[brycewray]

Have done both “local” (site host) and Cloudinary. With static sites in particular, a lot of it depends on your preferred site-building tool. The Hugo static site generator does a pretty impressive job of managing and processing images out of the box while, with most other SSGs, you’ll need to wrangle plugins and packages and you won’t get the same high performance. Thus, apart from Hugo sites, Cloudinary may end up being a better solution — although you’re right about its UI, and I’d say the same thing about its documentation. Even if you do use Hugo, it may be better to go with Cloudinary so you can avoid having to keep a lot of images in the site repo.