Sift Alternatives and Competitors

Disclaimer: Everything you’ll read in this article was gleaned from online research, including user reviews. We did not have time to manually test every tool. This article was last updated in Q3 2023. Please feel free to contact us to request an update/correction.

Best Sift Alternatives

Five Sift Alternatives and Competitors

Whether a competitor is better than Sift for your company’s needs will, of course, depend on those needs. 

But it’s always good to keep an eye on developments in such an important sector, as fraudsters continue to target organizations of various sizes with new methods.

Let’s now look at five robust alternatives to Sift.

SEON  

Features & Use Cases

Founded in 2018 in Hungary, SEON was quick to establish itself as a real contender in the fraud fighting arena, recently raising a record amount of funding in the country’s history. 

It has offices in Budapest, London, and Austin, Texas. Prominent customers include Revolut, KLM, 888casino, Patreon and xCoins, with the brand positioning itself as able to cover the needs of a range of sectors such as fintech, BNPL lending, payment gateways, and ecommerce.

In simple terms, what SEON has done is put some industry-leading research into practice, combining it with anti-fraud staples.

This can be seen, for instance, in the email lookup module, which scouts openly available data from more than 90 online platforms for data enrichment as well as manual review. It is the interpretation and utilization of such findings by the SEON engine that’s impressed its users time and again.

For example, the conclusion that if an email address has been found to be present in historical leaks and dumps, we know that it has been in use since at least that date – and is thus less likely to have been created on the spot by a fraudster.

Beyond the email and phone module, SEON uses whitebox artificial intelligence, which means that analysts have a clear view of why a customer or transaction has been assigned a specific risk rating.

Data points taken into account for the scores are based on IP analysis, device/browser/cookie caches and fingerprinting, both complex and heuristic machine learning rules, behavior tracking, and velocity checks.

There are industry presets available, as well as 24/7 support, while SEON takes pride in its solution being adaptable, scalable and easy to fine-tune.

Last but not least, the AML module is designed to help companies meet anti-money laundering regulations. It allows you to check PEP lists, sanction lists, crime watchlists and more, ditectly from the same dashboard or via API calls.

One often stressed benefit of this vendor’s products is the seamless integration into the customer journey, because the data enrichment and fingerprinting algorithms work behind the scenes, without delaying the shopper, asking them for unnecessary validation, or causing churn.

Kount

Features & Use Cases

Acquired in February 2021 by Equifax to the tune of $640 million, Kount is a startup that has made a name for itself ever since it came onto the scene in 2006.

Today, it counts more than 15,000 customers around the world – including 20% of the top retailers and MLMs, and about 50% of fast food restaurant websites, by the brand’s own admission. Among its clientele are New Balance, PetSmart, Staples, Party City, and Getty Images.

There are two main aspects to Kount’s solution that the company highlights time and again: strong artificial intelligence and what they call the Identity Trust Network.

The latter is a database populated over 13 years of the company’s anti-fraud services, containing up to 32 billion interactions a year, which serves both to reach conclusions about shifting fraudster methodologies and quickly flag any known bad actors, stolen fullz and so on.

However, it should be noted that the data contained within is not live, and overreliance on stale data could lead to less than ideal decisions in certain cases.

Furthermore, in terms of Kount customer concerns, there are some calls for more customization options, for speeding up response times, and addressing some bugs – although the solution seems to be working well almost all the time.

On the other hand, there are also benefits to using Kount. Customers have the option of choosing which of the products to use.

There is Kount Command, a digital fraud prevention tool; Kount Control, for a boost in authentication, including MFA, and Kount Central, created specifically for payment providers. There is also a chargeback and dispute management tool that can be of interest to companies in ecommerce.

Accertify

Features & Use Cases

Acquired by American Express for approximately $150 million back in 2010, just three years after it was founded, Chicago-based Accertify has set as its mission to deliver convenience and peace of mind to organizations.

Among its fraud prevention client roster we find Southwest Airlines, Arcadia, Ubisoft, and Ticketmaster. Being an American Express company, Accertify enjoys the prestige the name brings and has landed several big players from the travel industry, including Greyhound and EasyJet.

Financial services is another sector this vendor is big in, while they also target ecommerce and igaming. 

All these merchants enjoy access to – and help power – two of the most comprehensive anonymized databases in the industry, promising to catch known bad actors more quickly through crowdsourced information about historical threats and fraudsters. 

There are separate products for digital identity verification, fraud management including refund and chargeback management, SCA optimization, and adjacent concerns.

Accertify’s risk analysis is based on machine learning and heuristic models, with detailed reporting and real-time dashboards. Results are generated after examining users’ IP, device, BIN data, and more, and include what-if analysis, 30+ out of the box reports as well as data extraction options.

One of the benefits of choosing this vendor is the truly multilingual, around-the-clock support. The speed of deployment is frequently rated as being excellent, too.

On the other hand, some users report issues with the platform’s stability, and with integration with non-AmEx products.  

Emailage (LexisNexis)

Features & Use Cases

After eight years as a startup, Emailage was acquired by popular fraud vendor LexisNexis on February 3, 2020, and is now offered either as a standalone tool or bundled into the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Network.

