What's the difference between Uppy and Transloadit?
Uppy and Transloadit may seem like they offer similar functionality but there's some key differences between the two.
Uppy is an open-source file uploader for the web. It was built by Transloadit to make it effortless and reliable for end-users to share their files. They can seamlessly fetch files from third-party sources like Dropbox, from cameras, or remote urls, and directly send them to your final destination. This could be an S3 bucket, some website's FTP Server, or Transloadit. In the last case, Transloadit's encoding platform is often used as an intermediate location to transform the files, before sending them to their final location, where they can be consumed by others.
On the other hand as indicated, Transloadit processes files. Whether this is simply as a proxy to export to your S3 bucket, or to perform a series of image manipulations, detect faces, encode video for best display on an iPad, Transloadit is the best way to handle this without owning and infrastructure which is expensive to build and operate when it's not your core business, and investments into it can't be leveraged by more than one company. It's possible to upload to Transloadit from Uppy, using the Transloadit plugin.
If you're handling files on the web, we recommend using both Transloadit and Uppy in conjunction with each other.