COMPARISON · MODERATION APIs

Flat-cost text,
not per-operation.

Sightengine is a capable moderation API across media and text, billed per operation. For the high-volume text path, Filter8 is deterministic and flat-cost — replayable verdicts, sub-millisecond, PII-aware, and nothing retained after the response.

Try the playground → See flat pricing

100 free calls · no per-operation meter · run the math on your volume.

Flat, not per-operation

Per-operation pricing is linear in volume. Filter8 sustains huge throughput per core, so filtering every message costs roughly the same as filtering some of them.

Deterministic & replayable

Same input, same verdict, forever — with an explain trace of every candidate and veto. No model to drift, no score to second-guess.

Built-in contact/PII catch

Phone, email, and URLs — even spelled-out as "six-eight-six… at gmail dot com" — caught in the same call, at sub-millisecond speed.

Sightengine vs Filter8 — on text

CAPABILITY	Sightengine	Filter8
Approach	Hosted ML classifier	Deterministic engine
Cost model	Per operation — linear	Flat — marginal cost ≈ compute
Latency	Network round-trip	Sub-millisecond, in-process
Output	Class probabilities	Verdict + clean_text
Explainable / replayable	Scores	✓ reproducible explain trace
Data residency	Text sent to Sightengine	Nothing retained after the response
Evasion (leet · homoglyph · spacing · zero-width)	Model-dependent	26 classes, deterministic
Contact / PII (incl. spelled-out)	Varies	Built-in classifiers
Rating-aware (E–M · minors)	—	Per-rating, per-category ceilings
Image / video moderation	✓	—

Comparison as of July 2026 based on public information and Filter8's positioning; Sightengine's capabilities and pricing change — verify current details with the vendor before relying on specifics.

WHERE SIGHTENGINE WINS

Honest about the trade

Sightengine covers images and video alongside text, with ML models and multilingual reach. If your moderation problem is multimodal, one API across media and text is a real convenience. Filter8 is deliberately narrow — the fastest, cheapest, most private path for high-volume text — and pairs cleanly with a visual service when you need one.

Sightengine comparison questions

Is Filter8 a Sightengine alternative?

For text, yes — deterministic, flat-cost, sub-millisecond, PII-aware. Sightengine also does image/video, which Filter8 doesn't; run both if you need media.

How does per-operation cost compare?

Per-operation scales with volume; our marginal cost is compute, so text filtering stays roughly flat. Compare your volume against a per-op rate.

Is deterministic accurate enough?

For known patterns + evasion on the hot path, yes and faster. Route the ambiguous tail to a model async.

Where does my text go?

Managed keeps nothing after the response and logs offsets, not substrings — nothing is handed to a third-party model.

COMPARE MORE

vs OpenAI — the free classifier → vs Stream & Sendbird — chat-SDK moderation → vs Community Sift — the enterprise suite →

Filter every message, flat.

No per-operation meter to ration against. 100 free calls, no card.

Get an API key Open the playground