Microsoft Presidio
Shares rank 3 of 4 pii redaction tools by recommenders
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.
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.
8 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 5
- criticize it
- 3
- approval share
- 63%
Recommended in 3 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 5 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 1.6 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 3 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Solid first pass for anonymization
“Tools like Presidio are great for data anonymization.”
Comment from 3 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Blindfold – PII protection for LLM apps (local regex and cloud NLP)” “as a first pass does a terrific job”
Comment from 14 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: How do you safely give LLMs SSH/DB access?”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Many false positives out of the box
“full of false positives though. but definitely good for some types of entities and regexes”
Comment from 11 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Local Privacy Firewall-blocks PII and secrets before ChatGPT sees them” “lots of false positives out of the box, you need to do a ton of tuning”
Comment from 11 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Local Privacy Firewall-blocks PII and secrets before ChatGPT sees them” Heavy resource use, memory problems
“its heavy but looks really good”
Comment from 11 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Local Privacy Firewall-blocks PII and secrets before ChatGPT sees them” “designed to replace the kind of Presidio-based solution that OOM-crashes AWS instances”
Comment from 6 May 2026 in “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)”
Other pii redaction tools people recommend
The three most recommended other pii redaction tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rampart | 7 | 7 | 50% | 4 | — | — |
| OpenAI Privacy Filter | 7 | 1 | 88% | 2 | — | — |
| Microsoft PresidioThis page | 5 | 3 | 63% | 3 | — | — |
| PII-Shield | 5 | 0 | 100% | 2 | — | — |
What people said
All 8 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“a Presidio guardrail masked the ΑΦΜ label but leaked the actual tax identifier to the LLM while returning HTTP 200”
“designed to replace the kind of Presidio-based solution that OOM-crashes AWS instances”
“it requires a decent amount of customization to do anything AFAICT”
“Tools like Presidio are great for data anonymization.”
“as a first pass does a terrific job”
“lots of false positives out of the box, you need to do a ton of tuning”
“full of false positives though. but definitely good for some types of entities and regexes”
“its heavy but looks really good”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.