Retake AI asks for 12 clear selfies before it will do anything, then trains a personal model to reshoot the photos you already took. When the results land they can be uncanny in a flattering way, but a lot of users bounce before they get there. The onboarding is slow, the good outputs sit behind a subscription, and the 3.2 star rating on Google Play is mostly people saying the free credits ran out before they got a keeper. If you are looking for Retake AI alternatives that skip the personal-model wait, cost less, or hand you the retouch dials directly, these seven do the job in different ways.
We tested each one on Android with the same three test photos: a dim indoor selfie, a group shot with one person in shadow, and a slightly out-of-focus portrait. Results below.
Quick comparison
| App | Best for | Free plan | Starting price/mo | Standout feature |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FaceApp | One-tap face transformations | Watermarked exports, limited filters | About $4/mo | Impression filters that read as photos, not filters |
| Remini | Enhancing old, blurry, low-res selfies | 3 enhances a day with ads | About $5/mo | Face restoration on genuinely broken images |
| Facetune | Precise manual retouch | 3-day trial only, limited free tools | About $7/mo | Best-in-class detail brushes and reshape controls |
| YouCam Perfect | Beauty tweaks plus virtual makeup | Full editor, watermarked and ad-supported | About $4/mo | Try-on makeup rendered in real time |
| BeautyPlus | Casual selfie fixes with heavy filters | Full editor, ad-supported | About $3/mo | Trend filter drops updated weekly |
| FaceLab | Age, gender, and hairstyle transformations | 3-day trial | About $6/mo | Aging engine that still looks like the same person |
| Meitu | All-in-one photo and short video edits | Broad free layer, watermark on some effects | About $4/mo | Body reshape plus filters plus a real timeline |
Why people leave Retake AI
Three complaints show up over and over in Google Play reviews and on Reddit.
The 12-photo training gate is slow and easy to fail
The app needs 12 selfies that meet its rules on lighting, angle, and framing, then it runs a training pass that can take hours. If the training set is uneven, everything downstream looks off, and the fix is to redo the whole upload. Users on Reddit describe waiting overnight only to get results that do not really look like them, then paying again for another run.
The paywall lands the moment the results get good
The free tier gives you a taste, then blocks the higher-resolution exports and the styles most people actually want. The subscription is not extreme by itself, but stacking it on top of the training wait is what breaks the goodwill. A common review pattern is a five-star for the concept followed by a two-star for the price.
Uploading 12 face photos to a stranger's server
The privacy question is not hypothetical. Twelve tagged selfies plus a trained model is a bigger footprint than a single photo edit, and there is no way to run the model on-device. Users who care about that side of things want an app that either edits locally or asks for one photo at a time.
The Retake AI alternatives worth trying
FaceApp: Best for one-tap face transformations
FaceApp is the app most Retake AI users try first, and often the one they stay with. It applies a strong catalogue of face filters (age, gender, hair, makeup, mood) to a single upload, no training required. The Impression filters in particular land close to what Retake AI is selling: a photo that looks like a better version of the same shot, not a filtered one.
Where it falls short: The free tier watermarks every export, and a few of the most popular filters sit behind Pro. Some of the transformation styles skew unrealistic in a way Retake AI mostly avoids.
Pricing:
- Free: All filters previewable, watermarked export, occasional ads
- Paid: About $4/mo or roughly $20/year for Pro
- vs Retake AI: Cheaper per month, no training wait, and results are one tap away
Migrating from Retake AI: No import needed. Point FaceApp at the same source photos and the workflow is faster from the first tap.
Bottom line: Pick FaceApp if you want the closest one-tap Retake AI experience without the 12-photo gate.
Remini: Best for fixing broken selfies
Remini is the app to open when the photo itself is the problem. Blurry, low-light, low-resolution, or old-camera-roll shots come out sharp, with skin texture that reads as detail rather than smear. It does one thing (AI enhancement) and does it better than the retouch-first apps in this list, which mostly assume you started with a usable image.
