Philter vs PII Tools

Philter is open-source software for finding and redacting personally identifiable information and protected health information in text. For detected entities, users can choose to mask, encrypt, replace with synthetic values, remove, or pass them through. Policies, custom dictionaries, and identifier patterns such as medical record numbers and transaction IDs let teams configure what to detect and how to handle it. General Purpose, Healthcare, and COVID-19 NLP lenses address different types of text. Philter provides an HTTP REST API, a Java SDK, and an OpenAPI specification for generating clients in other languages. It can run in a private environment or through AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure marketplaces. The maker says text stays in the customer’s environment, including firewalled or air-gapped deployments. Redaction requests are recorded in a tamper-evident, hash-chained audit log that can be queried and exported to CSV. Detection is probabilistic, so results should be checked against an organization’s own data before production use. The open-source toolkit has community support; commercial licenses include direct support.

PII Tools locates and helps remediate personally identifiable information, payment-card data and health information across digital assets. It scans more than 400 file formats in local or cloud storage, covering structured and unstructured data. Analytics and reporting support review, while users can redact or erase information individually or in batches. Person Cards aggregate detected records associated with people across files, email and databases, with spreadsheet export. Document redaction supports in-place changes and pseudonymization for PDFs, Excel files and images, and a REST API can automate workflows. Named connectors include Microsoft 365 Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Salesforce, Google Drive, Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL/MariaDB. It can run on a customer server, keeping sensitive data within the network according to the maker. Deployment uses Docker-capable machines or virtual machines. A seven-day hosted trial is available by contacting PII Tools.