Sightengine
A content moderation and image analysis API for platform parties, covering image, video, text and audio moderation. It can identify AI-generated content and deepfakes, perform duplicate detection and avatar verification. The official offers a free quota of 2,000 operations per month.
Updated: 2026-10-26
What is Sightengine?
Sightengine is a content moderation and image analysis API service provider for platforms. Its official website positions it as "reliable content moderation and image analysis". It focuses on using APIs to automatically evaluate, filter and moderate images, videos and texts, and the official claims that its cost is much lower than manual moderation. Its relationship with manual moderation teams is complementary rather than substitutive: it first has machines screen out obviously violating content, and humans only handle edge cases, thus building an extensible content analysis pipeline. The official product line is divided into five categories: moderation, AI content detection, visual search, human and identity, image analysis and OCR; the image moderation category is marked as 120+ categories in the navigation bar and described as 150 categories in the body copy, covering nudity, hate speech, violence, drugs, weapons, self-harm, etc. The official states that it is context-aware, highly customizable and tunable on demand.
Who is it for?
- Communities, social and dating platforms with UGC content that require automatic filtering before content goes live
- E-commerce and second-hand trading platforms that review product images, comments and in-site chat text
- Live streaming and short video products that require near-real-time or real-time filtering capabilities
- Products that offer AI-generated content need to identify or block AI images, AI videos, and deepfakes
- Identity scenarios requiring avatar verification, age group verification and liveness detection
Key features
6Image and Video Moderation
Covers categories such as nudity, hate speech, violence, drugs, weapons, and self-harm. The official states that it is highly customizable and can be fine-tuned according to business needs.
Text and Audio Moderation
Detect inappropriate text, personal information, links and usernames; perform transcription on audio and detect profanity.
AI Content Detection
Includes AI image detection, deepfake detection (identifying face replacement and AI tampering), AI video detection, AI audio detection, and AI music detection. AI audio and music labeling are relatively new.
OCR and QR Code Moderation
Recognizes text and QR codes appearing in images and videos and conducts moderation on them. It also provides independent OCR extraction capabilities for large-scale text extraction.
Visual Search & Anti-Abuse
Identify duplicate and similar content, and use blacklists and spam detection to spot attempts to bypass moderation or redirect transactions outside the platform.
Personnel and Identity Verification
Avatar verification (based on dimensions such as facial visibility, image quality, and filters), age group estimation, and facial liveness detection, the latter being used to identify spoofing and presentation attacks.
How to use Sightengine
- First verify the accuracy with the official website Demo and free tier: The official pricing page shows that the free tier includes 2,000 operations per month (500 operations per day limit), covering basic content review and AI detection with no time limit.
- the paid tier page indicates that the Starter tier costs $29 per month for 10,000 operations, and the Pro tier costs $99 per month for 40,000 operations.
- Any excess usage is charged at $0.002 per operation, with the prevailing prices on the official website’s respective pages taking precedence.
- Clarify the definition of "one operation" before integration: The official instructions state that billing is based on request types—for example, running nudity detection on an image counts as one operation, and the interface will return the consumption amount for this operation.
- Do not set the review threshold to the strictest level all at once.
- first conduct a trial run with low traffic, count false positives, and then gradually tighten the threshold step by step.
- Capabilities related to facial recognition, age, and liveness detection involve privacy issues, so be sure to verify local regulations and the official website’s privacy compliance statement.
Traffic & popularity
Data month Sep 2026
Sightengine receives about 2.7M visits per month and ranks #20,123 worldwide.
Monthly visits
12 monthsTraffic sources
- Search71.0%
- Direct23.7%
- Referrals2.5%
- Social2.1%
- AI assistants0.7%
Top countries
- United States39.0%
- France6.2%
- Canada4.6%
- United Kingdom3.4%
- Bangladesh3.3%
Estimated from third-party traffic data.
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