Sumsub Alternatives & Competitors

Sumsub was founded in 2015 by three Israeli brothers and the lead software architect from ResearchGate. The company’s initial software offering focused on detecting evidence of photoshopping or other digital alterations to IDs and other images. They went on to develop the initial user identification system for the Cryptopay platform, and thereafter focused exclusively on enabling KYC processes.

Today these processes include user and business verification, compliance, and fraud prevention. Let’s see how Sumsub stacks up against competitors offering similar tools.

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 Q1 2023. Please feel free to contact us to request an update/correction. 

Best Sumsub Alternatives

What Does Sumsub Offer?

Having come from the wild west of early crypto financing, Sumsub pivoted into fraud prevention with IDV guns blazing. In practice, this translates to a software stack full of verification tools, along the data points that many fraud preventions lean on, including:

• email/phone/address verification
• ID verification
• biometric verification
• AML list checks
  

These verification processes happen within the proprietary Verification Engine, but Sumsub’s software also has two other primary tools to strengthen safety and compliance.

The Orchestration Lab is a tool to build and execute fraud-fighting workflows, as well as maintain a top-down view of the company’s compliance and the associated data. 

Sumsub’s more unique modules are inside the Monitoring Toolkit, which includes the expected transaction monitoring, but also continuous AML monitoring to detect when a user becomes problematically non-compliant. Sumsub’s video-enabled verification technology also offers Prooface, a module that creates a 3D FaceMap of each user, then continually references it to ensure user authenticity throughout their experience.

Sumsub is aiming its services at enterprise-level clients with at least 1000 verification calls per month. It also offers Single Sign-On (SSO) and reusable KYC modules, which are tools best utilized by large-scale companies where users might be using multiple gateways to connect to different arms of the same organization.

Why Look for a Sumsub Alternative?

Naturally, any given vendor, Sumsub included, will not always be able to serve every company’s needs, so it is a good idea to explore some alternatives before committing.

As Sumsub pivoted from being crypto-exclusive (it also offers an entire crypto transaction monitoring system), some of its optimizations for that industry may be less suitable for other online businesses. 

Sumsub’s strongest user verification services include liveness and facial recognition checks, but steps like these in a user journey offer a potentially deal-breaking amount of friction. Even when legislation mandates IDV checks, some may want to opt for a less friction-heavy solution. Moreover, according to online reviews, the false positives can be punishing: Occasionally. legitimate customers will fail the verification checks and get “stuck” in the workflow, proceeding to complain and potentially taking their business elsewhere.

Currently, Sumsub only lists a pricing plan – bespoke – for enterprise clients. Many of their modules are designed for businesses at that scale or in the process of scaling, particularly features like SSO and reusable KYC. Companies that are not prepared to handle the costs, and who may not have the scale to fully utilize all of Sumsub’s potential, might consider an option geared towards SMBs.

Six Sumsub Alternatives

Though Sumsub offers an impressive KYC, fraud prevention, and IDV stack, with proprietary technology to make those offerings sing, there may be other options on the market that better suit your business. 

Here are six of the competitors that may fit better into a wider diversity of risk appetites and scales. 

SEON 

SEON is a fully customizable fraud prevention platform, detecting signs of malicious intent throughout the user experience. The SaaS achieves this through a combination of device fingerprinting, analysis of open-source OSINT data, AML lookup capabilities, and behavioral analysis during onboarding, transactions, or any possible touchpoint.

Prioritizing low friction while maintaining high security, SEON offers a smooth user experience of dynamic friction. Rather than deploying high-friction gateways like video liveness checks, SEON can begin user analysis from the moment they enter your marketplace, assessing their device fingerprint and IP address for anomalies. Combining that data with any submitted onboarding data, such as an email address, SEON can draw an accurate picture of incoming traffic, and decide how much security to put up around each user.

What’s more, even when it is necessary to check the ID documentation of a customer, SEON can streamline the process and reduce spend by acting as a pre-KYC step that blocks obvious fraudsters so you don’t have to spend per-check money to verify them.

SEON gets its confidence in this decisioning from a variety of technologies, including the unique assessment of 50+ social media and online sites, velocity checks, AML lookup functionality, and more. 

SEON is available for free. Smaller organizations can use all of SEON’s API calls to determine the validity of their customers. The extreme customizability of the platform also allows lightweight scaling for even the largest businesses that also want to stay true to their risk appetite and, of course, protect their bottom line.

Trulioo

Based in Canada, Trulioo has been serving major clients like Facebook and LinkedIn their KYC services for over a decade.

The company’s primary services are IDV, document verification, AML compliance, and business verification. To power these engines, Trulioo gets its data from the GlobalGateway network, which connects proprietary and third-party databases of IDs and risk indicators. These are then leveraged on incoming traffic to detect signs of maliciousness.

Like Sumsub, Trulioo is focused on fraud-fighting through identity verification, singling out users who match risk patterns or are shown to be untrustworthy otherwise.  

