We can't always tell whether an image contains adult content at a glance, especially when dealing with large numbers of uploads. One way to check is by using an NSFW detector, a tool that scans an image and estimates whether it contains nudity, sexual content, or other adult material. Most return a score or a label such as safe, suggestive, or explicit.
Some detectors are free and run in your browser. Others are APIs made for apps that handle thousands of uploads a day, or Python libraries that you can add to your own applications. Whatever you need, our list covers 10 of the best NSFW detection tools, including pricing, what each one does well, and where it still lacks.

How We Choose the Best NSFW Detectors
To compare these NSFW detectors fairly, we evaluated each tool based on the same criteria:
- Detection capabilities: The types of content the tool can detect, from explicit nudity to suggestive content, drawings, specific body parts, and violence.
- Ease of use: The steps required to check an image, whether you can upload an image and see a result right away, or need an API key or code.
- Classification categories: How results are split. A tool may return one NSFW probability, a handful of labels, or dozens of classes.
- Processing location: Where image analysis takes place, such as in your browser, on your own server, or in the provider's cloud.
- Pricing: Whether the tool is free, open source, has a free tier, or needs a paid plan, and what happens when you pass the limits.
Note that the information in this guide was reviewed as of October 2026. Features, pricing, free-tier limits, and model availability may change.
Part 1. Best NSFW Detectors at a Glance
Use this comparison table to shortlist the NSFW scanners that best match your needs. You can compare their types, free options, and use cases before exploring each tool in detail.
| Tool | Type | Free Option* | Use Cases | Best for |
| Is This Image NSFW? | Online NSFW image checker | Free | Checking individual images | Quick checks without an account or coding |
| Nyckel | NSFW detection API | Free website testing; 100 API calls/month | Classifying images into five categories | Developers who need a ready-made classifier with customization options |
| NSFWJS | Open-source JavaScript library | Free | Detecting adult content in browsers or Node.js applications | Front-end developers who want to process images locally |
| Sightengine | NSFW detection API | 2,000 operations/month, capped at 500/day | Detecting nudity, suggestive content, and context-specific categories | Marketplaces and community platforms that need detailed moderation rules |
| Hive Moderation | NSFW detection API | Free credits for new accounts | Moderating adult content, violence, drugs, and other potentially harmful imagery | Businesses handling large volumes of user-generated content |
| Amazon Rekognition Content Moderation | Cloud image and video moderation API | 1,000 free images/month for 12 months | Detecting adult content and other inappropriate material in images and videos | Developers and businesses using AWS |
| Google Cloud Vision SafeSearch | Cloud NSFW image detection API | First 1,000 units/month free | Checking adult, suggestive, violent, medical, and spoofed content | Teams that need basic image moderation within Google Cloud |
| NudeNet | Open-source Python nudity detector | Free | Detecting specific body parts and locating regions for censoring | Developers who want to blur or censor detected areas in images |
| OpenNSFW2 | Open-source Python NSFW classifier | Free | Scoring individual images, image batches, and video frames for pornographic content | Developers who need a self-hosted NSFW classifier |
| Falconsai/nsfw_image_detection | Pretrained image classification model | Free to download | Classifying images as normal or NSFW with Python | Developers building custom image moderation tools |
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*) Cloud services and APIs may charge for usage beyond their free allowances.
Part 2. Best NSFW Image Detectors for Content Moderation
For more details on what each NSFW detector offers, let's take a closer look at the 10 tools below. You will find their key features, pricing, pros and cons, and the types of users or projects they are best suited for.
1. Is This Image NSFW?
Is This Image NSFW? is a simple online NSFW image checker to check whether the image looks safe or not safe for work. What you need to do is open the website, select an image, and check the result. It runs on the safety checker from Stable Diffusion, a component first built to filter AI-generated images.

