Banuba - Face Filters SDK VS DeveloperToolStack

Banuba - Face Filters SDK's answer

It runs properly in the browser. The web build is compiled to WebAssembly, so a filter opens from a link with no app install and no plugin, at the same quality as the native builds. That is the single thing most face AR engines still do badly, and for a web-first product it usually decides the choice.

Two more things set it apart. Android quality is brought close to iOS despite device fragmentation, which matters when most of your users are on mid-range Android phones. And filters, beautification, AR makeup, virtual backgrounds, hair recoloring and hand tracking all come from one engine and one license, instead of stitching together a face vendor, a background vendor and a makeup vendor.

Under the hood: a 3,308-vertex face mesh with 68 anchor points and 37 morphs, holding tracking through roughly 80 degrees of head rotation, 70% occlusion and up to 3.7 meters from the camera.

Banuba - Face Filters SDK's answer

Because of what happens after integration. Effects are authored by your own team in Banuba Studio, with no 3D specialists and no tickets to a vendor, and AR Cloud delivers them on demand, so a new filter ships without an app release. Over 1,000 ready-made effects are available if you would rather not author anything at all.

The rest is practical. Average startup time is under an hour, and agent skills are published so an AI coding assistant can do the integration work from real documentation. Everything runs on the user's device, with no camera frames or user content reaching our servers, which shortens the security review instead of extending it. Licensing is based on monthly active users, with a dedicated customer success manager and a 14-day trial covering the full feature set.

Banuba - Face Filters SDK's answer

Product and engineering teams who need a camera to do more than record. Social networks and short-video apps using filters for retention, live streaming platforms where effects drive creator earnings, dating and video chat apps, and video conferencing tools that need beautification and background replacement to work on a laptop webcam.

Beyond that: beauty and cosmetics brands adding makeup try-on, photo booth and kiosk vendors, games and avatar products, and medical and aesthetic clinics using face morphing to show a before and after. The buyer is usually a CTO, a mobile lead or a product manager who has priced out building face tracking in house and decided it is not where their team should spend a year.

Banuba - Face Filters SDK's answer

Banuba started in 2016 with one thing: making a camera understand a human face in real time, on ordinary hardware. The Face AR SDK is the core that came out of that work, and everything else in the company, from the video editor to virtual try-on, is built on the same tracking.

Two decisions shaped the product more than any feature. The first was betting on the browser early, compiling the engine to WebAssembly when face AR on the web was still assumed to be impossible. The second was handing effect creation to customers through Banuba Studio, rather than keeping every new mask as a paid request to our art team. Banuba sells only to other companies and has never built a consumer app competing with its own clients, and after a management buyout in 2022 it answers to no platform or brand group.

Banuba - Face Filters SDK's answer

Proprietary computer vision developed in house: neural networks for face detection, tracking and segmentation, a 3,308-vertex 3D face mesh with 68 anchor points and 37 morph targets, plus hand and gesture models and background segmentation. All inference runs on the device.

Delivery is native per platform. Native SDKs for iOS, Android, Windows and macOS, C++ on desktop, the web build compiled to WebAssembly and shipped as an NPM package, plus Unity, Flutter and React Native support. Rendering uses OpenGL ES 3.0 on mobile and WebGL 2.0 in the browser. Real-time performance is 30 FPS on iOS and 25 to 30 FPS on Android for single-face tracking. Effects themselves are authored in Banuba Studio and can be hosted in AR Cloud for on-demand delivery.

Banuba - Face Filters SDK's answer

More than 120 companies, including RingCentral, Samsung, Logitech, Gucci, Vidyo, Airmeet and Schwarzkopf.

Published results:

• Bermuda, video chat and dating: 20 million installs, over 4 billion matches, and 15 million Banuba feature launches every month.
• b.stage, K-pop fandom platform: 1 million monthly active users across 224 countries within two years, using face filters and beauty effects inside live chat.
• VROOM, video conferencing: virtual backgrounds and beauty mode lifted monthly active users by 30% and registered users by 54%.
• GreenBee, Japan: AR deployed across 3,000 shops and more than 500,000 devices.
• Clash of Streamers, mobile game: 4 million installs and over 100,000 monthly active players using AR avatar creation.
• UNICEF: mobile vision screening that reached 10,000 children.