Trulioo works in over 190 countries and recognizes over 4200 forms of official documents. The company offers different payment rates to suit companies of varying sizes. Organizations for which compliance is a crucial stepstone to a healthy ROI, such as iGaming and finance, would potentially make good use of Trulioo’s offering as a solution focused on adhering to legal KYC and AML mandates.

Veriff

Six years after its founder and CEO, Kaaral Kotkas, photoshopped his own ID to buy age-restricted rope on Amazon, Veriff opened its doors as an IDV and KYC solution.

Kotkas took his own experience in the realm of ID verification to his company, which was one of the first to leverage live video into the IDV process. Veriff is still focused on keeping its clients legally compliant when it comes to KYC and AML/CTF mandates, with all of its products moving towards that end. These are made conveniently accessible via modules that help customers submit their documents, including software that extracts pertinent info from the 9500 accepted documents from around the globe. 

Compared to solutions aimed at the largest clients, Veriff also offers its services at a variety of tiered pricing plans, with per-verification prices and a minimum monthly commitment. This potentially makes Veriff a more dynamic financial decision for companies of various sizes.

ShuftiPro

ShuftiPro was born after its founder’s own frustrating journey with integrating an IDV solution into his former company’s software stack. Dissatisfied with the existing options, founder Shahid Hanif founded ShuftiPro on the foundation of authenticity, trust, and transparency. The confidence he had in his product led to ShuftiPro being the first solution on the market that was available for a free trial.

Like other IDV solutions on this list, ShuftiPro has functions to verify IDs and keep businesses legally compliant. The product assists users with document submission and automatically extracts the data therein. The security of this process is bolstered by face recognition technology that seeks out both liveness and authenticity, while also keeping the process quick and automated through AI. 

ShuftiPro also offers specific software modules for specific business needs and AML compliance, such as 2FA, QR codes for migrating verifications between devices, as well as a database of over 1700 global watchlists that updates every 15 minutes. Ease of integration is also a large part of the company’s ideology, making ShuftiPro a more convenient option than some. 

Nethone

By comparison to Sumsub and some of its direct competitors, Poland-based Nethone approaches fraud prevention from a less IDV-focused angle. In practice, this means the software stack is less concerned with ID document verification and more on its “Know Your User” goal – touted as “a step forward compared to KYC”.

The software’s proprietary Profiler tool is an all-encompassing persona analysis solution, assessing over 5000 attributes for each user journey. Included among these are the expected data analyses like address and device intelligence, but also monitoring of the lowest-level biometric processes like keystroke analysis and mouse speed.

The data gathered through this monitoring is then used to inform and strengthen Nethone’s machine learning models, which will create recommendations for how to handle each session. 

Though Nethone highlights KYC compliance as one of its main offerings, it also assures clients that its processes are GDPR compliant, guaranteeing that any process data is handled with privacy legislation at the forefront. Potential customers looking for deep user insights with a more holistic fraud prevention solution attached may find Nethone to be a good match in terms of financing and functionality.

Jumio

At its foundation in 2010, Jumio was originally focused exclusively on delivering IDV services, but after the acquisition of Beam Solutions, the SaaS company expanded significantly into AML compliance, off the back of a $150 million influx of funding capital.

Nestled into Jumio’s flagship product, Jumio KYX, are fully-automated solutions for ID document verification, identity verification, and KYC/AML compliance. It can be integrated into an existing app’s front end. In addition to the industry-standard address verification and device fingerprinting tools, fraud is deterred through Jumio’s two-pronged system of ID document submission, then having that document corroborated with a selfie.

The platform offers continuous monitoring with biometric authentication to make sure customers, once verified, stay that way, without dedicating large amounts of human resources to the process – contracts offer “live verification experts” to make decisions when automation can’t. 

Jumio is top-down friendly, with the orchestration allowing both views of the data analysis process as well as a tool to design workflows. Jumio also has a TCO calculator to help businesses make the best financial decisions on its website.

How to Choose the Right Sumsub Alternative

Sumsub’s IDV and fraud prevention solution offers functionality similar to many companies on this list. Choosing which product is the right one for your business is a two-sided conversation. 

Understanding your company’s compliance and fraud prevention needs is the first part of that conversation. Make sure your risk appetite is decided, and understand what resources your company can devote to onboarding and continuous monitoring processes, and bring them to the table when deciding. Another part of your responsibility is understanding your budget for fraud prevention in relation to your expected ROI, which will be crucial.

On the other side of the table, listen to the specifics that each solution has to offer, as some of the more granular offerings may or may not suit your situation exactly.

Note that the solutions above have a range of price points, with per-verification costs ranging from $1–$2.50 per verification. With the right math and the right knowledge of your own business, as well as this list, the best choice should hopefully become apparent in the time it takes to automatically verify a driver’s license. 

Sumsub Alternatives FAQ