What is Filestack used for?

Filestack is a file upload widget and API that adds transformations, intelligence, storage and CDN delivery to apps, with SDKs for common web frameworks. It is a good fit for letting users upload from Google Drive or Dropbox, and moderating and tagging user-uploaded images.

Is Filestack open source?

No. Filestack is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. In the File Storage & Sharing category, open-source options include Paperless-ngx, Zipline and Gokapi.

What are some alternatives to Filestack?

Filestack competes with Uploadcare and Cloudinary.

Filestack: features, pricing and alternatives

About Filestack

Filestack is a developer service for adding file uploads to websites and applications. It provides a file picker that lets users upload from a local disk or from cloud sources such as Google Drive, Dropbox and Instagram, and the vendor says it can be added with a couple of lines of code. Files can then be stored, transformed and delivered without the app team running that infrastructure.

Beyond uploading, the platform offers image transformations including content-aware cropping, face detection and face blur, audio and video processing, file conversion and a drop-in image editor. An intelligence layer adds OCR, document intelligence, content moderation, image tagging and virus or phishing detection. Delivery features include a CDN, a document viewer, webhooks and workflows that chain upload, transformation and delivery into one reusable job.

Filestack is proprietary and delivered as a hosted service with files able to land in S3, Azure or a customer's own bucket. SDKs exist for JavaScript, React, Angular, Python, PHP, Java and WordPress, a plugin gives coding agents access to its tools, and pricing is on the vendor's pricing page.

Key features

File picker with cloud source uploads
Smart image transformations and face blur
OCR and document intelligence
Content moderation and virus detection
Workflows chaining upload, transform and deliver
SDKs for major languages and frameworks

Good fit for

→Letting users upload from Google Drive or Dropbox
→Moderating and tagging user-uploaded images

Tags: file-upload; image-processing; cdn; api; developer-tools; ocr; content-moderation

Filestack: questions and answers

What is Filestack used for?: Filestack is a file upload widget and API that adds transformations, intelligence, storage and CDN delivery to apps, with SDKs for common web frameworks. It is a good fit for letting users upload from Google Drive or Dropbox, and moderating and tagging user-uploaded images.
Is Filestack open source?: No. Filestack is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. In the File Storage & Sharing category, open-source options include Paperless-ngx, Zipline and Gokapi.
What are some alternatives to Filestack?: Filestack competes with Uploadcare and Cloudinary.