Upload vs Uploadcare

Upload.js installed into our web app in a few seconds. It's a lightweight library, so there's no UI elements. A "file input element" was already present on our page, and with Upload.js you set their helper method as the "onchange" attribute, and they take care of everything else from there.

Used their AI image cropping for some projects (you don't define crop geometry yourself -- they detect which part to crop for you), and manual cropping for others (where the user wanted to set which part of the image to crop in the UI). We're currently saving all our images out to webp.

Time savings aside, it's very cost-effective. Entry tier for like $7pm worked well for several client projects. Only upgraded to the $35pm tier because a client wanted password-protected files -- other than that, the quotas / limits are very generous.

Uploadcare doesn't require you to define cached transformations, and handles them quickly for you so you don't have to fiddle with configurations.

Their APIs are open source on github so you can see the source and provide pull requests.

Uploadcare provides a client side widget and API, with well worded documentation that clearly explains how each part of the widget is implemented. The client side API also implements the jQuery promises interface for cleanly defining callbacks and updating with progress.

With the client side API decoupled from the upload interface, you can much more easily create customized UI's that match the look and feel of your site.