- Direct image upload for quick checks
- Simple interface for occasional use
- No API integration or programming setup required
Free online NSFW detector (web app)
Free.
- No need to set up an account or write code to use it
- Free to use
- Can only upload one picture at a time
- Takes a long time just to analyze one image
Quick checks before sharing when you have a single image.
2. Nyckel
Nyckel provides a pretrained NSFW image classifier that you can test on its website or connect to an application through an API. It sorts each image into one of five labels (NSFW porn, NSFW drawings, safe drawings, safe neutral content, and mildly suggestive safe content) and returns a confidence score.

- Test images directly on the website without signing up.
- Classify images into five predefined categories.
- Receive predictions and confidence scores through an API.
- Clone and customize the classifier for your own data.
NSFW detection API.
Free testing on the website. Nyckel's free plan includes 100 API calls/month, with additional calls priced at $0.005 each under the listed free-tier terms. Paid plans are available for higher usage. Check the pricing page for more details.
- Easy to test before you create an account
- More detailed classifications than a simple safe/unsafe result
- You can retrain the model with your own corrections
- API examples are available for Python, JavaScript, and other languages
- Images are processed through Nyckel's hosted infrastructure
- 100 free calls a month go fast
- Accuracy needs testing against your own image collection
Developers who want a ready-made NSFW classifier without training a model from scratch.
3. NSFWJS
NSFWJS is a free NSFW detector built as an open-source JavaScript library by Infinite Red. It classifies images using TensorFlow.js, and runs in the client's browser, so images don't have to go to a server. Just load the pretrained model, pass it an image, and it returns a probability for each class. It also runs in Node.js if you would rather check images on your server.

- Five classes: Drawing, Hentai, Neutral, Porn, and Sexy
- Three models: MobileNetV2 (the default), MobileNetV2Mid, and InceptionV3, which is the largest
- Blur protection option in the live demo at nsfwjs.com
Open-source JavaScript NSFW content detector.
Free and open source.
- Processing can stay on the user's device
- No per-image fees
- Can be integrated into existing JavaScript projects
- The project itself says it isn't perfect, with GitHub issues reporting false positives and one user noting differences between its results and those on the demo site
- Requires JavaScript development knowledge
- Model loading can affect page performance
- Production use may require additional testing and model hosting
Front-end developers who want NSFW image detection in the browser without running a backend.
4. Sightengine
Sightengine is a content moderation service that provides an NSFW detection API for websites, applications, and online platforms. It's designed to integrate with larger moderation systems and can identify nudity and other sexually suggestive content. The API returns classification results that developers can use to flag, filter, or send images for further review automatically.

- 7 intensity classes, from sexual activity down to none
- 19 suggestive classes, including bikini, lingerie, male chest, and nudity art
- 3 context classes (sea, lake, or pool; other outdoor; other indoor), so you can allow a bikini at a pool and flag it elsewhere
- Video and live-stream moderation (on paid plans)
NSFW detection API.
- Free plan includes 2,000 operations a month (500/day), with no time limit.
- Starter starts at $29/month for 10,000 operations
- Pro starts at $99/month for 40,000 operations
Additional operations cost $0.002 each. There's also an Enterprise plan that offers custom pricing based on your needs.
- Detailed output that lets you write rules by context
- Free tier is available for testing
- Can be integrated into existing applications
- More classes mean more rules for you to set up and maintain
- As a developer, you need to configure your own moderation rules and responses
Marketplaces and community apps that need fine control over what counts as adult content.
5. Hive Moderation
Hive Moderation offers visual content moderation tools for businesses that need to review user-generated images and other media. Its visual moderation service can identify adult content alongside other categories of potentially harmful or unwanted material. You can integrate its services into your existing products and use the results to flag content for further review.

