The computer vision industry has produced a range of powerful technologies, from enterprise-grade platforms that power facial recognition in banking, retail, and public safety, to consumer-focused tools that help individuals verify identities and protect themselves from online fraud. Megvii, the Beijing-based company behind the Face++ platform, represents the enterprise side of this spectrum, while facesearching represents the consumer side. Megvii builds the underlying face recognition infrastructure that companies integrate into their own products: identity verification for financial services, access control for office buildings, and customer analytics for retail stores. Facesearching, by contrast, is a complete reverse face search engine that individuals can use directly to find someone by photo, verify identities, and investigate suspicious online activity. This comparison examines the key differences between these two approaches to help you understand which one serves your needs.
What Is Megvii (Face++)?
Megvii is a Chinese artificial intelligence company founded in 2011, best known for its Face++ platform, which provides computer vision APIs and SDKs to developers and enterprises. Face++ offers a suite of face-related capabilities including face detection, face comparison, face search within a user-defined database, and liveness detection for anti-spoofing. These capabilities are sold as building blocks that other companies integrate into their own applications. For example, a banking app might use Face++ to verify that a customer's selfie matches their ID photo during account opening. A retail chain might use Face++ to analyze customer demographics and foot traffic. A security company might use Face++ to build an access control system. Megvii does not offer a consumer-facing product where an individual can upload a photo and search the open web. Its focus is on providing the technical infrastructure for other businesses to build face recognition features into their own products.
What Is facesearching?
Facesearching is a reverse face search engine that provides a complete, consumer-ready solution for identity verification. Unlike Megvii, which sells APIs to developers, facesearching is a fully built product that anyone can use without technical expertise. Users upload a photo, and the engine searches the public web to find where the same face appears, returning results with context about each match. The platform is designed for practical verification scenarios: hiring managers checking candidate identities, journalists investigating sources, online daters verifying matches, and individuals monitoring their own digital footprint. Facesearching handles the entire process from photo upload to search to result delivery, with no development work, no API integration, and no technical knowledge required. The platform prioritizes ease of use, privacy, and actionable results for everyday users rather than developer flexibility and enterprise scalability.
Key Differences at a Glance
- Product type: Megvii sells APIs and SDKs for developers to build with. facesearching is a complete, ready-to-use consumer product.
- Target user: Megvii serves developers, enterprises, and system integrators. facesearching serves individual consumers, professionals, and small businesses.
- Search scope: Megvii searches within a customer-defined database of images. facesearching searches the entire public web for publicly available images.
- Technical requirement: Megvii requires development work to integrate and use. facesearching requires only a web browser.
- Privacy model: Megvii's data handling depends on how each customer implements the API. facesearching uses ephemeral processing with no persistent storage of uploaded images.
Megvii gives developers the tools to build face recognition. facesearching gives everyone the tool to use it. The difference is the difference between a factory and a finished product.
When to Choose Each Solution
If you are a developer building an application that requires face recognition capabilities such as identity verification, access control, or customer analytics, and you have the technical resources to integrate APIs and manage a face database, Megvii's Face++ platform is a relevant option. It provides the flexibility and scalability that enterprise development projects require. But if you are an individual who needs to verify an identity right now, without building anything, without managing a database, and without writing a single line of code, Megvii is not the right tool for you. You need a complete product like facesearching that handles the entire verification workflow from photo upload to search to result delivery. The distinction between an API platform and a consumer product is fundamental to understanding which tool is appropriate for your situation. For more on practical verification use cases, see our guide on how to verify a remote employee's identity with face search.
The Open-Web Advantage
One of the most significant differences between Megvii's approach and facesearching's approach is the search scope. Megvii's Face++ face search API is designed to search within a database of images that the customer provides. You upload a set of images to Megvii's servers, and the API searches within that set. This is useful for enterprise applications like employee identification or customer recognition, but it cannot help you discover where a face appears across the broader internet. Facesearching, on the other hand, searches the open public web. When you upload a photo, the engine searches across social media platforms, news websites, blogs, forums, and other public web sources. This open-web scope is essential for the verification use cases that facesearching serves. You cannot discover that a job candidate's photo was stolen from a stock image site, that a dating profile is using a model's portfolio photos, or that a social media account is impersonating a public figure by searching within a closed database. You need the open web. For more on how open-web search enables verification, see our guide on how to use face search for reputation management.
Privacy and Data Handling
Privacy and data handling represent another important distinction. When you use Megvii's APIs, the data handling practices depend on how each customer implements the platform. Megvii provides the technology, but the customer is responsible for how photos are collected, stored, used, and deleted. This creates a variable privacy landscape where the protection of biometric data depends on the policies of each individual company that uses the API. Facesearching, as a complete consumer product, controls the entire data handling pipeline. The platform's privacy policy states that uploaded photos are processed for the search only and are deleted immediately after the search completes. No biometric templates are created, no images are stored, and no data is shared with third parties. This consistent, privacy-respecting approach is a core part of the facesearching value proposition. For businesses looking to build their own security framework, see our guide on how to create a face search security checklist for your business.
The choice between an API platform like Megvii and a consumer product like facesearching comes down to what you need to accomplish and what resources you have available. If you need to build face recognition into your own application, an API platform is the right foundation. If you need to verify identities right now, without building anything, a complete consumer product like facesearching is the right tool. Ready to verify an identity today? Run a face search on facesearching now and get results in seconds.