Reality Defender vs Hive Moderation
Reality Defender and Hive Moderation side by side: what each one is, what it costs to start, and whether you can try it free. Everything below comes from the vendors' own sites and other public sources, not from hands-on testing.
At a glance
| Reality Defender | Hive Moderation | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Cybersecurity AI | Cybersecurity AI |
| Starting price | Free; paid plans from $399/mo (checked October 2026) | Usage-based (checked October 2026) |
| Free tier | Yes | Not listed |
| Profile | Read profile | Read profile |
Prices are in US dollars unless shown otherwise. Confirm the current price on the vendor's site before you buy.
Key differences
Reality Defender lists a free tier and Hive Moderation does not.
Pricing is not directly comparable from the numbers we hold (Reality Defender: Free; paid plans from $399/mo; Hive Moderation: Usage-based), so check each vendor's pricing page.
Both are in our Cybersecurity AI category.
About each tool
Reality Defender
Deepfake detection API and RealScan web app; the vendor says its models are AI-based. Free plan has 50 scans a month; Business lists $399 with annual billing.
Who it is for
Developers and security, fraud and trust-and-safety teams that need to check media for synthetic content; the vendor lists call center fraud, hiring, identity verification, executive impersonation and media verification as use cases. The vendor says the tool does not verify identity or fact-check content, and that the final judgment about the media stays with the analyst.
Strengths
- The vendor lists a Free plan at $0 with 50 audio or image scans a month, no credit card required.
- The vendor lists SDKs in Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust and Java, plus a REST API over HTTPS, and says all SDK variants are open source.
- Results are labeled Authentic, Suspicious or Manipulated with explainable indicators, and the web app exports reports as PDF.
- Enterprise lists on-premises, private cloud, containerized and air-gapped deployment options, plus Zoom, Teams, Webex and contact center integrations and a Chrome extension.
- The web app accepts files, social media video links and text (a 200-word minimum is stated for text), and the vendor lists audio support in eight languages, including English and Spanish.
Limitations
- Vendor pages disagree on plan details: the product page lists Free with up to 3 seats and a Business plan at $399 with annual billing for 1,000 scans a month; an older campaign page lists one seat for Free and a Growth plan from $399 a month with 50+ scans; a help article lists a Developer plan with 1,000 scans a month and Free scans that include text.
- Listed media limits: audio up to 100MB and 12 seconds to 5 minutes, images up to 10MB, video up to 250MB (formats such as wav, mp3, jpg, png, mp4, mov).
- Enterprise pricing is custom and sold through sales. Business is limited to 1 seat, and the pages read do not state how long uploaded media is retained or whether it is used for model training.
- Reported (not re-verified this session): the vendor's data processing addendum says personal data is retained as needed to deliver the service and deleted or returned on request or at contract end.
Hive Moderation
Hive's AI APIs for moderating text, image, video and audio and detecting AI-generated media. Pay as you go from $0.50 per 1,000 text requests; Enterprise pricing is not published.
Strengths
- Hive's pricing page lists per-unit rates for many models, for example Visual Moderation at $3.00 per 1,000 requests, Text Moderation at $0.50 per 1,000 requests and Audio Moderation at $0.03 per minute, so usage cost can be estimated.
- Hive lists a separate AI content detection group: AI Image + Deepfake Classifier at $6.00 per 1,000 image requests, AI Video Detection at $6.00 per 1,000 video frames and AI Audio Classifier at $10.00 per audio hour.
- Hive says its Moderation Dashboard is a no-code interface where rules use over 50 model classes with confidence or severity thresholds, borderline items go to a human Review Feed, and custom actions call back to your server through callback URLs (blog post from 2022, last modified March 2025; it says audio is not supported in the Dashboard).
- Hive says custom models can be trained through AutoML, and the pricing page lists AutoML training, inference and data storage rates (for example text classification training at $4.00 per 1M rows seen).
- Hive's Enterprise Commitments page says it adheres to SOC 2 Type II, supports SAML SSO and role-based access control, and can be deployed via API, on-premises or in custom cloud environments.
- Hive's FAQ says the default data retention period is 14 days and customers can ask for a longer, shorter or no retention period.
Limitations
- Pricing is usage-based with no subscription price. The Developers tier lists $50+ in free credits after adding a payment method, which is a credit, not a free plan.
- Hive's pricing page lists a limit of 100 requests per day for Visual Moderation, Text Moderation, AI Image + Deepfake Classifier, AI Video Detection and AI Audio Classifier on self-serve tiers; its FAQ gives the same figure for Text and Visual Moderation on the self-serve version. Higher limits require contacting sales.
- The FAQ says longer data retention may incur additional charges. Neither the Enterprise Commitments page nor the FAQ says whether submitted data is used to train Hive's models; the Enterprise page says content you submit stays under your control. Check the Privacy Policy.
- Hive's pricing page does not mention minimum spend or refund terms, and its AI content detection overview does not describe how detection works or its reliability. Customer results and accuracy statements on the Hive Moderation homepage are the vendor's own and were not independently checked.
