Compare PDF redaction tools

A black box is not always a redaction

The most common redaction failure is not choosing the wrong tool. It is drawing a filled rectangle over text and saving the file. The page looks finished. The words are still in the document, and anyone can search, copy or extract them.

This is not a hypothetical. Apple’s own support forums carry a long run of threads from people who used Preview and later found the covered text was still searchable, in some cases after saving, closing and reopening the file. Preview does have a real Redact tool, and it does delete the text. The trap is that the markup rectangle sitting beside it looks the same on screen and does not.

So the question worth asking any tool on this page is not whether it can draw a box. It is what the file contains after you save it.

How Lex Cloak checks its own work

Because that failure is so easy to miss by eye, Lex Cloak checks the finished file rather than trusting the drawing step. After it burns the redactions in, it reads the exported document back and looks for the text it was asked to remove. If some of it can still be read, a single-document export stops before saving and names the page to check. You choose whether to review it or save it anyway.

The same check runs when you save several documents as a zip. There the zip is saved first, and Lex Cloak then names each file and page worth a look before you send them. This check can raise a false alarm, which is why it warns you rather than holding the file back.

A barcode or QR code gets a stricter check. If a code you redacted can still be scanned in the finished file, the export is refused. For a single document you can still go ahead by typing a confirmation that the code holds nothing sensitive. In a zip, that document is left out and named.

Detection itself is rule based and runs on your computer, so when something is flagged you can trace why it was flagged. No automatic detection catches everything, which is why Lex Cloak shows you the matches and asks you to confirm them rather than deciding on your behalf.

The comparison

One row per capability, one column per tool. A tilde means the tool does part of this, or that the vendor does not document it, and the footnote says which.

1. 1.macOS Preview is free and built-in on macOS, and there is no Windows equivalent. Its Redact tool (Tools > Redact) deletes the underlying text rather than covering it, but the markup shapes sitting beside it only hide content visually, so which one you pick matters. Older macOS versions may not offer Redact at all, so check your own Tools menu. It does manual selection only (no automatic detection or OCR), which is practical for a few items on short, born-digital PDFs, not scanned or long documents.
2. 2.Acrobat Pro can do each of these, but as separate steps you start yourself. On the Pro and Studio plans its AI Assistant can find sensitive text by meaning from a typed request, with the app language set to English and the machine online, and Adobe is rolling that out in phases. Its Find text and redact tool searches for words or patterns, and scanning plus OCR is a further step. None of it runs on its own when you open a file.
3. 3.CaseGuard is Windows-only, enterprise-tier desktop software.
4. 4.Full batch processing is a higher-tier CaseGuard feature; entry tiers limit it to specific file types.
5. 5.CaseGuard runs offline using a machine-tied license key (one per license).
6. 6.Redaction and OCR are Acrobat Pro features and are not in Acrobat Standard. The $19.99 per month figure is the annual plan billed monthly. A month-to-month subscription costs more.
7. 7.RedactLocal (redactlocal.app) is a free macOS app requiring macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon, with no Windows version. Note the name collision: an unrelated product also called RedactLocal is published at redactlocal.parseextract.com. The figures here describe redactlocal.app only.
8. 8.RedactLocal states it highlights detected names, Social Security numbers, phone numbers and addresses for review. It does not publish a full list of the categories it covers, so the breadth is narrower than an enumerated category list would be.
9. 9.Not described on the vendor’s own site at the date checked. Recorded as unverified rather than as absent.
10. 10.This is the vendor’s own description of how their product works. On-device, offline and no-telemetry properties are self-reported by each vendor and are not independently audited here.
11. 11.BlurData runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later, on both Intel and Apple silicon, and also has an iPhone and iPad app. Windows is listed as coming soon. As of September 2026, a subscription is $79 per year for one Mac or $199 per year for five, and a one-time purchase is $149 for one Mac or $349 for five, with a year of updates included. Both come with a 14-day money-back guarantee.
12. 12.BlurData states it detects 8 built-in categories (emails, names, amounts, account numbers, addresses, license plates, IP addresses and URLs). Beyond those it offers community presets for specific document types, custom presets it writes for you on request and regular-expression patterns you supply yourself.
13. 13.PII Blackout runs on Windows and macOS. Its free tier covers up to 3 PDFs per day at up to 15 pages each in the desktop app. As of September 2026, paid plans are Starter at $29 per month or $249 per year (one device, one document at a time, up to 100 pages a month), Professional at $69 per month or $599 per year (up to two devices, no document or page limit, batch folder processing) and Team at $149 per month or $1,299 per year (up to five devices). The vendor has restructured these plans more than once since August 2026, so treat them as a snapshot and check its page before relying on them.
14. 14.PII Blackout states that full OCR for image-based PDFs is in the desktop app, and that the browser demo’s OCR is limited.
15. 15.PII Blackout states that it requires sign-in, after which it runs offline.
16. 16.Redactable is a cloud web application, so documents are uploaded to and processed on the vendor’s servers. There is no desktop or offline mode. As of September 2026, paid plans are priced by documents per month: Starter at $29 per month for 15 documents, Pro at $49 for 50, Pro Plus at $99 for 100 and Expert at $199 for 200. Annual billing costs less, and higher volumes are quoted as Enterprise.
17. 17.Redactable’s throughput is bounded by a monthly document allowance per tier rather than by a batch feature.

Checked September 2026 against each vendor’s own site. Pricing and features change, so confirm anything that matters to your decision at the source before you buy.

Tool by tool

Where Lex Cloak fits

Running on your own machine used to be the unusual part. It is not any more, and three of the tools above do it too. So that is not the reason to pick this one.

Lex Cloak is built for a specific job: a solo or small US practice working through legal and medical records, often scanned, often long, on whichever machine is free. That shapes what it does. It reads scanned pages by default rather than as a separate step, it runs on Windows and on Macs with Apple silicon so a mixed office can standardise on it, it checks the exported file before handing it back, and it is $35 a month.

If your work is body-camera footage, CaseGuard is the better tool. If you need an audited cloud vendor to sign an agreement, Redactable is. If you are on a Mac and want something free for the occasional document, RedactLocal is worth your time. Scanning is free here, and so are your first three redacted documents, so you can point Lex Cloak at real work and judge the output before deciding.