Philter vs RedactLaw

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.

RedactLaw is an AI-powered document redaction platform made for law firms. It detects personal information and HIPAA identifiers, applies context-aware recognition, and assigns confidence scores to help users review proposed redactions. Reviewers can compare a detection with the original, approve or reject items individually, or handle flagged items in bulk. The product says it removes underlying data permanently and clears metadata and hidden layers from redacted files. It accepts PDF, DOCX, XLSX, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF files, including scanned documents through OCR, and produces redacted PDFs. Templates cover medical records, court filings, FOIA responses, financial discovery, employment records, and immigration files. Redaction decisions, users, and timestamps appear in an audit trail, with PDF and CSV exports. RedactLaw is available on the web, by API, and as self-hosted software. The free plan allows five documents a month, up to ten pages each, for one user; paid plans start at $39 a month.