Persona vs Onfido vs Veriff Identity Verification Pricing Playbook

Three SaaS vendors sell the same promise — prove the person on the other side of the screen is who they claim to be — and price it three ways. Persona sells a platform subscription with volume inside it: $250 a month buys the first 500 verifications. Veriff sells a per-check menu: $0.80 a verification on Essential, with every extra capability priced as an add-on. Onfido, now Entrust Identity Verification, publishes no price and quotes through sales. The cheapest changes with your volume and your screening requirements. Prices as read on November 15, 2026.

The three price ladders

The table has a hole in it, and the hole is the story. Two vendors publish rates; one does not. Veriff's page is a menu with prices next to every item. Persona's help center states one number. Onfido's commercial pricing is unpublished, and the only public price list anywhere is a UK G-Cloud 14 procurement filing dated May 7, 2024, priced in GBP by annual volume.

Persona: $250 a month buys the first 500

Persona's Essential plan starts at $250 a month on an annual, 12-month contract, and the $250 includes 500 free services a month. A service is a verification or a report, and each service past the 500 costs $1.50. Unused services do not roll over. The plan carries a 60-day trial of up to 50 services in the sandbox, and Persona runs a Startup Program by application for one year. Growth and Enterprise are quote-only through sales.

The effective per-verification cost is $0.50 at 500 verifications, $1.00 at 1,000, and $1.40 at 5,000, and the annual floor is $3,000 before a single extra verification is bought. That floor is the whole decision at low volume: 300 verifications a month costs $250, an effective $0.83 a check, while 100 a month costs the same $250 for an effective $2.50 a check. Persona is cheap only when the team actually uses the allotment.

Persona's platform is the reason the subscription exists: the Essential plan buys the most popular products and services with basic platform access, and the quote-only Growth plan adds Graph investigations and advanced Cases features. The buyer is buying a platform with the checks inside it. Our Okta vs Auth0 vs Microsoft Entra identity pricing playbook covers the workforce side of the same decision, where Persona's Okta integration sits.

Veriff: $0.80 a check, and the menu is the price

Veriff's Self-Serve plans are priced per verification with no setup or implementation charges: you only pay for IDV decisions, not retries. Essential is $0.80 per verification with a $49 monthly minimum. Plus is $1.39 with a $99 minimum and adds review by trained specialists when automation cannot decide, video session recording, and fraud detection through Risk Insights, FaceBlock and CrossLinks. Premium is $1.89 with a $209 minimum and adds end-user flow branding, session export via API, and bulk export for compliance. The page carries a 15-day free trial with 50 live verifications, and an estimator that prices 600 verifications at $480.00 on Essential.

The minimums matter at low volume, because the minimum is the bill when the volume is small. Essential's $49 minimum clears at 62 verifications, Plus at 72 and Premium at 111. Below those counts the buyer pays the minimum: 20 verifications on Essential cost $49, which is $2.45 a check.

The add-ons are where the headline rate stops describing the bill: PEP and sanctions screening adds $0.64 per verification, ongoing monitoring $0.09, and extended retention of two years $0.30 — all three together take Essential from $0.80 to $1.83 a check.

Veriff's coverage is the widest of the three on the printed page: 230-plus countries, 50 languages, 12,500-plus documents, about 99.6 percent accuracy. The compliance seals are printed on the same page: CCPA and CPRA, GDPR in the EU, SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, ISO/IEC 30107-3 Level 1 and Level 2, UK DIATF, and FIDO. Liveness is iBeta conformant on Essential, which means the selfie check has passed an independent presentation-attack test. A team that needs sanctions screening on every check should price Veriff at $1.44, not $0.80.

Onfido: no public price, one public-sector anchor

Entrust completed its acquisition of Onfido on April 9, 2024, and the product is now sold as Entrust Identity Verification. The commercial price is unpublished and quoted through sales, and the vendor's own pages carry no rate card. The only public price list is Onfido Ltd's UK G-Cloud 14 filing for public-sector buyers, dated May 7, 2024: each check priced by type and annual volume committed over 12 months, no platform fees, onboarding at £3,776.50 for Standard or £8,632.00 for Enterprise.

Onfido's G-Cloud 14 pricing sheet, above: document verification £1.39, biometric £0.64 and watchlist screening £0.44 per check at 10,000 annual checks.

