Star by Face

StarByFace is a free celebrity look-alike finder: you give it a photo with one face, and it ranks the famous people you look like, with a percentage next to each name. You don't need an account and you don't pay anything; the website runs on ads, and there are apps for Android and iPhone too. I tried it on October 15, 2026, and it was fun, fast and, with one of its own sample photos, spot on. With a 160-year-old portrait, less so.

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".

The site's advice is simple: only one person in the photo, face clearly visible, and frontal photos work better. It also warns that accuracy depends on the resolution and quality of the face. 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.

Before any of that, though, there's a consent banner. It's from the ad side of the site, and it lists 943 vendors. That tells you how StarByFace pays the bills.

My test: a sample photo and Abraham Lincoln

I started with one of the site's sample photos, Angelina Jolie, because the easiest way to check a look-alike finder is to give it someone who is already in its database. It passed: the results opened on the Females tab, and Angelina Jolie came first at 100%. 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.

Each result is a card with the celebrity's photo, the percentage bar and, on most of them, a WIKI button that opens their English Wikipedia page. Above the cards you get "Again" to start over and "Share results" to send the whole list.

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."

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.

"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.

Is StarByFace safe?

Here's what the site promises, word for word: "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 page that sent you there, a cookie and your browser type, and that it uses Google Analytics and advertising companies to serve ads. It's a promise from the site, not something I can check from the outside. My own rule, for this or any face tool: use photos of yourself, not of people who haven't said yes, and think twice before sharing results with someone else's face in them.

The app and the price

There's no price list because there's nothing to pay on the website: no account, no premium plan, no paywall. The home page links to apps on Google Play and the App Store, where the app's home screen offers to take a photo, pick one from your gallery or start from a suggested face. The terms add one limit: the service is for personal and non-commercial use only.

If what you want is the opposite, a realistic person who doesn't exist, that's a different kind of tool: Human Generator creates full-body AI people from a few settings.

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