Sightengine

Sightengine provides automated content moderation and media analysis APIs designed to assess, filter, and moderate images, videos, text, and audio. The platform is aimed at developers and organizations building scalable content analysis pipelines to detect unwanted media. It takes the form of accessible APIs and SDKs that process digital content without involving human moderators.

• Image moderation with 120+ to 150 moderation classes covering nudity, hate, violence, drugs, weapons, and self-harm
• Video moderation and live-stream filtering supporting videos up to 50MB or 500MB depending on the plan
• OCR and QR moderation to extract text and moderate QR codes present in images and videos at scale
• Text moderation to detect and filter sexual, hateful, violent, insulting, or otherwise inappropriate text, personal information, links, and usernames
• Audio moderation to transcribe and detect profanity in audio files
• AI content detection to identify AI-generated images, videos, speech, music, and deepfakes or face swaps
• Visual search and near-duplicate detection to find similar content, duplicates, and prevent spam or abuse
• Profile image validation and age group estimation to check face visibility, quality, filters, and implement age verification

Pros

• Provides automated processing that returns moderation results in milliseconds to scale moderation pipelines
• Offers broad multimodal detection spanning images, videos, text, audio, AI generation, and identity verification
• Maintains data privacy by ensuring no human moderator is involved and files are not shared with third parties
• Includes developer-focused tooling with simple SDKs, API documentation, and feedback loops for continuous improvement

Cons

• Starter plans limit video uploads to 50MB and do not include live-stream support
• Audio moderation and advanced video or live-stream moderation require upgrading to the Pro plan
• Specific tiers cap included operations per month, requiring additional fees per operation beyond the base allocation
• Exact pricing tiers above Starter and Pro or enterprise custom limits are not fully detailed on the pricing page text

Sightengine fits developers and platform teams building marketplaces, social apps, and content-sharing services that need to automatically screen user-generated images, videos, text, and audio at scale. It is well-suited for enforcing terms of use, blocking spammers, and validating user profile pictures or age groups. It is a poor fit for teams seeking manual human review workflows or operations that require fully offline on-premise deployments without API connectivity.

The platform utilizes a freemium model with a free tier alongside paid monthly subscription plans. The Starter tier costs $29 per month and includes 10,000 operations per month, with additional operations billed at $0.002 per operation; it includes visual moderation, text moderation, AI image and video detection, and deepfake detection with videos limited to 50MB and no live-stream support. The Pro tier is the most popular option, costing $99 per month for 40,000 operations per month plus $0.002 per additional operation, and includes everything in Starter plus advanced video and live-stream moderation up to 500MB videos, live moderation, audio moderation, custom search, disallow lists, spam and near-duplicate detection, liveness detection, recapture detection, age estimation, and AI music detection.

Unlike manual moderation teams, Sightengine automates content analysis through APIs to process media in milliseconds at a fraction of the cost. Compared to generic cloud vision services, it bundles specialized moderation classes specifically tailored for safety use cases such as nudity, gore, weapon detection, deepfake identification, and circumvention attempts. It also differentiates itself by combining multimodal capabilities across text, audio, and visual data into a single unified pipeline.

Sightengine works with image files, video files up to 50MB or 500MB, live streams, audio files, text, QR codes, and metadata formats such as EXIF and C2PA checkers.