At its core, Emailage is a reverse email lookup tool that enriches data in order to allow for less friction in your customers’ shopping journey while still keeping you safe.

To do this, it taps into an enormous database of 5.9 billion digital identifiers from the company’s work in 150+ markets around the globe – and around 82,200 fraud events are added to these every day. However, this data is not live, which can result in less accurate conclusions being drawn.

When someone looks to sign up for an account or complete a guest purchase, the email address they will provide will be taken by Emailage and run through this database to help assess whether they could be a bad actor.

There are machine learning suggestions, industry preset rules and custom rules as well, while both modular APIs and API calls are supported. 

Considering this functionality, it is rather surprising that this solution has not also integrated other industry-standard methods, such as some degree of device fingerprinting and phone number lookup.

Beyond this, it is useful to remember that Emailage is more likely to suit the needs of those who already use some of the LexisNexis products and are in need of email analysis. 

TruValidate

Features & Use Cases

Originally building its reputation for fraud prevention under the name Iovation, the company was absorbed by TransUnion in 2018 and rebranded as TruValidate.

TruValidate offices are found around the world to include the worldwide reach of their services, with locations in Hong Kong, Leeds, Mumbai, Toronto, Johannesburg, Colombia, and Brazil.

TransUnion was likely drawn to TruValidate’s capabilities because of their focus on device fingerprinting, but TruValidate has since diversified its risk-based assessments to develop a user profile around:

• bank verification
• card verification
• device fingerprinting
• document verification
• email verification
• phone verification
• verification based on defined challenge questions

This risk-based authentication model dynamically adjusts the level of precaution for each transaction, throughout the customer journey. The data being generated also allows security teams to notice patterns that might otherwise escape notice, like particular networks developing between customers, or specific vulnerabilities in the customer experience.

By leveraging TruValidate’s tech inside of the digital marketplace, a safer and more convenient experience should be the end result.

Additionally, as part of the TransUnion umbrella, TruValidate’s services can be integrated with any of the other solutions offered by the company, which include services for things like recovering from data breaches, dealing with chargebacks, and customer engagement and decisioning.

What Does Sift Offer?

Sift is undoubtedly a powerhouse in the fraud management sector and comes with some of the benefits and shortcomings such popularity can bring. Founded in 2011 with funding out of Y Combinator, it has raised over $157 million in its lifetime.

Prominent in the financial services/fintech industry, Sift also promises to cover the needs of customers in the retail, food & beverage, and other sectors, including travel and ticketing, where fraud has been on the rise.

Among the brands that subscribe to Sift’s services are McDonald’s, DoorDash, Twitter, Wayfair, Birchbox and Airbnb. Clearly, this vendor is well-positioned to serve enterprises. 

The complete, integrated solution on offer is called the Digital Trust & Safety Suite, promoted as a comprehensive and easy-to-pick-up product that will minimize losses and streamline operations.

However, some of the functionality included is also available in the form of standalone products, for anyone in need of a more targeted approach: 

• Payment Protection – addressing chargebacks, fake accounts, transaction fraud
• Content Integrity – protecting from spam and scams, T&C violations, fake accounts
• Account Defense – against account takeovers, promo abuse
• Dispute Management – to win more disputes, including chargebacks
• Passwordless Authentication – a strong multi-factor authentication solution

Naturally, each of these will suit certain industries more than others. For example, online gambling is rife with bonus abuse attempts and terms & conditions violations.

There is also a separate PSD2 Solution – as well as Sift Connect, which offers new ways to integrate Sift tools into a business and promises to play well with third party software.

Looking at the technology powering Sift solutions, we find the below and more:

• account takeover detection
• transaction risk scoring
• intelligence reporting
• IP analysis
• data enrichment
• behavior tracking

Why Look for a Sift Alternative?

There are several reasons why one might want to look for an alternative to Sift. These can include:

• no machine learning scoring suggestions available
• no custom rules, no industry-based rulesets
• blackbox AI
• some integration issues
• no default PSD2 support – possible issue for those active in the EU
• steep learning curve according to some reviewers
• Sift is perhaps more suited to large enterprises
• one might just be wondering if there’s anything better out there
• no AML option for compliance

It would be fair to say that Sift is one of the less transparent anti-fraud tools out there when it comes to the technology that powers it, considering it uses blackbox AI, and how even the official website focuses on the results it can bring for companies, without going into the innovations and algorithms behind them.

How to Choose a Sift Alternative

We hope the above explainer has been useful to anyone looking to evaluate whether Sift is suitable for them or maybe a competing product is a better option. 

There is no single solution that will be perfect for everyone’s needs, so keep yours in mind when choosing.

From here, your next steps should be to arrange demonstrations for the products and platforms that seem the most suitable for you. Hopefully, we have helped a little.

FAQ for Sift Alternatives & Competitors

Further Reading

Learn more about:

Emailage Alternatives | Feedzai Competitors | Signifyd Competitors | Kount Competitors | ThreatMetrix Alternatives

Try our free tools:

Reverse Email Lookup Tool | Reverse Phone Lookup Tool | Social Media Lookup