The G-Cloud tiers show how steeply the per-check price falls with committed volume. Document verification runs £1.39 at 10,000 checks, £1.10 at 50,000, £1.00 at 100,000, £0.80 at 500,000 and £0.73 at 1,000,000. Biometric verification runs £0.64, £0.56, £0.51, £0.41 and £0.38 across the same bands, watchlist screening £0.44 down to £0.25, the ID Record eKYC check £1.14 down to £0.59, and the QES plus OTP package £3.22 down to £2.18. These are 2024 GBP prices for UK public-sector buyers, not a 2026 commercial rate card, and this guide converts none of them to dollars.

Add watchlist screening to the 10,000-check stack and the annual cost is £24,700 — 10,000 times £2.47. With Standard onboarding of £3,776.50, the first year is £24,076.50 before any other module. Third-party buyer data puts the average Onfido contract at about $260,000 a year, according to Vendr data cited by BeVerified — a market figure, not a vendor price.

What the anchor buys is the strongest liveness and trust-framework record of the three. Onfido's Liveness 2.0 holds an iBeta ISO/IEC 30107-3 Level 2 result from 2022, and the product holds certification under the UK Digital Verification Services Trust Framework at high confidence.

The crossover: 714 checks a month

The ranking between Persona and Veriff is a single equation: Persona's cost is a floor plus $1.50 a check past 500, and Veriff's is a flat $0.80 a check.

Below about 714 verifications a month, Persona is cheaper; above it, Veriff Essential is cheaper. The annual gap at 1,000 verifications a month is $2,400: Persona costs $12,000 a year and Veriff Essential costs $9,600. At 500 a month the order reverses by $1,800 a year: Persona costs $3,000 and Veriff costs $4,800. With PEP and sanctions screening added to Veriff, the crossover moves to about 8,333 verifications a month, because the screened rate of $1.44 is only six cents below Persona's $1.50 marginal rate. At 1,000 screened verifications a month, Persona costs $12,000 a year and Veriff costs $17,280: Persona is cheaper by $5,280.

Two cautions sit under that table. First, the Veriff figures at 5,000 and 10,000 are list-rate arithmetic: Self-Serve serves under 5,000 a month, and above that the buyer moves to custom Enterprise pricing. Second, the Persona figures assume the buyer uses the 500 included services.

The compliance hook: 31 CFR 1010.230

The reason any of this matters is the FinCEN customer due diligence rule, 31 CFR 1010.230. Covered financial institutions must establish and maintain written procedures reasonably designed to identify and verify the beneficial owners of legal entity customers, and to include those procedures in their anti-money laundering (AML) compliance program. The ownership prong covers each individual who owns 25 percent or more of the equity interests — up to four people. The control prong covers a single individual with significant responsibility to control, manage or direct the entity. Records must be kept for five years after the account is closed. The rule was published May 11, 2016 and required compliance by May 11, 2018; FinCEN's exceptive relief FIN-2026-R001, dated February 13, 2026, says institutions need not re-identify and re-verify beneficial owners at each account opening. The vendor verifies the person and the institution owns the obligation: the check is outsourced, the CDD duty is not. The same vendors sell KYB checks for the legal entity itself; the CDD rule is what makes the buyer need them. Our FinCEN CDD beneficial owner certification playbook walks the certification itself, and our FinCEN BOI beneficial ownership reporting guide covers the separate reporting duty that sits beside it.

Who should use each — and who should not

The buying checklist

• [x] Step 1: Count the monthly verifications, honestly. Use the last three months of real volume and split screened checks from bare checks.
• [x] Step 2: Price the mix at your own numbers. Below about 714 a month Persona wins bare; with screening the crossover is about 8,333.
• [x] Step 3: Add the add-ons before you compare. Price Veriff at $1.44 with screening, or $1.83 with monitoring and retention.
• [x] Step 4: Check the minimums. Under 62 verifications on Veriff Essential you pay the $49 floor; under 500 on Persona you pay the $250 floor.
• [x] Step 5: Ask Onfido for a written quote at your volume, using the G-Cloud tiers as the anchor: document plus biometric at 10,000 checks a year is £20,300 before onboarding.
• [x] Step 6: Confirm the certification your regulator needs: UK DVSTF and iBeta Level 2 are not interchangeable, and only one vendor here holds both.
• [x] Step 7: Run the numbers in the pricing calculator. Our chargeback defense engineering Ethoca Verifi RDR 3DS2 playbook covers the fraud layer that identity verification does not reach.

The verdict: Veriff wins the bare per-check comparison at $0.80 and is cheapest above about 714 verifications a month. Persona wins below that volume, wins whenever screening is required at ordinary volumes, and wins on platform breadth with the most popular products and basic platform access inside the subscription. Onfido wins on certification — iBeta Level 2 and UK DVSTF — and loses on price transparency, because the only public price is a 2024 UK public-sector filing in GBP.