Best Redaction Software to Protect Sensitive Data

Redaction is the centuries-old practice of permanently censoring sensitive information in documents. Now, it’s a must-have in this data-heavy age. Based on local laws and domains, a business can be required to redact its name, email address, phone number, medical records, credit card information, and more.

Using redaction software at the information source helps keep confidential data secure from rogue employees and cyberattacks. Besides, these tools support a business adhere to user data privacy regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.

Moreover, with 68% of data breaches in 2024 being caused by human error, it’s essential to use redaction software to mitigate any risks to your organization’s data privacy. These solutions automate the process and reduce the need for human intervention.

In this post, I’ve researched and reviewed 14 popular solutions and listed the 9 best redaction software you can use today. I’ve based them primarily on document type, focusing on tools for PDFs, audio, video, Microsoft Office documents, and even directly enforcing redaction at databases.

• 1. Adobe Acrobat Pro
• 2. Egress
• 3. CaseGuard
• 4. Objective Redact
• 5. Oracle Data Redaction
• 6. Relativity
• 7. Redactable
• 8. Nitro Pro
• 9. iDox.ai
• Show moreShow less

Best Redaction Software Comparison

In the table below, I’ve given a brief overview of each tool and compared them based on file support, deployment method, and starting price.

1. Adobe Acrobat Pro

Adobe Acrobat Pro is a tool that can redact information from many documents with a single keystroke. You can erase single or multiple occurrences of words, phrases, and images from the PDF documents.

Plus, the tool can find patterns, including email addresses, credit card information, social security numbers, and dates. You can go with the conventional black box or use custom colors/text within the redacted area.

Acrobat Pro doesn’t stop at mere redaction. It also lets you sanitize without going through more steps. Just turn a toggle on to erase hidden data and click to push redaction and sanitization.

Finally, Adobe prescribes to save the modified file differently without overwriting the original as that would lead to a permanent loss of information. However, it’s up to you to make irreversible changes right there and not create another copy.

Adobe Acrobat Pro Pricing

Acrobat Pro retails for $19.99/month. You can also avail of its 7-fay free trial, although after giving away payment information.

Try Adobe Acrobat Pro

2. Egress

Egress is a cloud-based email security platform with which you can automatically redact communications, including attachments, to avoid the risks of data breaches. This platform is specially tailored for regulatory compliance activities and is based on a hybrid (automatic and manual verification) approach.

You get data templates that use regular expressions to identify Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This is used to check and redact emails of specific data types, such as IP addresses, credit cards, and social security numbers. Egress allows using multiple templates for removing different data types at once.

The best part is you can save and reuse search configurations in the future for similar compliance requests.

Egress is also collaboration-friendly. Its toolbar can accommodate multiple users simultaneously, clearly showing messages with modifications and the redacted data.

Businesses can deploy Egress on the cloud, on-premises, or a combination of the two.

Egress Pricing

Egress doesn’t provide upfront pricing on their page. Contact their sales department for a quote.

Try Egress

3. CaseGuard

CaseGuard is an AI-based redaction tool that works across a diverse range of file formats, such as audio, video, images, and PDFs.

You can redact faces, license plates, entire vehicles, and scenes and add effects from body cam footage to 8K video. It has various effects, such as color filtering, enhancement, pixilation, blurring, and more, to hide sensitive data.

Likewise, it works on audio redaction by muting, resampling, or including bleeps in place of redacted durations. Moreover, you can protect information within transcription, translations, and closed captions in any audio/video files from 33+ languages.

Document redaction has a few modes, including manual and automatic workflows. It can identify patterns to remove information matching card numbers, SSNs, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. You can also search for specific words and phrases and redact those matching the criteria. Plus, CaseGuard supports redacting graphics, headers, and footers and customizing the redacted areas.

CaseGuard’s USP is bulk redaction. You can upload thousands of video/audio files, documents, and images simultaneously.

CaseGuard Pricing

CaseGuard has different subscriptions based on file type.

