NFT Metadata Storage Provider Comparison
NFT Metadata Storage Provider Comparison
Determining which storage solution is the best for your NFT project.
Deciding which decentralized storage solution to use for your NFT metadata can be difficult. There are many to choose from that all have various pros and cons. To make the decision easier, we took a deep dive into each service to compare their response times and other important features. The storage providers examined include Filebase, Pinata, NFT.Storage, Web3.storage, IPFS.io, Arweave, Amazon S3, and Self-Hosted.
Provider Response Times
All storage options come with tradeoffs. One of the most important tradeoffs is the balance of response times and decentralization. Typically, providers which are more decentralized also have slower response times.
Response times were calculated for each provider by using an average time-to-first-byte comparison across thousands of NFT image and metadata requests.
Amazon’s centralized S3 service was included in the comparison to provide a baseline for the response times.
Results
50th Percentile Comparison (Ranked Fastest to Slowest)
Filebase: 2.12s
AWS S3: 2.2s
IPFS.io: 2.67s
Web3.Storage: 2.89s
Arweave: 3.4s
Pinata.Cloud: 3.49s
NFT.Storage: 4.1s
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Want to explore the data further? Check out Skry’s API documentation to use NFT latency data streams and more.
Pros/Cons
In addition to analyzing the average response times of each storage provider, it's important to understand their pros and cons. Each provider was compared across seven different key data points.
Cost
The pricing models and costs associated with using the storage provider. For the purposes of the comparison table below, we focus on the cheapest paid option
Ease of use
The difficulty of using the provider. This ranges from code-only implementations to intuitive interfaces.
Redundancy
The level of redundancy the storage provider implements. This can range from a single IPFS node to many nodes with caching and geographic diversity.
S3 API compatibility
The ability to interact with files on the provider by using the S3 API syntax.
IPFS CID in URL
The availability of the files CID in the provider's file URLs. If the CID is in the URL, it is easier to recover files from the IPFS network. This is also critical when linking IPFS files to on-chain assets (NFTs).
Browser compatibility
The browser compatibility of a file uploads location. E.G., whether or not it makes use of the HTTP URL syntax.
Decentralization
The level of reliance on the provider itself to maintain the uploaded data.
Comparison Table
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a high-performing decentralized storage solution, Filebase is an excellent option. Filebase strikes a balance between maintaining decentralization, being simple to use, and being highly performant.
Each storage provider has areas they shine, and it depends on your requirements to determine which option is best for you.
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