Detoxify vs Sightengine

Detoxify is a free, self-hosted library that provides trained models and code to classify toxic comments. Its original, unbiased, and multilingual models are based on BERT, RoBERTa, and XLM-RoBERTa, respectively. Depending on the model, outputs include categories such as threats, obscenity, insults, identity attacks, and explicit sexual content. The multilingual model is intended for English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, and Russian. The project describes research, fine-tuning on carefully constructed representative datasets, and helping moderators flag harmful content faster as intended uses. It can be installed with pip and called from Python to predict labels for one string or a list. Inference uses CPU by default and accepts a PyTorch device such as CUDA. The project warns that profanity-associated words may be labeled toxic regardless of tone or intent, potentially biasing results against vulnerable minority groups. Inference uses Transformers and PyTorch Lightning; training also requires the Kaggle API to download data. API access can be requested by email. The library is distributed under Apache-2.0.

Sightengine provides APIs to assess, filter, and moderate images, videos, and text. Its visual moderation checks categories including nudity, hate, violence, drugs, weapons, and self-harm. It also detects AI-generated images, videos, speech, and music, as well as deepfakes. Additional tools include OCR and QR moderation, image and video search, age estimation, liveness checks, and recapture detection. Image moderation thresholds and rules can be configured for different community policies. Developers can use API examples and SDKs for Curl, Python, PHP, and Node.js. Sightengine says it does not involve human moderators or share customer content with third parties. The Free plan costs nothing and has daily and monthly usage limits; it does not include video processing or live-stream support. Starter costs $29 a month for 10,000 operations, with additional operations at $0.002 each. Sightengine is cloud-deployed and lists API and web platforms.