• Doc: $99/month (PDFs and images)
• Lite: $199/month (Video and audio)
• Standard: $249/month (Video, audio, PDFs, and images)
• Premium: $329/month (Video, audio, translation, transcription, PDF, and images)

Try CaseGuard

4. Objective Redact

Objective Redact provides you with extensive file support and a user-friendly experience. You can simply install this redaction utility on your desktop computer, upload files, and begin redacting. It swiftly redacts content of interest, in addition to hidden metadata (such as authors, creation date, etc.)

You have its powerful text redaction to find and remove personal data, such as tax filing numbers, SSNs, card numbers, regular expressions, and email IDs. Besides plain text, Object Redact is efficient with logos and graphics. It also has an in-built OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine, which helps with speedy redactions.

While redacting a single document is easy, the problem lies in handling tons of documents all at once. Not with Objective Redact, though. Here, you can set input/output folders and create redaction templates to take care of excessive work.

Objective Redact lets you add exception codes to indicate the cause of the redaction.

To avoid human error, you can share copies with authorized members before finalizing the redaction. Still, you always retain the original files intact, as all the modifications take effect on a separate working copy.

Compliance reporting is also effortless, with documented information about the redactions, types, number of instances, and exception codes.

Objective Redact Pricing

Objective Redact offers the following plans:

• Quick Project: $100 for a single month
• Team: $274 yearly per user (up to 20 users)
• Enterprise: Quote-based (20+ users)

Try Objective Redact

5. Oracle Data Redaction

Oracle Data Redaction is an advanced procedure to hide confidential information from the results of the database queries. It’s an on-the-fly workflow that applies redaction policies per end-user without altering the underlying database.

You can apply this to an entire database table, view, or specific columns.

There are multiple redaction methods, such as full redaction, partial redaction, regular expressions, and random redaction. The basis of this categorization is the redaction scope.

For instance, full redaction works on every data point in a column, whereas partial redaction is effective on a specific portion. You can enforce redaction based on the user, database, or pre-defined logical conditions of a redaction policy.

Oracle Data Redaction is efficient in many situations, including read-only web pages, data management tools, and offline analytics. You can deploy it on-premises and with cloud databases.

Oracle Data Redaction Pricing

You’ll have to contact Oracle sales for a personalized quote.

Try Oracle Data Redaction

6. Relativity

Relativity has AI-powered redaction capabilities thanks to its 2022 acquisition of Text IQ. It can handle imaged documents, spreadsheets, and PDFs to mark up sensitive data automatically and manually.

You can create rules highlighting specific words, phrases, and regular expressions to help Relativity apply redaction. It supports removing specific cells, rows, columns, or the entire document matching the redaction criteria.

Thereafter, you can also review markups to track and approve (or revert) changes efficiently. Alternatively, Relativity supports finding and redacting information manually.

Relativity has configurations to allow admins to assign and manage redaction permissions. Keeping in mind document security and other factors, you can let team members selectively view, add, edit, and delete redactions.

The platform doesn’t modify original documents. This gives you the flexibility to download both native and redacted files at the end.

Relativity Pricing

Contact Relativity’s sales team for a customized quote.

Try Relativity

7. Redactable

Redactable is an AI-enhanced, cloud-based redaction specialist. Its manual, hybrid, and auto-redaction workflows ensure you get the best with minimum input from your end.

Its AI-based redaction searches for redaction-worthy information and applies sweeping changes with ease. Redactable not only works for standard files, but can also tackle scanned documents—thanks to its AI OCR engine. In addition to the usual redaction, Redactable sanitizes documents of associated metadata.

I tried Redactable with sample data containing SSNs, credit card numbers, names, and birthdates. In its auto mode, Redactable immediately highlights sensitive information, barring a few instances in which you can select manually.

The tool supports teamwork. You can collaborate on a series of documents with comments, task manager, hierarchical review, and redaction logs. It automatically generates redaction certificates to record all the changes with their authors.

You can either upload documents or integrate Redactable with cloud storage providers, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and Box, for seamless import and processing.

Redactable is HIPAA compliant and SOC 2 Type 2 certified. Data remains encrypted in transit (TLS 1.2+) and at rest (AES-256).

Redactable Pricing

The base pricing is $19/month, which lets you redact up to 20 documents. Higher-tier plans are available, including enterprise offerings.

