Why ImageKit?

Because it's a no-brainer — it just works.

If you’re reading this, it probably means:

  • You want to improve web performance by optimizing how images and videos are delivered and managed.
  • You’re exploring ways to handle an increasingly complex library of media assets more efficiently.
  • Perhaps you’re dissatisfied with your current setup and want to move to a modern, scalable, and composable architecture.
  • Maybe you’re comparing a few solutions and weighing the trade-offs.
  • Or you’ve already decided on ImageKit and just need to convince the rest of your team.

Either way, you have an important decision to make. You want a solution that improves web performance, simplifies asset management and is easy to use, cost-effective, and future-proof.

Before we go any further, a quick reality check: with enough time and expertise, almost any tool can be made to work. You could even build and maintain everything from scratch. The real questions are:

  • How much time and effort are you willing to pour in today and tomorrow maintaining it?
  • More importantly - Does your team have the skills, bandwidth, and motivation to keep that custom stack alive?

That’s where ImageKit steps in. We won’t claim to be perfect for every use case. But if the points below resonate, we’re likely the best fit for you.

Go live in minutes

Unless you’re building a hobby project, you probably don't want your web performance initiative to turn into one huge, blocking project.

You want to make incremental progress. Commit small changes. Ship them. Move on. Come back later when needed. Keep the momentum going.

This is exactly where ImageKit shines.

  1. Start immediately with zero code changes.
  2. Connect your existing storage — no heavy migrations or complex onboarding.
  3. Just change the base URL of your images and videos (or swap a CNAME) to get automatic image and video optimization out of the box.
  4. Migrating from Cloudinary, Imgix, or Akamai? Use ImageKit’s built-in URL rewriters to preserve your existing URLs and transformation syntax.

When you're ready, you can go further:

The point is: You get immediate, visible improvements without touching your existing codebase. It’s easier to build the case for web performance improvements with your team and management — show results first, then refine further.

Avoid billing surprises

The last thing you want is to get hit with an unexpected bill at the end of the month.

If you can’t predict your bill, you can’t plan your business. When billing has too many moving parts, it’s easy to lose track. We hate that too.

At ImageKit, we keep billing simple:

  • Billing is based on bandwidth usage when using ImageKit for media processing, and on storage and number of users when using ImageKit DAM.
  • No charges for the number of master assets, common image transformations, or derivative storage.

This means you can redesign your website, add new transformations and your bill won’t change. You can focus on building your product, not worrying about costs.

That being said, we do have a few other billing parameters for advanced use cases if and when you need them:

  • AI transformations are charged per image processed (cached forever — no reprocessing charges).
  • Video processing is charged exactly once based on video seconds processed, resolution, and codec. This cost is at par with other leading solutions in the market.

Our customers often describe our billing as predictable, boring, and fair — exactly how infrastructure billing should feel like.

Avoid vendor lock-in

If a platform forces you to migrate assets just to get optimized CDN delivery, you’re already locked in. We’ve been through that pain ourselves, and we hated it enough to build something better.

With ImageKit:

  • You can connect your existing storage (S3, GCS, Azure, web servers).
  • Even if you use ImageKit’s storage, we offer automatic, real-time backups of your assets — no support tickets needed.

Of course, if you want to use ImageKit’s full-fledged storage and DAM features, you can. But you’re never forced into it.

You can simply use ImageKit as an optimization and delivery layer without changing where your assets live.

Why we started ImageKit

Back in 2016, the three of us — Rahul, Manu, and Somesh — were working at Ixigo.com.

At the time, we were using a competing service. Migrating to it took months — moving assets, rewriting URLs, adapting code. Soon after, the billing surprises started: large overages, per-transformation charges, and more. It quickly became a nightmare.

Eventually, we had to leave and move everything back to our own infrastructure. It was painful.

We thought: why isn’t there a service that’s easy to start with, flexible, and predictable?

That’s how ImageKit was born.

Since then, we’ve added a ton of features — video processing, full DAM capabilities, AI transformations — but the core philosophy remains the same:

Make it simple. Make it predictable. Use smart defaults but allow for customization. Nothing fancy — just common sense and a lot of hard work.

How far we have come

We started with just images. Today, we offer:

  1. Video processing and delivery. Same unified API interface as images plus video specific features like adaptive bitrate streaming.
  2. Full-featured DAM (Digital Asset Management) with access control, versioning, and metadata management.
  3. Generative AI transformations (background removal, smart cropping, generative fill)

…and more. You can read full details in our docs.

Honestly, at some point, we’ll probably need to change the name — because ImageKit is way more than just images now.

But for now, we’re busy making the product better every day.

How we compare with other services

At the bottom of our website (in the footer), you’ll find comparison pages.

We’ve put real effort into:

  • Making sure we’re comparing apples to apples.
  • Highlighting not just features, but overall experience.
  • Being honest about tradeoffs, not just marketing spin.

We encourage you to check them out and see for yourself.