Star by Face: Is It Safe, Is It Free and How Accurate Is It?

Is Star by Face safe? For a photo of your own face, it's a reasonable bet, with one caveat: its safety rests on a promise. The site says it doesn't store uploaded photos, deletes them after recognition and only keeps one if you choose to share it, and that's not something I can check from the outside. It's free, with no account, and it pays for itself with ads. As for accuracy, the 100% matches I got were famous faces it already knew; everything after that is a loose resemblance. I went back on November 5, 2026, to check all of this again, and here are the details.

Is Star by Face safe? What it says it does with your photo

Here's the promise, word for word, on the home page and in the privacy policy: "We do not store uploaded photos. All photos are deleted after recognition. The photo will be saved only if you want to share it." By its own account, sharing is the one step that keeps your photo.

The same privacy policy says it collects no personal information beyond website usage data: your IP address, the address of the page that sent you there, a cookie and your browser type. No name, no email. It also says it uses Google Analytics and advertising companies to serve ads, and those companies may use information about your visits to this and other websites to show you ads.

That second part is the one you notice first. Before you can do anything, a consent banner from the ad side of the site asks you to accept more than 900 vendors. That's how StarByFace pays the bills, and it's the price of "free".

The apps have their own privacy declarations, and they're worth a look if you'd rather use your phone. On the US App Store, the iPhone app's privacy label lists identifiers and usage data under "Data Used to Track You" (data that may be used to track you across other companies' apps and websites). It also lists location, identifiers, usage data, diagnostics and other data as data not linked to you. On Google Play, the developer's Data safety section says no data is collected and none is shared with third parties, that data is encrypted in transit, and that it can't be deleted. Those are the developer's own declarations, not something I audited.

Is Star by Face free?

Yes, on the website: no account, no premium plan, no paywall, nothing to pay. The home page links to apps on Google Play and the App Store. On the US App Store, the iPhone app is free with in-app purchases, and the one it lists is "Disable Ads" for $0.99. The Android app is listed as containing ads and in-app purchases. The website's terms add one limit: the service is for personal and non-commercial use only.

How accurate is Star by Face? My tests

The easiest way to check a look-alike finder is to give it someone who should be in its database, so I did that twice. First, one of the site's own sample photos, Angelina Jolie. It passed: the results opened on the Females tab with Angelina Jolie first at 100%, and the photo on her 100% card is a different picture of her, so it did recognize her. Then the scale drops fast: Emmanuelle Béart at 47%, Eva Green at 40%, Jennifer Garner at 39%, and the rest of the list in the 30s.

Then I uploaded Barack Obama's official White House portrait, which is in the public domain. Same story: Barack Obama first at 100% on the Males tab, then 35% for the second name, 30% for the third and a long tail in the high 20s. But look closely at the card that scored 100%: this time, the catalog photo on it is that same official portrait, cropped. So here, the 100% says "I have this exact picture", not "I recognized this person from a new photo".

Then I tried something harder. I pasted the URL of a public-domain portrait of Abraham Lincoln from Wikimedia Commons, a nearly frontal black-and-white photograph from the 1860s, mostly to see whether StarByFace would find Lincoln himself or an actor who played him. It found neither: the photo loaded, and the answer was "Recognition error. Please try to upload another photo. We apologize."

So how accurate is it? It's good at finding a famous face it already knows, and it's honest enough to give an error instead of a guess. For everyone else, and that includes you and me, the list is a ranking of resemblance to its catalog photos. The iPhone app's own listing calls the matches "a similarity estimate", and the site warns that accuracy depends on the resolution and quality of the face. I didn't find anything that explains how the percentages are calculated.

How StarByFace works

The home page gives you three ways in. You can paste the address of an image into "Enter URL…" and press Select, drop a file into "Upload a pic", or, if you'd rather not use your own face, pick one of the sample photos under "OR USE ONE OF THESE" and press "Use Photo".

According to the site, it detects the face, builds a facial pattern from points like the eyebrows, eyes, nose and mouth, and a neural network compares that pattern with its celebrity faces. Each result is a card with the celebrity's photo, the percentage bar and, on most of them, a WIKI button that opens their Wikipedia page. Above the cards you get "Again" to start over, and every card has its own Share button.

Males, Females and Best pair

The results come in three tabs. "Males" and "Females" are two separate rankings, and you can switch between them whatever the photo shows, so a woman's face gets a list of male look-alikes too. That's where most of the fun is, and also where the percentages matter least.

"Best pair" puts one man and one woman side by side, as a single picture to share. For the Jolie sample, it paired her with Taylor Kitsch, and each side has a drop-down menu to swap in another name from the lists.

Star by Face on your phone, and what to use instead

The iPhone app does the same job on your phone: its home screen offers to take a photo, pick one from your gallery or start from a suggested face, and the results come in Male, Female and Best pair tabs. The two videos on this page show it, from the App Store listing to the results screen.

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This review was written by Miguel Ángel, with an LLM helping to check the facts.