Stream vs. Hive Moderation
Compare Stream and Hive content moderation APIs across speed, scale, workflow, pricing, and more, using each company's published numbers.
- ~35 msvs. ~60 msText moderation latency, p50
- 1,500+vs. 25-50Text requests per second
- 50+vs. ~30Languages for text moderation
- $100vs. $50Free credits every month
The short answer.
Stream fits teams that want detection, rules, a review queue, an AI agent for automated flagging, and appeals within a single moderation product.
Hive leads in synthetic media detection. It's a classifier vendor: you get scores back, and you still build the enforcement layer, the queues, the appeals, and the audit trail yourself.
What each product is.
Stream Moderation is an API plus the workflow around it, including rules, a review queue, and appeals. One policy covers text, images, audio files, video files, and live video keyframes. Nora, Stream's moderation agent, reviews each flag in context and takes action or recommends one. It works on its own for any app with user-generated content, or plugs into Stream Chat, Video, and Feeds.
Hive sells moderation models as APIs for text, images, video, and audio, plus detection models for AI-generated content and CSAM. The API returns confidence scores and severity levels, and the customer decides what to do with them.
"We needed something that was the next generation of moderation. With Stream's AI Moderation being machine learning based, it meant that we could establish much broader parameters, and it would understand what people were trying to circumvent it."
Side-by-side.
What you build yourself.
Hive's API returns a score and stops there. Stream's API goes on to enforce a decision, queue the message for review, and handle appeals. Here is one scam message in a chat app: "pay me on Venmo, DM me on WhatsApp."
Note: Hive's Moderation Dashboard is a separate addition under its Enterprise plan. It comes with Hive's custom pricing, and it adds rules, thresholds, enforcement actions, review feeds, appeals, and watchlists on top of the API.
"We were very impressed right away that the AI recommendations matched what our human moderators would've done. Now the backend applies sanctions automatically. We just review and optimize the model from time to time."
Performance.
Both companies publish latency figures. Stream publishes p50, p95, and p99 for text; Hive publishes p50 and p90.
Benchmarks verified October 2026 from docs.thehive.ai.
Stream under heavier load
For a top-5 mobile gaming publisher with 750M+ monthly active users, Stream ran one million requests at 4,000 per second on a dedicated shard that it stood up in 48 hours.
0errors in 1,000,000 requests
Price per 1,000 requests.
Both companies publish per-request rates.
Hive text
$0.50
per 1,000 requests
Limited to 100 requests/day; dashboard on Enterprise only
Hive images
$3.00
per 1,000 requests
Limited to 100 requests/day
Stream text
$2.00
per 1,000 messages
No limits; dashboard, enforcement, and AI agent Nora included
Stream images
$4.00
per 1,000 images
No limits; same dashboard and review queue as text
Prices verified October 2026 from thehive.ai/pricing and getstream.io/moderation/pricing.
Hive is cheaper per request at list prices, but generally costs more once you add the Enterprise plan and the engineers who build review, enforcement, and appeals. The Moderation Dashboard, the highest rate limits, multi-region deployment, and premium support all sit on Hive's custom-priced Enterprise plan.
Free credits.
Both offer free usage to get started. Stream gives $100 in credits every month with no credit card required. Hive gives $50+ after you add a payment method.
The dashboard.
Stream includes the moderation dashboard, review queues, and appeals on every plan. On Hive, the Moderation Dashboard is part of the Enterprise plan, priced on request.
Example: 10M messages a month.
At 10 million messages a month, Hive costs about $48,333 all in: $5,000 for text detection, plus estimates of $10,000 for the Enterprise plan and $33,333 for two engineers to build review, enforcement, and appeals. Stream's list price is $20,000, with the dashboard, enforcement, and AI agent Nora included. At this volume, Stream also offers volume-based discounts up to 75%.
- $20,000 List price, $2.00 per 1,000 messages. Includes the dashboard, enforcement, and Nora.
- $5,000 Text detection, $0.50 per 1,000 requests
- $10,000 Enterprise plan (estimate)
- $33,333 Two engineers building the workflow (estimate)
Estimates: Hive doesn't publish Enterprise pricing, so $10,000 a month is a placeholder. Engineering assumes two engineers at $200,000 a year.
Where each platform leads.
Detection plus the workflow
Hive detects. Stream detects, routes, enforces, logs, and reports, with the harm label, severity, user metadata, and surrounding conversation in one view. AI agent Nora reviews each flag in context.
A moderation dashboard on every plan
Moderators work from queues for users, content, and media. Each flagged item shows the surrounding conversation, the harm label, severity, confidence score, and the user's history.
The send path
Stream publishes p50, p95, and p99 for text, and for Stream Chat and Feeds moderation runs in Stream's own send path, so no third-party call sits in it.
Live video and audio
Moderation runs inside the call: keyframes and live captions are analyzed in real time, with mute and blur actions applied there.
Total cost
While the per-request rate is higher, your dashboard, enforcement, and AI agent Nora are included with Stream. Total cost at scale is generally lower than Hive.
Synthetic media detection
Hive detects deepfakes and AI-generated content across image, video, audio, and music, plus text and liveness.
Child safety
Hive offers Thorn-powered hash matching against a 57M+ hash corpus, scene-sensitive video hashing, a CSE text classifier, and NCMEC CyberTipline reporting.
A granular visual taxonomy
Hive's visual model has 40+ heads, each with per-class confidence scores, so you can tune thresholds per policy instead of accepting a binary verdict.
Live-stream ingest
Hive documents RTMP and HLS ingest and offers a sync API mode.
Regulated and air-gapped buyers
Hive holds a DoD Defense Innovation Unit contract and supports offline and on-premise deployment.
"We squashed the [scam] issue entirely. What used to be hundreds of scam messages per day is now effectively zero. And we didn't need a team of moderators to do it."
Frequently asked questions.
Try Stream free.
$100 in moderation credits every month. No credit card required.
Stream.io, Inc. references third-party trademarks only to identify vendors for factual comparison, consistent with nominative fair use. All trademarks remain the property of their owners. Pricing and features checked October 2026 from each vendor's public pages. Spot something out of date? Email compare@getstream.io.