- Three top-level groups (NSFW, suggestive, and clean) with 20 additional NSFW subclasses
- 90+ subclasses overall, which also cover violence, drugs, and hate imagery
- Confidence scores that you map to your own thresholds
- Low latency for live streams
NSFW detection API.
Pay as you go. Image moderation costs $3.00 per 1,000 requests. New developer accounts get free credits after adding a payment method.
- You can try a demo on the Hive site
- Broad coverage in a single API response
- Built for high volume and live content
- Free credits need a payment method
- Costs more per image than Rekognition or Google SafeSearch
- Less convenient if you only need to check one image
Businesses and large online platforms that need a commercial solution for moderating images at scale.
6. Amazon Rekognition Content Moderation
Amazon Rekognition is an AWS image and video analysis service with content moderation features. Its moderation API identifies potentially inappropriate content, including adult and suggestive content, violence, drugs, hate symbols, gambling, and disturbing content in images and video, and returns labels with confidence scores.

- Confidence scores for each label, plus timestamps for video
- Custom Moderation adapters that you can train with as few as 20 annotated images
- Amazon Augmented AI (A2I) for human review of low-confidence results
- Flags up to 95% of unsafe content automatically, according to Amazon
Cloud NSFW detection API (images, stored video, streaming video).
Pay per use with no minimum. New accounts get 1,000 free images a month for 12 months and up to $200 in credits. Image moderation is $0.0010 per image for the first million images a month, and the rate drops as volume grows. Check the pricing page for more details.
- Suitable for large-scale moderation systems
- Supports image and video moderation
- Provides detailed labels instead of a single NSFW score
- Works well with existing AWS infrastructure
- Requires an AWS account and code to use it
- You need to decide how to handle flagged content
Developers and businesses building image moderation systems on AWS.
7. Google Cloud Vision SafeSearch
SafeSearch is the explicit content feature in Google Cloud Vision. It checks an image against five categories and returns how likely each one is to contain adult content, suggestive material, violence, medical imagery, or spoofed content. Its results use six likelihood levels, ranging from VERY_UNLIKELY to VERY_LIKELY.

- Five categories: adult, spoof, medical, violence, and racy
- Accepts local files, Cloud Storage files, and web URLs
- Offline batch processing for up to 2,000 images per request
- Client libraries for Python, Node.js, Java, and Go
Cloud NSFW image detection API.
The first 1,000 units each month are free. After that, charges depend on the number of images processed and the applicable pricing tier.
- Low cost
- Easy to add if your stack is already on Google Cloud
- Needs a Google Cloud project with billing enabled
- Fewer categories than Sightengine or Hive
Teams on Google Cloud that need a basic screen for adult and violent content.
8. NudeNet
NudeNet is an open-source, free NSFW detector tool for detecting nudity-related objects in images. Unlike classifiers that assign one overall NSFW score, its object detection models can identify specific body parts and return their locations in an image.

- Detects specific body parts associated with nudity
- Provides model options with different sets of labels
- Methods for single images, batches, and censoring (detect, detect_batch, censor)
- Accepts file paths, OpenCV images, and image bytes
- Docker image and an in-browser demo that runs on the client side
Open-source NSFW object detection model.
Free and open source under the repository's MIT license. Computing resources and implementation work may incur costs.
- Shows where the content is in the image, which makes blurring possible
- Runs on your own machine
- Light enough for CPU use
- Provides location information for detected regions.
- Detects body parts only, not one safe or unsafe verdict, so you write the rule that decides what to block
- Requires technical knowledge to install and integrate
- Detection quality depends on the model and image
Blurring or censoring specific areas of an image in a local Python workflow.
9. OpenNSFW2
OpenNSFW2 is an open-source NSFW detector Python implementation of Yahoo's original Open-NSFW model, built with Keras. It estimates the likelihood that an image contains pornographic content and provides functions for processing images and video frames. This NSFW detector focuses on pornography detection rather than a broad range of content moderation categories.

