Idswyft
Idswyft is an open-source identity verification API for developers, available through hosted flows or self-hosting.
What Idswyft is
Idswyft is an open-source identity verification API for developers, available through hosted flows or self-hosting. A single verification call combines document OCR, cross-validation, liveness detection, and face matching. It accepts passports, driver’s licenses, and national IDs, including MRZ, PDF417, EU eIDAS, and mobile driving licence formats. Its OCR combines PaddleOCR and Tesseract to extract identity fields from 20+ country formats. Face checks use face-api.js embeddings, with passive and head-turn liveness options; tamper analysis uses error level analysis, entropy mapping, and FFT spectral analysis. Fraud checks flag patterns such as reused IPs, Tor exit nodes, and country mismatches, while name screening uses OpenSanctions PEP databases. Privacy controls include configurable retention, erasure endpoints, and removal of face embeddings before persistence. Developers can integrate through a REST API, TypeScript SDK, React components, iframe, or webhooks. The free Community Edition provides unlimited verifications and full source code under MIT for use on your infrastructure. Cloud Starter includes 50 verifications per month; Cloud Pro is $49 a month, billed Coming Soon.
Good
- One call combines OCR, cross-validation, liveness, and face matching.
- Supports passports, driver’s licenses, and national IDs.
- Free Community Edition includes unlimited verifications.
- Configurable retention and full erasure endpoints are available.
- Supports REST API, SDK, React, iframe, and webhooks.
Watch out
- Cloud Starter is limited to 50 verifications per month.
- Cloud Pro is listed as Coming Soon.
- Community Edition support is through GitHub Issues.
Who it suits
Idswyft suits developers building identity checks for fintech, marketplaces, gig platforms, crypto and Web3, or healthcare applications. Its API, SDK, hosted flows, and self-hosted option support different integration approaches.
Verdict
Idswyft combines document, biometric, fraud, and PEP checks in one verification workflow. The free self-hosted edition includes unlimited verifications, while managed cloud plans have stated limits or availability conditions.
Plans and prices
From Idswyft's own pricing page, checked 15 Oct 2026.
| Plan | Price | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Starter | Free | 50 verifications/month · managed hosting · email support · 99.5% uptime SLA · $0/mo |
| Community Edition | Free | Unlimited verifications · self-hosted · no rate limits · full source code under MIT · GitHub-issue support · Free forever |
| Cloud Pro | $49 a month | 2,000 verifications/month · priority support · audit logs and backups · 99.9% uptime SLA · $49/mo · Coming Soon |
The facts
Each one read from Idswyft's own pages, with the date it was checked.
What it does
- Age screening
- The product compares estimated face age with declared date of birth as an identity-borrowing signal.checked 15 Oct 2026
- API
- The REST API exposes session initialization, document uploads, live capture, status retrieval and webhook-based results.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Architecture
- The core API is a Node.js and TypeScript service while OCR, face detection, liveness and deepfake analysis run in a separate engine container.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Barcode and MRZ
- PDF417 barcodes and TD1, TD2 and TD3 MRZ formats are parsed and checked against front-side OCR.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Biometrics
- Face matching uses face-api.js embeddings and supports passive and head-turn liveness modes.checked 1 Oct 2026
- Cloud limits
- The API reference lists cloud limits of 1,000 requests per developer key per hour and five verifications per user per hour.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Compliance screening
- Idswyft screens names against Politically Exposed Persons databases via OpenSanctions and offers apparent-face-age checks against declared date of birth.checked 1 Oct 2026
- Credentials
- After verification, the system can issue W3C Verifiable Credentials as JWT-VCs signed with Ed25519 and resolvable through did:web.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Cross-validation
- Levenshtein and exact-match scoring compares front OCR with back barcode or MRZ data, sending unreadable barcodes to review instead of automatically passing them.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Decision model
- Idswyft says verification decisions are deterministic and do not use an LLM in the pass-or-fail path.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Documentation
- The documentation includes API rate limits, status codes, a semantic-versioned changelog, endpoint history and support contact details.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Document support
- The service accepts passports, driver’s licenses and national IDs, including MRZ and PDF417 data.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Face matching
- A live capture is compared with the document portrait using face-api.js embeddings and a configurable confidence threshold.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Founder
- The official site identifies Obed Lorisson as founder and developer.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Fraud prevention
- Velocity checks and IP geolocation detect bot submissions, IP reuse, Tor exit nodes, datacenter proxies, and country mismatches.checked 1 Oct 2026
- Fraud signals
- Velocity checks, IP reuse, Tor or datacenter-proxy detection and document-origin country mismatch are listed as fraud controls.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Hosted flow
- A hosted verification page lets developers redirect users without building a front end.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Independent praise: privacy
- A Reddit discussion praises that the ML engine can run locally so identity images do not leave the operator’s server.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Independent praise: setup
- The Reddit write-up describes Docker deployment in roughly two minutes and API integration in about 30 minutes.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Integrations
- It provides hosted flows, a REST API, and an embeddable TypeScript SDK with React components, iframe support, and webhooks.checked 1 Oct 2026
- Licence
- The community source code is released under the MIT License, while the Idswyft name and logo remain trademarks.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Limit: country coverage
- The same discussion says 19 countries have format-specific validation and that expanding coverage remains ongoing.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Limit: OCR accuracy
- The founder’s Reddit post reports roughly 65% field-level accuracy across seven tested US driver-license states and says address extraction is weakest.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Limit: SDK coverage
- The founder says JavaScript is available while a Python SDK is planned for a later release.checked 15 Oct 2026
