Philter vs Redact PDF AI

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.

Redact PDF AI detects personal and sensitive information in PDFs and image files, then applies redactions. Users can select categories such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, organizations, dates, IBANs, and credit card numbers. Built-in OCR supports scanned documents, and the service says it handles more than 100 document languages, including mixed-language files. In the Studio editor, users can adjust redactions, add highlights, rotate pages, and exclude specified terms from masking. Multiple files can be uploaded together and downloaded as a ZIP. The features page lists support for PDFs up to 50 MB and documents of 1,000 or more pages. A REST API supports asynchronous jobs, batch uploads, PII controls, and configurable retention on every plan, using the same page quota. The maker says output pages are rasterized so redactions are burned into pixels and recoverable text layers are removed. It says documents are processed on Microsoft Azure in Frankfurt and Switzerland North, encrypted at rest and in transit, and automatically deleted after 14 days of inactivity by default. Starter is $50 a month; Business is $250 a month. A one-time prepaid credit offer is 5.00 USD.