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Pqina Review

Worth it

Should I use Pqina?

Designs and builds performant, responsive, and highly polished web components. - pqina.nl

· 1 month ago

Buy if your dev team needs polished file upload or in-app image editing — FilePond is free and Pintura is $149/yr. Skip it if you have no developers or need an enterprise vendor with guarantees.

Confidence

Medium. Based on 14 public sources: vendor pages, GitHub, Reddit threads, CVE data, and company-data sites. No named customer companies were disclosed in the evidence.

Ratings

  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Feature depth
  • Support quality
  • Security posture

Pricing

Free

FilePond

ModelNot disclosed
Monthly feesNot disclosed
HardwareNot disclosed
Free tierYes
Pintura$149/year

Best for

  • Dev teams adding file upload
  • Apps with user image editing
  • Multi-framework JS projects
  • Open-source projects using FilePond free

Not for

  • No-code or low-code teams — it's an SDK requiring developers
  • Buyers wanting SLAs and multi-person vendor accountability — it's one person
  • Products needing guaranteed long-term support — prior products reached end of life
  • Anyone expecting a hosted service — you integrate and maintain it

Gotchas - check before you buy

medium

Pintura licenses are per developer and per product — bigger teams pay more

medium

Slim cropper customers were forced to migrate when it was retired

low

It's a subscription, not a one-time buy; budget the annual renewal

low

Impersonation accounts have fooled developers; verify you're on

Pros and cons

Pros

  • 4.9/5 average from 500+ Pintura customers
  • Claims 10,000+ companies use its components
  • FilePond uploader is free and open source
  • Official React, Vue, Angular, and Svelte wrappers exist
  • Strong reputation among front-end developers on Reddit

Cons

  • One-person company; bus-factor risk on every product
  • Slim Image Cropper reached end of life after six years
  • Pintura is proprietary and paid; core code stays closed
  • Some developers find the license price steep for small projects
  • No public security page

Sources & method

- 14 sources - One CVE in the Snippy WordPress plugin; no dedicated security page published.

official x5review x5security x2news x2
  • CVE-2025-23803: CSRF to reflected XSS in PQINA Snippy plugin, A cross-site request forgery flaw in Snippy versions up to 1.4.1 allows reflected XSS attacks.

Key stats

  • Value for money: 4/5

    Rating

  • Free

    Starting price

  • 14

    Sources

  • Analyzed

  • Value for money: 4/5. $149/yr vs months of in-house build effort
  • Ease of use: 5/5. Reddit users repeatedly call it easy to implement
  • Feature depth: 4/5. Pintura covers crop, annotate, blur, video add-on
  • Support quality: 4/5. Testimonials praise support; solo founder does it all
  • Security posture: 2/5. CVE in Snippy plugin; no security page found
  • 4.9/5 Customer rating 500+ Pintura customers
  • $149/yr Starting price 1 developer, 1 product
  • Yes Free tier FilePond is open source
  • 2012 Founded Solo founder, ~$120K ARR (2020)

Pricing

FilePond

Free

  • Open-source file upload
  • Image previews, drag and drop
  • Framework wrappers included

Pintura

$149/year

  • 1 developer, 1 product
  • Full image editing SDK
  • Video editing available as add-on tier

Security

One CVE in the Snippy WordPress plugin; no dedicated security page published.

  • CVE-2025-23803: CSRF to reflected XSS in PQINA Snippy pluginA cross-site request forgery flaw in Snippy versions up to 1.4.1 allows reflected XSS attacks.⁸

What users say

Developers praise the polish and easy implementation, though a minority call the paid licenses steep and one dismissed FilePond as looks-only.

“Just used this in a recent project! It’s easy to implement, has image previews, drag and”
Reddit, r/sveltejs
“I can imagine that for some projects the price might be steep. You could decide to make your project open source under G”
Reddit, r/web_design
“This is not the case of FilePond in my opinion. It looks cool and that's it.”
Reddit, r/web_design
Full analysis

Based on 14 public sources: vendor pages, GitHub, Reddit threads, CVE data, and company-data sites. No named customer companies were disclosed in the evidence.

Solo-built, well-loved JS components: free FilePond, $149/yr Pintura. Great for devs, useless for no-code teams.

Methodology

Based on 14 public sources: vendor pages, GitHub, Reddit threads, CVE data, and company-data sites. No named customer companies were disclosed in the evidence.

Read how a report is made.

Sources

  1. Pintura Image Editor product pagepqina.nl
    official
  2. FilePond product pagepqina.nl
    official
  3. Pintura pricing (Gumroad membership)pqina.gumroad.com
    official
  4. Pqina revenue and founding data — GetLatkagetlatka.com
    news
  5. Pqina RocketReach profile (1 employee)rocketreach.co
    news
  6. Pqina GitHubgithub.com
    official
  7. Pqina CodeCanyon profile (Slim EOL notice)codecanyon.net
    official
  8. CVE-2025-23803 Snippy plugincve.imfht.com
    security
  9. Pqina security pagepqina.nl
    security
  10. FilePond recommendation thread, r/sveltejsreddit.com
    review
  11. FilePond launch thread, r/web_designreddit.com
    review
  12. PQINA Photo Editor alternatives — SaaSHubsaashub.com
    review
  13. Similar sites to pqina.nlsitelike.org
    review
  14. edit.photo thread mentioning Pintura, r/webdevreddit.com
    review

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