Philter vs Redactable

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.

Redactable is a web-based platform for detecting and permanently removing sensitive information from documents and images. Its AI identifies personal, health, financial, and other sensitive patterns for redaction. Built-in OCR makes scanned documents and image-based PDFs searchable before redaction. Supported inputs include PDF, TIFF, PNG, and JPG files from device uploads or supported third-party services; output is PDF. Redactable says it removes hidden metadata, embedded objects, and residual data from redacted files. Collaboration tools include shared workspaces, task assignments, comments, role-based permissions, activity logs, and version history. It can generate redaction certificates and audit logs recording who redacted what and when. Integrations listed include Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, SharePoint, and Clio. Redactable states that it is SOC 2 Type II certified and HIPAA compliant, uses AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS 1.2 or higher in transit, and does not retain document content beyond the redaction job or use it to train AI models. Three documents are free; pay-as-you-go costs $7.50 after that. Starter costs $19 a month billed annually.