MOSTLY AI vs Open Diffix

MOSTLY AI is a data intelligence platform for accessing production data, generating synthetic, mock and simulated data, and analyzing data. Its assistant lets users request Python code in natural language and run it for analysis. The open-source Synthetic Data SDK supports local generation and uses the Apache v2 license. The platform handles numerical, categorical, date-time, text and geolocation data; it can synthesize relational tables while preserving their relationships. Other controls include Data Insights Reports, data rebalancing, missing-value imputation and generation temperature settings. Listed database connectors include MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery and Apache Hive; cloud bucket connectors include Azure, GCP and AWS. An API and Python client support integration into applications and workflows. Deployment options include Kubernetes, OpenShift and Minikube, as well as on-premises, private-cloud and air-gapped installations. The maker says the platform is SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certified. A single-node Kubernetes deployment requires at least 24 CPU cores, 48 GB RAM and 256 GB storage. The free plan is free, with no further limits stated. It is available via API, Linux, self-hosting and web.

Open Diffix is a free, open-source project for anonymizing structured data, available through APIs and self-hosted deployments on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its SynDiffix Python package generates statistically accurate synthetic data with strong anonymity. It is aimed especially at descriptive analysis, including histograms, heatmaps, column correlations, counts, averages, and standard deviations. You can generate a separate synthetic table for each analytic task and distribute a blob from which others create tables after installing SynDiffix. The project says this approach can preserve anonymity across many column combinations, but blobs currently do not scale well beyond about 10 columns. SynDiffix installs with pip and requires Python 3.10 or later. It can also support machine learning, though the maker says ML use is somewhat less easy. For data containing multiple rows per protected entity, provide the entity identifier separately or anonymity may be compromised. Open Diffix also includes pg_diffix, a PostgreSQL extension for aggregate anonymized answers to a very limited SQL subset; development is paused.