- Returns one NSFW probability between 0 and 1 for each image
- Scores whole lists of images in batches, and scores video frames at a set interval
- Optional Grad-CAM overlay that highlights the part of the image that drove the score (TensorFlow backend only)
- Works with Keras 3 (TensorFlow or JAX) or tf-keras on Python 3.9 to 3.12
- Includes an HTTP service with Docker, and supports fine-tuning on your own labeled images
Open-source Python NSFW classifier.
Free under the MIT license.
- Handles video frames
- Supports individual images and batches of images
- A single probability gives no categories, so you cannot tell drawings from photos or suggestive from explicit
- Because the model focuses on pornographic content, suggestive images may not score the way you expect
- Needs TensorFlow or JAX installed
Developers who want a self-hosted model for checking images for pornographic content.
10. Falconsai/nsfw_image_detection
Falconsai/nsfw_image_detection is a pretrained image classification model hosted on Hugging Face. It predicts whether an image is classified as normal or NSFW. You can use it to filter explicit or inappropriate images in your own apps, such as an upload check that runs in a short Python script. The model is available for use with the Hugging Face Transformers library.

- Classifies images as normal or nsfw
- Works with the Hugging Face Transformers library
- Trained on about 80,000 images from a proprietary dataset
- The model card reports 0.98 accuracy on its evaluation set
- 85.8 million parameters, Apache 2.0 license, and about 4.1 million downloads last month
- Runs through the Transformers pipeline in a few lines of Python
Pretrained image classification model.
Free to download. Running costs depend on your own hardware or host.
- Straightforward classification labels
- Can be used for prototypes and custom image moderation applications
- Gives you control over local deployment
- Can run locally after downloading the model and required dependencies
- Widely used, with many community Spaces built on it
- Provides only two main classification labels
- Doesn't identify the specific location of nudity in an image
- Requires technical setup and enough computing resources
Developers who want a pretrained NSFW image classification model for Python projects, prototypes, or locally managed moderation systems.
Part 3. Generate AI Images Safely (No NSFW) with Filmora
An NSFW detector is aimed at flagging images after they have been created, but you can also take steps to avoid generating inappropriate content in the first place. If you create AI images and want to keep them safe for work (SFW), Wondershare Filmora offers an AI Image Generator with content filters that follow its content guidelines.
When a prompt contains keywords or requests that violate these guidelines, Filmora blocks the generation. It's a good example of how content filters can help prevent NSFW images before they're created.
If you need to prepare existing images or videos for sharing, Filmora also provides editing tools to help censor inappropriate content, such as:
- Apply blur effects to obscure sensitive details.
- Use mosaic effects (AI Face Mosaic) to pixelate sensitive areas, such as faces.
- Add overlays to cover unwanted content.

Creating SFW content takes more than filtering prompts. With Filmora, you can also edit and censor sensitive details to make your images and videos more suitable for sharing.
Conclusion
Whoever publishes or hosts images is responsible for what appears alongside them. The NSFW detectors we recommend here are built to help you check images before they go live. Some of them are free or even open source. You just need to choose one based on how many images you handle and where you want them processed.
For the images you create yourself, you can generate AI images in Filmora, which employs a safety filter for its AI generation that blocks prompts violating its content guidelines. Other than that, Filmora also offers blur, mosaic, and overlay effects that you can use to blur or cover sensitive details before you share your images and videos.
FAQ
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Can an NSFW detector scan videos?
Yes, several adult content detection APIs and open-source models (such as Amazon Rekognition, Hive Moderation, Sightengine, and OpenNSFW2) support video moderation by analyzing stored video files, streaming video feeds, or evaluating individual video frames at designated intervals. -
Are online NSFW image checkers safe to use?
Online NSFW detectors that process images locally (such as open-source JavaScript libraries) keep user content on your device. However, web apps and cloud APIs require transmitting images to external servers. It’s important to review each provider’s privacy policy and data retention practices. -
Can NSFW detectors be fooled?
While automated detectors are highly accurate, they are not completely foolproof and can occasionally yield false positives or false negatives depending on image context. Many enterprise platforms combine automated thresholds with human review for low-confidence results. -
What categories do NSFW detectors classify?
Depending on the tool, classifications in NSFW detectors range from binary labels (safe/NSFW) to detailed breakdowns including explicit nudity, suggestive/racy content, artistic nudity, specific body parts, drawings/hentai, violence, drugs, and context-specific environments like pools or beaches.
