# Microsoft Presidio

5 Hacker News commenters recommended Microsoft Presidio and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Open-source toolkit for detecting and anonymizing personal data in text, useful as a first pass. Critics say it throws many false positives and needs heavy tuning.

## Why people recommend it

- Solid first pass for anonymization (2 comments): "Tools like Presidio are great for data anonymization." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47232789)) "as a first pass does a terrific job" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623176))

## What people warn about

- Many false positives out of the box (2 comments): "full of false positives though. but definitely good for some types of entities and regexes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46232350)) "lots of false positives out of the box, you need to do a ton of tuning" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46236226))
- Heavy resource use, memory problems (2 comments): "its heavy but looks really good" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46231391)) "designed to replace the kind of Presidio-based solution that OOM-crashes AWS instances" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48034971))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Rampart](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rampart.md): 7 recommend
- [OpenAI Privacy Filter](https://hackerapproved.com/p/openai-privacy-filter.md): 7 recommend
- [PII-Shield](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pii-shield.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Microsoft Presidio", https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-presidio/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).