7 Best Apps to Blur Faces on iPhone (2026 Comparison)

Short answer: for iPhone, the BlurQ face blur app for iPhone is free, runs 100% on your device and blurs every face in one tap; our full comparison is below.

This guide is for anyone who needs to hide faces before posting: parents, teachers, people selling a car, vloggers who film in public. It only covers apps whose main job is blurring faces; general editors like CapCut make you draw every mask by hand, so they get a short note at the end.

One disclosure up front: BlurQ is our app. Every claim below comes from each app’s App Store listing, website or release notes as of October 2026, not from hands-on testing. Where a listing does not say something, we say so instead of guessing.

The apps compared at a glance

All seven apps detect faces on the phone and let you tap individual faces to keep or hide them. The differences are price, what else they detect, video, and the App Store privacy label.

How we compared

We read each app’s US App Store listing, in-app purchase list, privacy label, latest release notes and, where one exists, the developer’s website, then checked the same six things:

• Detection: does the app find faces on its own, and does it also find license plates or text, or do you draw those by hand?
• Per-face control: can you tap one face to keep it visible while the rest stay hidden?
• Video: does the app blur video at all, does the blur follow moving faces, and what does the free tier allow?
• Privacy: what the developer declares in the App Store privacy label, and whether the listing claims on-device processing. Privacy labels are self-reported, so we quote them as written.
• Price over two years: the cheapest way to own the full app for 24 months, lifetime where offered, otherwise two years of the annual plan.
• Watermarks and limits: what you give up if you never pay.

BlurQ: Face Blur Photo & Video

Platform: iPhone only, iOS 18 or later. Price: free with ads; BlurQ Pro Lifetime $9.99 one-time. Rating: 4.3 stars from 18 ratings.

BlurQ finds faces on the device with Apple’s Vision framework and lets you tap the ones you want to hide. It has 10 blur styles, more than any other app here: Gaussian, Pixelate and Cover are free, and Pro adds Mosaic, Hexagon, Triangle, Frost, Motion, Zoom and Bokeh. In video, the blur follows faces when heads turn or pass behind a hand, and emoji stickers can follow a face the same way. It also blurs the background or whole people in photos and video. Photos save at original resolution with no location or camera data.

The limits are real. The free version shows ads, and because of that the App Store privacy label lists “Data Used to Track You” (location, identifiers, usage data), while Redact, Deface and BlurFace declare “Data Not Collected”. Photos are never uploaded; the tracking concerns ads, not your images. Free saves carry a small watermark unless you watch a short ad, and free video exports stop at 8 seconds in 720p. License plates, signs and text use the manual tool and need Pro. There is no batch mode, and there is no iPad or Mac app.

Best for: anyone who wants photo and video face blur for a single $9.99 payment, and does not mind that the free tier is ad-supported. Step-by-step instructions are in how to blur faces in photos and how to blur faces in videos.

Redact: Blur Faces in Video & Photo

Platform: iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Vision, iOS 18 or macOS 26. Price: free; Redact Pro $3.99/month, $22.99/year or $59.99 lifetime, one purchase for all devices with Family Sharing. Rating: not enough ratings yet.

Redact has the widest toolkit in this group. It detects faces and license plates automatically, with a confidence slider for crowds and manual add or remove for anything it misses. In video, the listing says “every face blurred and tracked across the whole clip”, with a per-person timeline and a “Track from here” control. Styles include blur, pixelate or mosaic, a black bar, emoji and stickers. The listing describes it as “100% on-device, powered by the Neural Engine” and the privacy label is “Data Not Collected”. Single-photo exports are free at full resolution with no watermark, and EXIF data is stripped.

The cost is the catch. Lifetime is $59.99, six times BlurQ, and two years of the annual plan is $45.98. Free video exports carry a “Made with Redact” badge and a length limit the listing does not quantify. Batch photos and some sticker packs are Pro. Background blur is not mentioned in the listing.

