Kraken.io vs Thumbor

Kraken.io is an image optimization service with a browser tool and an API. In the browser, it can optimize, compress, resize, and convert images without code; it also accepts ZIP archives and returns a processed archive. Supported formats are JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, SVG, AVIF, HEIC, and PDF. The service offers batch processing, metadata controls, and both listed compression modes, with a maximum upload size of 32. Each account starts with 100 MB of testing quota, and signup does not require a credit card. Monthly quota is measured by unprocessed source image data before overage charges. Plans include Free, Micro, Basic, Advanced, Premium, and Enterprise; the pricing note lists paid service from $5/mo. Customers can choose monthly or yearly billing and cancel, downgrade, or upgrade without a contract. Official plugins are available for WordPress and Magento.

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.