OFACScreen vs yente

OFACScreen screens people and organizations against sanctions lists for US businesses. It covers eight sources: OFAC SDN and Non-SDN, BIS, UN, EU, UK OFSI, Canada SEMA and Swiss SECO. The lists refresh automatically each day, and fuzzy matching is designed to account for transliterations, aliases, alternate spellings and other name differences. Screening is available on the web or through a REST API, including on the trial; API batch requests can contain up to 100 names. Users can also upload CSV files, with row limits that depend on the plan. Saved names are checked daily, with email alerts for matches. Paid plans keep timestamped search records and allow CSV export of the audit trail. Free searches allow 25 searches per day per IP without an account or saved history. A one-time report is $9.99, paid once. Starter costs $49 a month billed annually, and the 14-day trial includes 25 searches, three users, five monitored names and API access. The privacy policy says audit logs stay for seven years and uploaded CSV files are deleted within 30 days.

Yente is an open-source API for searching, retrieving, and matching people, companies, and other entities against watchlists. It uses OpenSanctions data by default and can work with company registries or custom watchlists. Operators can add datasets, choose which OpenSanctions data to index, and set scopes in a manifest; custom datasets must be line-based JSON feeds of FollowTheMoney entities. By default, Yente checks for updated OpenSanctions data hourly and reindexes when a new build is available. It can run on premises, keeping customer query data within the deployment context, and supports Elasticsearch and OpenSearch. The project provides Docker containers and example Docker Compose and Kubernetes configurations. Documentation estimates 800 MB of memory per Python service, plus 4–16 GB of memory and 10–30 GB of disk for the Elasticsearch index. Default matching limits are 100 entities per batch and 500 results per query. Yente is released under the MIT License. Commercial use of OpenSanctions data requires a data license subscription; non-commercial and exempt users may access the civic manifest. It provides health endpoints and supports OpenTelemetry metrics and traces. The project welcomes issue reports and contributions on GitHub.