facesearching and Megvii Face++ both touch facial recognition, but they occupy very different positions in the market. facesearching is a consumer-facing reverse face search engine: you upload a photo and receive clickable links to where that face appears across social media, news, blogs, and video. Megvii Face++ is a developer-facing computer vision platform whose Face++ APIs provide face detection, recognition, comparison, and attribute analysis for teams building their own applications. Choosing between them comes down entirely to what you are trying to accomplish. For another vendor contrast, see our facesearching vs Clarifai comparison.
Background: What Is Megvii Face++?
Megvii is a Chinese artificial intelligence company founded in 2011 and best known for its Face++ platform, one of the earliest and most widely used computer vision APIs in the world. Face++ offers a broad suite of capabilities — face detection, face comparison (1:1 verification), face search (1:N identification within a collection you supply), landmark detection, and attribute estimation such as age, gender, and emotion. It is aimed squarely at developers and enterprises that want to embed facial recognition into their own products, from identity verification and access control to retail analytics. Face++ does not provide a searchable index of the public web; you bring your own images and build recognition over your own datasets.
What Each Platform Does
facesearching is built for end users who want immediate answers. The workflow is simple: upload a photo, wait seconds, and review a ranked list of matches with links to the original sources. It scans publicly indexed web pages — social media profiles, news articles, blog posts, and video thumbnails — so results arrive with useful context. Megvii Face++, by contrast, is a machine learning platform that gives developers the tools to build custom vision applications. Its face recognition capabilities let developers detect faces, compare them, and run face search within their own collections. Face++ never searches the open web for a face; it operates only over the images you supply.
Target Audience and Ease of Use
This is where the two platforms diverge most sharply. facesearching is designed for non-technical users. There is nothing to install, no code to write, and no infrastructure to manage — the entire experience happens in a browser and results are ready in seconds. Megvii Face++ is built for developers and engineering teams. Using it requires API integration skills, the ability to manage your own datasets and application logic, and a clear plan for how to handle the biometric data you process. For an individual who wants to verify a dating match or investigate a suspicious photo, facesearching is immediately accessible. For a company building a custom identity-verification pipeline, Face++ provides powerful building blocks.
API and Feature Comparison
Megvii Face++ exposes a rich, documented REST API covering face detection, face comparison, face search within a custom face set, landmark detection, and attribute analysis. It supports SDKs in several languages and offers both cloud and on-premise deployment options for enterprise customers. facesearching, by design, does not expose a raw recognition API for developers to build on. Instead it offers a finished search product: upload a face, get ranked web matches with source links. If your requirement is to embed recognition into your own application, Face++ is the appropriate choice. If your requirement is to discover where a given face appears online, facesearching is the appropriate choice. For more vendor comparisons in the same space, see our articles on facesearching vs Amazon Rekognition and facesearching vs Microsoft Azure Face API.
Accuracy
Both platforms rely on modern deep-learning-based facial embeddings, but accuracy means different things in each context. For Face++, accuracy is typically measured on standard benchmarks and in 1:1 verification or 1:N search within a customer's own collection, where performance depends heavily on the quality and size of the supplied dataset. For facesearching, accuracy is about recall over the open web — finding the right public pages among billions — combined with precision in ranking. The practical lesson is that the two are not directly comparable on a single number: they solve different problems, and each is accurate for its intended task.
Privacy Policies
Privacy is a meaningful differentiator, especially for biometric data. facesearching deletes uploaded photos immediately after each search completes and does not retain them or build a permanent biometric database of the people users look up. Megvii Face++, as a developer platform, retains data according to its own terms and the configurations set by the developer using the API — meaning the data handling depends on how the integrating customer configures it. If minimizing how long your uploaded photo sits on a server matters to you, facesearching's immediate deletion policy is a clear and explicit advantage. The broader legal context is covered in our article on the privacy implications of facial recognition technology.
Pricing Models
facesearching uses transparent pay-as-you-go pricing — a low-cost single search, a Starter plan, and a Pro plan — with no subscription required for occasional use. Megvii Face++ operates on a tiered model, historically offering a free tier for small-scale experimentation followed by paid plans that scale with API call volume and enterprise features such as on-premise deployment. For an individual who needs an occasional web search, facesearching's pay-as-you-go approach is far more economical. For a developer building a high-volume production system, Face++'s volume-based pricing may be more appropriate. Always confirm current pricing on each vendor's site, as plans change over time.
Use Case Suitability
- Choose facesearching for: verifying an online identity, investigating a suspicious profile, finding someone by photo, dating safety, fraud screening, and protecting your own images from misuse.
- Choose Megvii Face++ for: building custom identity verification, access control, KYC flows, face-based attendance, and any application where you search within your own image collection.
- Use both when: a developer team needs Face++ for internal recognition pipelines and facesearching for on-demand searches of the public web.
Pros and Cons
facesearching strengths and limitations:
- Broad coverage across social media, news, blogs, and video
- Pay-as-you-go pricing with no subscription required
- Photos deleted immediately after each search
- Clickable links to profiles and articles for context
- No developer API or custom model training
Megvii Face++ strengths and limitations:
- Rich, documented computer vision APIs for custom applications
- Supports face detection, comparison, search, landmarks, and attributes
- Cloud and on-premise deployment options for enterprise
- No public web index — you must supply your own images
- Data retention depends on the integrating developer's configuration
Which Should You Choose?
Pick facesearching if you want to search the public web for a face, verify an online identity, or protect yourself from fraud — all without writing a single line of code. Pick Megvii Face++ if you are a developer building a custom computer vision application with your own image data. The two tools are not really direct competitors; they serve different audiences with different needs and can even complement each other in a comprehensive identity strategy. If you want to try a web-based face search right now, visit the facesearching home page and upload a photo.