Tisane API

Tisane API is a RESTful text-moderation and language-analysis service for teams handling user-generated content. It is especially suited to multilingual communities and games, where context and explainable decisions matter. Its focused text analysis is useful, but the modest free quota and text-only scope set clear boundaries.

Overview

Developed by Tisane Labs, whose work focuses on natural language processing for moderation and law enforcement, the API returns detailed results in milliseconds with human-readable reasons for moderation decisions. Deterministic outputs and traceable explanations give teams a way to understand and debug decisions rather than rely on opaque flags.

This is a text-moderation product, not a complete media-safety suite. It supports custom policies, but does not moderate images, audio, or video and has no human-review workflow. Teams that need those capabilities will need another approach.

Key features

Tisane handles informal and evasive language, including slang, misspellings, and algospeak. Analysis can be tailored to contexts such as usernames and search queries, a useful distinction for community products where the same words can carry different meanings. It can translate foreign content while preserving original profanities and slurs, and identify topics, entities, and sentiment.

Gaming-specific moderation distinguishes in-game violence references from criminal activity, and can detect scammers, groomers, and trolls. That makes it a stronger fit for game communities than a general-purpose filter when those distinctions are central to moderation.

Deployment choices include public cloud, on-premises installation, and Tisane Embedded as an in-process library. On-prem deployment is available for privacy requirements or air-gapped environments. Integrations include plugins for Slack, Minecraft, Webex, Discord, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as third-party connections through Zapier, Make, and n8n.

Pricing

The Community plan costs nothing and includes 50,000 requests, capped at 10 hits per minute. It has no technical support, CORS support, LM Direct Access, or customization. It is a practical starting point for low-volume evaluation or small deployments, but the low rate limit and missing CORS support may constrain production use.

Small costs $99 a month for 100,000 requests and 120 hits per minute, with limited technical support. It retains Community’s exclusions for CORS, LM Direct Access, and customization, so it suits modest workloads that need more throughput but not those features.

Medium costs $159 a month and raises the quota to 400,000 requests at 120 hits per minute. It adds technical support, CORS support, and LM Direct Access, making it the more capable choice for teams integrating the API into a web application. Medium Burstable costs $349 a month for the same 400,000 requests and feature set, but raises the rate limit to 2,000 hits per minute; that premium is for burst capacity, not a larger monthly quota.

Large costs $899 a month and includes 2,500,000 requests, 2,000 hits per minute, technical support, integration assistance, CORS support, LM Direct Access, and limited customization. It is the clearest fit for higher-volume services that need implementation help. Enterprise uses a billed Server License with custom pricing: requests are unlimited subject to machine capacity, there are no rate limits, and it includes technical support, integration assistance, CORS support, LM Direct Access, full customization, private or public cloud deployment, and native Linux and Windows versions. This is the option for organizations needing an unconstrained deployment or tailored setup.

Platforms

Tisane is available through an API and supports Linux, macOS, Windows, web, and self-hosted environments. Its deployment options span cloud, on-premises, and an embedded library, giving privacy-sensitive teams alternatives to a public-cloud-only setup.

Who it's for

Tisane suits product and community teams moderating text at scale, especially gaming services and multilingual platforms that need contextual analysis and explainable decisions. Its free plan offers a low-cost way to begin, while paid tiers serve teams needing higher quotas, faster request rates, support, or customization. It is not the right standalone choice for mixed-media moderation or a human escalation queue.

Pros and cons

• Pros: Human-readable, deterministic decisions make moderation outcomes easier to trace and debug.
• Pros: Context-aware text analysis covers slang, misspellings, foreign-language content, and gaming-specific distinctions.
• Pros: Cloud, on-premises, and embedded deployment options accommodate different privacy and integration needs.
• Cons: The Community plan's 10-hits-per-minute limit and lack of CORS support restrict its usefulness for some live applications.
• Cons: Small also lacks CORS support and customization, so the first paid tier does not include every integration feature.
• Cons: Image, audio, and video moderation and human review are outside the product's scope.

Alternatives

For image-focused moderation, Google Cloud Vision API is a freemium, per-image option with a free allowance; choose it when image analysis, rather than explainable text moderation, is the priority. WebPurify offers paid moderation with a free trial and a live moderation option; consider it when that alternative better fits your moderation workflow.

Amazon Rekognition Content Moderation is a paid service with a free tier that includes video analysis minutes for 12 months, so it may suit teams seeking video moderation. Detoxify is a free, self-hosted open-source toxic-comment classification library for teams that prefer that model to a hosted API.

Hive Moderation provides access to more than 10 models and pay-as-you-go options, making it an alternative for teams seeking broader model selection. PicPurify offers a free allowance and paid monthly units, while Sightengine has a free tier and paid operations; either may suit a team comparing freemium API options. Llama Guard is a free, self-hosted model option for teams able to work with model weights.

See the AI Content Moderation Software directory for more options.

Verdict

Choose Tisane API for text moderation when contextual language analysis and explainable decisions are central, particularly in multilingual or gaming communities. Its Community tier makes a measured start possible, and the paid plans scale quotas and throughput; look elsewhere if you need image, audio, or video moderation or a human-review workflow.