Amazon Rekognition
AWS's managed face API: detect, compare, search collections, and run face liveness checks at $0.001 an image.
About
Amazon Rekognition's face stack covers DetectFaces (up to 100 faces per image with bounding boxes, landmarks, and attributes), CompareFaces for 1:1 verification with a similarity score, IndexFaces/SearchFaces for building searchable face collections, and Face Liveness for anti-spoofing during onboarding.
It is the pragmatic default for teams already on AWS: pay-as-you-go pricing, no model to train, and collections that persist face metadata. The trade-off is opacity — AWS publishes no accuracy benchmarks, and you are trusting a black box plus your own threshold tuning (AWS guidance suggests 80% similarity for general use, 99%+ for security use cases, but that is guidance, not a benchmark). Face Liveness is a separate, pricier SKU at $0.015 per check for the first 500K monthly.
Specs
Context window
Pricing
Free quota
API access
Weights
Released
Benchmarks
AWS publishes no accuracy benchmarks. Pricing docs carry usage guidance — an 80% similarity threshold for general use, 99%+ for security use cases — which is provider guidance, not a measured benchmark. No independent published benchmark found.
Provider-reported unless a source says otherwise. Benchmarks are marketing-adjacent by nature — treat them as directional.
Use cases
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified, metrics-v1). Evidence: flagship AWS AI service with full public docs and current pricing page; used at scale in production onboarding flows; free tier and transparent per-call pricing. Strengths: mature managed API, face collections, liveness offering, clear pricing. Docked for: (1) no published accuracy benchmarks — performance claims are unverifiable; (2) vendor lock-in and biometric data leaving your infrastructure. License: commercial service; no weights available.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 10.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 9.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 3.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 9.0/10
- · Flagship AWS AI service: DetectFaces, CompareFaces, IndexFaces/SearchFaces collections, Face Liveness.
- · $0.001/image first 1M/month; 5,000 images/month free for 12 months; face storage $0.01/1,000 faces/month; Liveness $0.015/check.
- · AWS publishes no accuracy benchmarks — similarity-threshold guidance (80% general, 99%+ security) is guidance, not a benchmark.