Philter vs RedactFile

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.

RedactFile is a web and API service for identifying and removing sensitive information from documents and images before sharing them. Its OCR and PII detection can find names, emails, phone numbers, IDs, account data, and addresses, including in scanned PDFs. Users can review matches, add redaction marks themselves, apply changes, and export a protected copy. Methods include black boxes, blur, pixelation, masking, replacement labels, and removal. File cleanup tools check metadata, comments, author data, OCR layers, annotations, bookmarks, embedded files, forms, and scripts. Some supported browser workflows process files locally; upload, dashboard, public-link, and API workflows may use RedactFile infrastructure and storage. The external v1 API supports OCR and structured extraction through JSON requests with document URLs and an API key; documentation includes JavaScript and Python examples and signed asynchronous webhooks. RedactFile publishes tests and a checker for examining recoverable text and hidden file data. It cautions that the service is not a compliance certification or guarantee that every document is safe to disclose, and recommends manual validation for regulated disclosures. The free plan costs nothing and has a 2MB upload limit, 10 daily uploads, 500MB storage, and no API.