Best for: people who need automatic plate detection and an iPad or Mac version, and are willing to pay for it.

Superblur: Mosaic & Blur Faces

Platform: iPhone only, and it requires iOS 27, which rules out any iPhone that cannot run this year’s system. Price: free with “no watermark and no ads”; Superblur Pro $6.99 one-time. Rating: not enough ratings yet.

Superblur is the only app here that detects faces, number plates and text (names, phone numbers, addresses) the moment a photo opens, all without a subscription. The free tier has no watermark and no stated limit. It plugs into the Photos edit menu, share sheet, Shortcuts and Siri. Video works with “one row per person, shown or hidden for the whole clip”. Pro adds face grouping so chosen people stay visible, long videos split by scene, and batches over 10 photos.

Two things to weigh. The listing never uses the word “tracking” for video, so we cannot say how it handles fast movement. And although the on-device claim is clear, the privacy label reads “Data Linked to You” (email address, customer support) plus usage and diagnostics, and version 1.4 added a “Share Usage Data” switch that is on by default. It is also very new: four versions shipped in one week in October 2026.

Best for: the cheapest one-time purchase with automatic plate and text detection, if your iPhone runs iOS 27.

Blur Faces - HiddenFace

Platform: iPhone and iPad, iOS 26 or later. Price: every feature free with a small watermark; Pro $2.99/month, $12.99/year or $19.99 one-time “Unlocked”. Rating: not enough ratings yet.

HiddenFace runs a YOLOv8 model on the device, lets you tap faces to toggle them and long-press to change the cover type. Styles are blur, pixelate, 46+ emoji, solid color and custom stickers cut out of your own photos. Video has a multi-track timeline with trim, split and keyframes, and the listing says it can “detect and cover faces across entire videos”. Bulk photo processing groups the same face across imports. The privacy label is “Data Not Linked to You” (usage and diagnostics).

Limits: license plates and screens are manual areas, not detected. The developer’s site says every feature is free with a watermark, but whether the free tier has other caps, such as video length, is not stated in the listing. It needs iOS 26, so older iPhones are out.

Best for: a full free trial of video blur with a watermark, and a fair $19.99 one-time unlock if you stay.

Deface: Blur Faces in Video

Platform: iPhone and iPad, iOS 16 or later, the lowest requirement in this group. Price: free with limited, watermarked exports; Pro $2.99/week, $2.99/month, $14.99 or $29.99/year, or $24.99 lifetime. Rating: 2.6 stars from 5 ratings.

Deface’s one-tap detection claims to catch “small, distant, angled, or partially hidden” faces, and you tap any face to keep that person visible. Styles are Gaussian blur, pixelate or mosaic, solid color and emoji. It has had a batch mode since version 1.3, claims “100% offline” processing on the Neural Engine, and its privacy label is “Data Not Collected”.

The concern is video quality. A one-star review reports blur bubbles jumping around when faces move; the developer replied that tracking was “substantially improved” later, which we cannot confirm. The free export count is not stated, two annual prices are listed, and metadata stripping is Pro.

Best for: older iPhones that cannot run iOS 18, where the other apps will not install.

Blur Face - photo & video

Platform: iPhone and iPad, iOS 17.6 or later, also on Android. Price: free photos with a daily limit; Pro $1.99/week, $12.99/year or $34.99 lifetime. Rating: 5.0 stars from 1 rating on the US store.

BlurFace is the strongest photo toolkit after BlurQ. Besides faces it detects people and backgrounds, so you can blur, pixelate, cover or remove a background in one step. It has the most cover shapes here, including an eyes-only bar, three glass-style blurs, motion blur and tags, with per-face intensity. The listing says it “works offline” and the privacy label is “Data Not Collected”. The website says photo exports have no watermark.

Video is Pro only, so there is no free way to try it. One-click blur-all, custom-area blur and unlimited batch are also Pro, and the free daily limit is not quantified in the listing. At $34.99 lifetime it is the second most expensive app here. One review reports it blurred everyone when only three faces were selected.

