URL parameters. Popular with developer-heavy teams that want a pure rendering pipeline without built-in storage or DAM.
Strengths:
- Fast, developer-friendly URL-based API
- Good image quality at high compression
- Used by large-scale companies like Spotify and Airbnb
- Supports PDF and SVG rendering
Pricing: $3 per 1,000 master images plus $0.08 per GB of bandwidth, with a $10/month minimum. The per-image pricing model can get expensive for stores with large catalogs. A store with 50,000 product images would pay $150/month for source images alone, before bandwidth.
Best for: Developer teams that want a lightweight rendering layer and already have their own storage and DAM solution.
ImageKit
ImageKit offers real-time image optimization and transformation with straightforward pricing. It covers the core image CDN needs well and has improved its feature set a lot over recent years.
Strengths:
- Clean URL-based API for transformations
- Generous free tier (20 GB bandwidth/month)
- Built-in media library with basic DAM features
- Good documentation and quick setup
Pricing: Free plan with 20 GB bandwidth and 3 GB storage. Pro plan at $89/month with 225 GB bandwidth and 225 GB storage. Overage at $0.45/GB for bandwidth.
Best for: Small to mid-size stores looking for a solid image CDN with a generous free tier and simple pricing.
Cloudflare Images
Cloudflare Images rides on Cloudflare’s massive global network for delivery. It’s a newer product compared to the others and takes a different approach with predefined image variants.
Strengths:
- Massive global edge network (300+ locations)
- Simple variant-based approach for predefined sizes
- Integrates naturally if you already use Cloudflare for DNS/CDN
- Low per-image storage costs
Pricing: Free tier with 5,000 transformations/month. Paid storage at $5 per 100,000 images, delivery at $1 per 100,000 images served, transformations at $0.50 per 1,000. Costs can be unpredictable during traffic spikes.
Best for: Sites already on Cloudflare that need basic image resizing and format conversion without advanced e-commerce features.
Pricing at a Glance
| Provider | Free Tier | Paid Starting Price | 360 / Zoom | Built-in DAM |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sirv | 500 MB storage, 2 GB BW | $19/month | Yes | Yes |
| Cloudinary | 25 credits/month | $89/month | No | Yes |
| imgix | Limited trial | ~$10/month minimum | No | No |
| ImageKit | 20 GB BW, 3 GB storage | $89/month | No | Basic |
| Cloudflare Images | 5,000 transforms | Pay-as-you-go | No | No |
Platform Integration Support
| Provider | Shopify | WooCommerce | Magento | BigCommerce |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sirv | Native plugin | Native plugin | Native extension | Supported |
| Cloudinary | Via app/SDK | Plugin available | Extension available | Via SDK |
| imgix | Via SDK | Via SDK | Via SDK | Via SDK |
| ImageKit | Via SDK | Plugin available | Via SDK | Via SDK |
| Cloudflare Images | Manual setup | Manual setup | Manual setup | Manual setup |
So Which One Should You Pick?
It really depends on what matters most to you.
Need 360 product views or deep zoom? Sirv is the only option that includes these natively. With every other provider, you’d bolt on a separate tool, manage another vendor, and handle the integration yourself.
Video processing is a primary need? Cloudinary’s combined image and video pipeline is the most mature option, though you’ll pay more for it.
Building a custom developer stack? imgix gives you a clean rendering API to work with. Just bring your own storage and asset management.
Budget is tight and you’re starting small? ImageKit’s free tier offers the most bandwidth, making it a solid starting point.
Want the best all-in-one value for e-commerce? Sirv packs the most e-commerce-specific functionality (image CDN, 360 spins, zoom, DAM, and platform integrations) at $19/month, the lowest entry price of the paid options.
Your Next Step
Whatever you choose, stop serving unoptimized images directly from your origin server. Even the most basic image CDN setup (automatic format conversion and responsive resizing) will measurably improve your page speed, Core Web Vitals, and conversion rates.
If your store relies on rich product imagery, try Sirv free and see how 360 views, zoom, and automated optimization work together. No credit card required. You can be serving optimized images in minutes.