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 any of it survives, the export is refused and names the document and the page, instead of handing you a file that looks correct.

The same check runs on batch exports, and a document that fails it is named in the results rather than quietly dropped from the zip.

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 manual, multi-step tools — pattern-based Search & Remove Text, Scan & OCR, and the Action Wizard — not automatically 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 is macOS-only (macOS 13 Ventura or later, Intel and Apple Silicon), with Windows listed as coming soon. Pricing is $39 per year or a $69 one-time purchase.
12. 12.BlurData states it detects 8 built-in categories (emails, names, amounts, account numbers, addresses, license plates, IP addresses and URLs) plus custom 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. Paid Personal and Team plans exist, but their prices are not published on the vendor’s pricing page, so no paid figure is quoted here.
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. The $19 per month Starter tier covers up to 15 documents per month, and Pro Plus is $99 per month.
17. 17.Redactable’s throughput is bounded by a monthly document allowance per tier rather than by a batch feature.

Checked August 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 both macOS and Windows so a mixed office can standardise on it, it checks the exported file before handing it back, and it is nine dollars 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, so you can point Lex Cloak at a real document and see what it finds before deciding.