Best for: photo-only users who want background and people blur as well as faces, and do not need video.

Poof: Blur Faces in Photos

Platform: iPhone, iOS 18 or later. Price: free with a small watermark; Poof Pro $3.99/month, $11.99/year or $24.99 lifetime. Rating: not enough ratings yet.

Poof is a photos-only app with Quick, Deep and Ultra Deep detection modes; the website says it found 81 faces in one crowd photo. You can give each face a different style (emoji, blur, pixelate, solid color or stickers), tap to uncover a face, or draw a box or marker stroke. Exports drop location, date and camera metadata. The listing says “No cloud. No uploads. No accounts.” and the privacy label is “Data Not Linked to You” (purchase history only).

Limits: there is no video at all; the site FAQ says it is “on the roadmap”. The free tier auto-covers only the most prominent faces (the website says the first six) and adds a watermark. No plate detection, no background blur. An unrelated app from another developer is also called Poof (Auto Blur Faces in Video); this section is about the one at poof.photo.

Best for: parents and teachers who only ever blur photos and want many faces handled at once.

Which one should you get?

The right app depends on what you blur most. Our picks, with the reason in one line:

• Best overall value: BlurQ. Photo and video face blur, 10 styles, emoji that follow faces, background and people blur, $9.99 once. Accept ads on the free tier and a Data Used to Track You label.
• Most complete toolkit: Redact. Automatic plates, batch, iPad and Mac, Data Not Collected. Budget $59.99 lifetime or $45.98 over two years.
• Best cheap one-time purchase with automatic plate and text detection: Superblur. $6.99, no watermark on free, but only on iOS 27.
• Best free trial of video blur: HiddenFace. Every feature free with a watermark, $19.99 to unlock.
• Best for parents who only need photos: Poof. Deep crowd detection, per-face styles, no video.
• Best photo toolkit with background and people blur: BlurFace. Video is Pro only at $34.99 lifetime.
• Best for older iPhones: Deface. Runs on iOS 16, Data Not Collected, but its 2.6-star rating and tracking complaints are a warning.

By what you need to do

• Parents posting kids’ photos: Poof or BlurQ. Both hide every face in one tap and let you keep your own child visible. Poof if you never shoot video; BlurQ if you do.
• Vloggers and TikTok: BlurQ (cheapest with free capped tracking), HiddenFace (free with watermark) or Redact (per-person timeline). Our video guide covers the workflow: how to blur faces in videos.
• Selling a car or posting street photos: Superblur or Redact detect plates automatically. In BlurQ the plate is a manual Pro blur; see how to blur a license plate.
• Journalists and anyone working offline: Redact, Deface and BlurFace declare Data Not Collected and claim full offline processing. More on this in blur photos without uploading to the cloud.
• Large group photos: Poof (Ultra Deep mode), Redact (confidence slider) or Superblur. BlurQ handles groups too but has no batch mode for many photos at once.
• Tightest budget: Superblur ($6.99) if you have iOS 27, otherwise BlurQ ($9.99). Both are one-time payments; two years of any weekly plan costs far more.

A note on built-in tools

The iPhone has no built-in face blur. Apple Markup can cover a face with a shape, but it does not blur. Signal blurs faces automatically, but only inside Signal, with no per-face control and no way to save the result for another app. CapCut on iPhone has no face detection: its own guide says to add an overlay, invert a circular mask, and “add keyframe animation to track the motion”, one mask per face. Fine for one face, slow for a group. Our guide to censoring photos for social media explains when a built-in tool is enough.

Blur faces without installing anything

On Android or a desktop, or if you do not want another app, our free blur faces online tool detects faces in the browser, offers blur, pixelate and mosaic, adds no watermark and never uploads your photo. It handles faces only, not video, plates or text.

Whichever app you choose, pick a style that destroys the face rather than softening it; our guide on how to pixelate or censor a face shows the difference.