Where it falls short: Not a portrait retouch tool. It will not slim a jaw or brighten skin tone. Free tier caps you at a few enhances a day and shows video ads between runs.
Pricing:
- Free: About 3 enhances a day with ads
- Paid: About $5/mo, or roughly $30/year on annual
- vs Retake AI: A different job, but if the Retake AI use case was rescuing grainy selfies, Remini does it for a fraction of the total setup
Migrating from Retake AI: No migration. Upload the same source photo and export in seconds.
Bottom line: Pick Remini if your Retake AI wish list was really “just make this photo not look terrible.”
Facetune: Best for hands-on portrait retouch
Facetune goes the other direction from Retake AI: you keep the wheel. Detail brushes fix stray hairs, the reshape tool nudges a jawline by a pixel, the eye whitener has a slider instead of a preset. Lightricks has been shipping this app for a decade, and it shows in how forgiving the tools are on small screens.
Where it falls short: There is no personal AI here, so a fifteen-photo cleanup takes fifteen edits. The free window is short, a three-day trial that flips into the paid tier fast.
Pricing:
- Free: 3-day trial with the full editor
- Paid: About $7/mo or roughly $36/year on annual
- vs Retake AI: Pricier per month, but no wait time and no personal-model dependency
Migrating from Retake AI: No migration. If Retake AI was doing skin, eye, and shape adjustments for you, Facetune exposes each of those as a controllable slider.
Bottom line: Pick Facetune if you want control per photo and you do not mind paying for a real toolset.
YouCam Perfect: Best for beauty edits plus virtual makeup
YouCam Perfect covers the space between a filter app and a retouch app, and it throws in real-time virtual makeup on top. Skin smoothing feels natural at low settings, the reshape tools have proper undo, and the try-on makeup is genuinely useful for people picking a look before a night out.
Where it falls short: The free tier watermarks some exports and pushes ads between edits. The interface is busy compared to Retake AI’s single-button flow.
Pricing:
- Free: Full editor with ads and export watermarks on premium effects
- Paid: About $4/mo, with an annual option that pushes the effective monthly rate lower
- vs Retake AI: Cheaper monthly, more knobs, but a steeper learning curve
Migrating from Retake AI: No migration path. The workflow is per-photo, not per-model.
Bottom line: Pick YouCam Perfect if you want to try makeup looks and fix a portrait in the same session.
BeautyPlus: Best for casual, trend-driven selfie fixes
BeautyPlus is where the trend filters live. New styles land almost every week, the community leans TikTok and Instagram, and the auto-beauty preset is aggressive enough that even the free tier looks polished. It is the closest thing on this list to a modern successor to the sticker-heavy selfie apps of five years ago.
Where it falls short: The default settings are heavy handed, and toning them down means digging into sliders that should probably start lower. Some of the popular filters are Premium only.
Pricing:
- Free: Full editor, ad-supported, most core tools included
- Paid: About $3/mo for Premium
- vs Retake AI: Cheapest option in this list, and no training gate
Migrating from Retake AI: No migration. Retake AI’s whole-image retouch is roughly BeautyPlus’s default preset.
Bottom line: Pick BeautyPlus if you want the cheapest working alternative and you do not mind a filter-heavy look.
FaceLab: Best for age, gender, and hairstyle swaps
FaceLab doubles down on the transformation side of the Retake AI pitch. Aging the face forty years and putting it back looks convincingly like the same person, the hair swaps preserve the original hairline instead of pasting a wig on, and the gender presets are the least uncanny in this list. It is not a retouch tool, it is a “future face” tool.
Where it falls short: No everyday beauty edits. It also relies on a subscription trial that flips over quickly, and the ad load in the trial period is high.