Try Redactable

8. Nitro Pro

Nitro Pro is a PDF editor with built-in text and image redaction. You can either manually select the areas or search and apply redaction. The search function helps you apply filters for whole words and simultaneously erase multiple occurrences of a word or phrase.

Redactions are not enforced on the PDF unless you save it. I will advise you to save it as a different file to keep the source intact. In addition, this does not remove annotations or vector graphics since Nitro Pro applies the modifications to the “content layer” only. For graphics, you have to separately right-click-delete them.

My brief experience with Nitro Pro was good. It worked as expected with manual area selection, search, and redact.

While redacting, you can also eliminate hidden data and metadata, including comments, links, Javascripts, bookmarks, attachments, invisible text, and more. It also lets you simply remove metadata without going for redaction.

In its current form, Nitro Pro’s redaction capabilities are best suited for basic redaction, limited to a single or few documents.

Nitro Pro Pricing

Redaction is reserved for Nitro Pro, costing $14.99/user/month or $250 as a one-time purchase for a single license.

Try Nitro Pro

9. iDox.ai

iDox.ai is an automated redaction tool that supports 47 file types, such as PDF, Word, and Google Docs.

Its redaction workflows automatically take into account GDPR, HIPAA, and others while scanning. You can also set a geographic location to enable specific privacy regulations, let it scan for sensitive data, and apply redaction with a click. It applies descriptive labels (such as name and email), indicating the type of hidden information.

iDox.ai has templates for industry-specific situations covering healthcare, finance, legal, and more. You can go ahead with these setups or customize these profiles to make quick work of bulk redaction. Its keyword finder allows targeting specific phrases, and you can also redact entire sections or pages if needed.

Data security isn’t an issue either since iDox.ai encrypts it in transit (SSL 2048-bit) and at rest (AES-256) with industry-standard protocols. Besides, you can rest assured about data security thanks to its SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance.

iDox.ai Pricing

iDox.ai provides a 7-day free trial, after which you need to upgrade to the paid tiers starting at $290/year.

Try iDox.ai

What Is Redaction Software?

Redaction software is a tool to permanently hide sensitive information, taking care of user privacy, confidential business data, and regulatory compliance.

The simplest form of redaction workflow is manual, where you mark an area and erase the underlying data. However, this is not suitable for bulk work, and you have to deploy AI-enhanced redaction utilities to identify patterns and proceed with/without manual review.

How Redaction Software Protects Sensitive Data?

Privacy regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA have stringent policies for user data privacy. Non-compliance often results in hefty penalties, which can also lead to business closure.

As a protective measure, companies can apply real-time redaction (with redaction software) at the information source (databases) to make data irretrievable. This protects their businesses from leaking sensitive/personal information in case of accidental disclosure, unauthorized access, or data breaches.

What Are the Benefits of Using Redaction Software?

Redaction software has multiple advantages (e.g., accuracy, redaction records, and batch processing). I’ve discussed 5 of these benefits below, showcasing why redaction software is the go-to solution for data-sensitive domains.

1. Accuracy and Reliability: The thing is, manually drawing black boxes doesn’t “hide” the content underneath forever. There are separate layers in popular document formats like PDF. With the right expertise and tools, it’s possible to retrieve blacked-out information. Redaction software doesn’t leave this to doubt and erases information permanently.
2. Audit Trails: Tools like Redactable keep a timeline of all the redactions, including the users’ making changes. This helps in efficient team management and improves collaboration.
3. Efficiency and Time Savings: AI-powered redaction tools are great for bulk work. They can identify patterns to highlight sensitive data related to your health, finances, etc. Besides, you can create redaction templates to apply the same set of policies to similar categories, avoiding redundant work.
4. Regulatory Compliance: Redaction software, such as iDox.ai, has pre-made templates to redact as per global privacy frameworks, including HIPAA and GDPR. Additionally, you get industry-specific redaction workflows for effortless compliance.
5. Enhanced Security: Encryption in transit and at rest is standard across many redaction software, including Redactable and iDox.ai. Plus, there are options for on-premises implementation with Egress and Oracle Data Redaction, which take out uncertainty about cloud storage and processing.

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