MultipleUpload vs Dropzone.js
Dropzone.js practically invented the friendly drop zone, and for small-file workflows it remains a perfectly good answer. The comparison is really about what happens when files stop being small.
If your requirement is "drag a few images onto the page and POST them", Dropzone is small, free and battle-tested — use it and move on.
MultipleUpload is for the requirements that grow teeth: multi-gigabyte files, flaky connections, uploads that must survive a reload, browser-direct-to-cloud, and content that needs validating or editing before it leaves the machine.
Side by side
| Dimension | Dropzone.js | MultipleUpload |
|---|---|---|
| Sweet spot | Attractive drop-zone UI for ordinary uploads. | Heavy-duty transfer engine with the UI included. |
| Chunking | Supported; server assembly and resume logic are yours to write. | Chunking with per-chunk retry, server-verified resume, and reference backends. |
| Reload survival | Not built in. | IndexedDB queue + blob persistence; continues automatically. Demo |
| Cloud direct | Via your own signing code. | S3 / Azure / GCS / tus strategies built in. |
| Validation | Extension/size/type checks. | Plus magic-byte MIME sniffing, image-dimension rules, duplicate detection, virus-scan hook. |
| Licence | Open source (MIT). | Commercial; free on localhost. |
A useful test
Ask of your project: "What should happen when a 2 GB upload dies at 97% on hotel Wi-Fi?" If the answer is "that never happens here", Dropzone is enough. If the answer needs to be "it resumes from 97% after the reload", that answer is the product. Chunked demo · Resume demo