Philter vs Redacta

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.

Redacta is a free, open-source web tool for redacting or pseudonymising sensitive information in PDF files from plain-language instructions. It can identify and permanently remove names, email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, addresses, account numbers, and other personally identifiable information. It also detects embedded photos, signatures, logos, and screenshots for image redaction. Pseudonymisation replaces real names, addresses, and identifiers with fictional alternatives while keeping documents readable. Redacta says output PDFs retain their formatting, layout, fonts, and page structure. PDF parsing and redaction run in the browser through WebAssembly and MuPDF, and the site says files are not uploaded to a server. You provide your own Google Gemini or OpenAI API key, with requests sent directly to that provider. The free trial routes extracted text through a backend proxy. No signup, installation, watermarks, or usage limits are listed.