Pricing:
- Free: 3-day trial with the full effect library
- Paid: About $6/mo, with a yearly plan that discounts materially
- vs Retake AI: Similar spirit, different content library, no training wait
Migrating from Retake AI: No migration. If the Retake AI styles you used were the age or hair transformations, FaceLab specializes in those.
Bottom line: Pick FaceLab if the “aging” or “future baby” style transforms are what you were paying Retake AI for.
Meitu: Best all-in-one photo and short video editor
Meitu is the closest thing here to a Swiss Army knife. It handles skin, teeth, and eye retouches like the beauty apps, throws in body reshape sliders, has a real short-video timeline, and layers on a genuinely good AI photo generator when you want to break from realism. Two decades of iteration in the Asian selfie market show in how the tools feel.
Where it falls short: The interface tries to sell you a lot of things at once. Some AI effects watermark exports on the free tier, and the language localization can be uneven outside Chinese and English.
Pricing:
- Free: Broad free layer, watermarks on advanced AI effects
- Paid: About $4/mo, with an annual plan that discounts around 40 percent
- vs Retake AI: Priced similarly per month, covers many more use cases
Migrating from Retake AI: No migration. Meitu’s default retouch flow is a reasonable stand-in for Retake AI’s single-tap output.
Bottom line: Pick Meitu if you want a single app that handles selfies, videos, and AI art without swapping tools.
How to choose
Pick FaceApp if you liked Retake AI’s premise but not the wait. It hits the same “photo looks like me on a good day” note without a training queue and without asking for a dozen upfront uploads.
Pick Remini if the real problem was image quality. Blurry, dim, or ancient selfies do not need face reshaping, they need enhancement, and Remini does that cleanly.
Pick Facetune if you want the retouch controls in your hand. It costs more monthly, but the payoff is per-photo precision that no personal-AI app quite matches.
Pick BeautyPlus if the monthly price is the only thing that matters. It is the cheapest here and does most of what a casual creator needs.
Pick FaceLab if you were mostly using Retake AI for transformation styles (aging, hairstyles, gender swaps). It goes deeper on those specifically.
Pick Meitu if you want one app that covers selfies, short videos, and AI art. It has the widest surface area of anything in this comparison.
Stay on Retake AI if the personal-model output has already earned its place in your workflow and the 3.2 rating average has not shown up in your own results. When the training set is good, few apps can match a well-tuned personal model for consistent output across a batch of photos.
FAQ
Is FaceApp better than Retake AI?
For most casual users, FaceApp is a better fit than Retake AI because it delivers realistic filtered selfies in one tap, without the 12-photo training upload. Retake AI can produce a more consistent personal look across many photos once the model is trained, but that setup cost is the main reason people stop using it.
Is there a free Retake AI alternative?
BeautyPlus, YouCam Perfect, and Meitu all offer usable free tiers with ads or watermarks on some effects. Remini has 3 free enhances per day, which is enough for occasional fixes. None of them require the paid subscription that Retake AI locks its best output behind.
Do any Retake AI alternatives edit photos on-device?
Facetune runs most of its retouch tools locally on the phone, which means the source image is not uploaded for the standard edits. AI-heavy apps like Retake AI, Remini, and FaceApp process photos on the server. If uploading a face is the concern, Facetune is the closest on-device option in this list.
What is the cheapest Retake AI alternative?
BeautyPlus at around $3 a month is the least expensive paid tier here. FaceApp and Meitu come in around $4 a month. All three sit well under Retake AI’s subscription plus the initial training cost.
What do people use instead of Retake AI?
Reddit threads about Retake AI most often mention FaceApp for one-tap transformations, Facetune for manual control, Remini for fixing broken photos, and BeautyPlus for cheap everyday tweaks. Meitu comes up in Asian markets. Which one fits depends on whether the pain point was time, price, control, or image quality.
Can Retake AI results be edited in another app?
Retake AI exports standard JPG or PNG files to the camera roll like any other photo app, so any editor on this list can open a Retake AI output and edit further. There is no proprietary format lock-in.
