Fastly Image Optimizer vs Thumbor

Fastly Image Optimizer automates image processing and delivery for image-heavy sites and apps. It resizes, adjusts quality, crops or trims, changes orientation, converts formats, and serves images on demand at the edge. Transformations are made in real time from request parameters, avoiding the need to pre-generate and store multiple variants. Processed images are cached for reuse. Supported formats are WebP, AVIF, JPEG, and PNG; developers control resizing, quality, format, and cropping through query parameters and configuration. The service integrates with existing asset pipelines and CMS platforms while teams keep their current image sources. It can be enabled through the Fastly control panel or API, while Compute SDK access is available through a beta program. Pricing includes 100,000 image requests per month at free. Paid rates are billed per 10,000 image requests and vary by monthly volume, from $0.50 a month for 100,000–10 million requests to $0.01 a month beyond 5 billion. Every request sent to Image Optimizer, including through the SDK, counts as billable.

Thumbor is a self-hosted image service for on-demand cropping, resizing and flipping. Its smart mode looks for faces when choosing a crop and falls back to feature detection if it finds none. Filters can be chained, including brightness, contrast, grayscale, red-eye and blur. Thumbor supports WebP delivery to browsers that can display the format, and its listed capabilities include responsive images, automatic optimization and AVIF support. File, HTTP, Redis and Mongo implementations are available for loaders and storage. The service can be extended with custom filters, storage, loaders, engines, detection and optimizers. A SECURITY_KEY can be used to sign image URLs with HMAC to help guard against tampering. The default HTTP loader uses HTTP; the documentation also describes HTTPS and strict HTTPS options. Thumbor is distributed as a Python package, and current releases require Python 3.10 or newer. The project describes it as open source and lists an MIT license. Its platforms include API, Linux and self-hosted use. The listed plan costs nothing.