DeepRedact finds personal data across an entire folder of PDFs, permanently removes it — never just draws a box over it — then re-scans every output and reports what it could still find. Scanned pages included. Nothing leaves your Mac.
macOS 14 or later · Apple silicon & Intel · 14 MB · no account, no card
$79 once, not a subscription · Acrobat Pro is $22.99/mo, $275.88 in year one · 30-day refund, no questions
Patient Rebecca J. Alvarez, date of birth 04 / 17 / 1981, presented on 14 August 2026 reporting persistent lower-back pain following a motor-vehicle collision.
Insurance carrier Aetna, member ID W2841-KJ-3310, group 0084412. Government identifier verified at intake.
Contact on file: r.alvarez@fastmail.com · (415) 555-0172. Emergency contact , relationship spouse.
Prior treating physician Dr. Halvorsen released records under authorization dated 02 / 03 / 2026.
Output re-scanned after writing. 47 of 47 strings unrecoverable. No text layer, no metadata, no annotation remnants.
Both documents below look redacted. One of them isn't. Press the button and copy what's underneath — the same thing anyone receiving the file can do.
Preview's Redact tool does remove text — but the Markup rectangle sitting one menu above it does not, and it looks identical. One file at a time, and nothing checks your work.
It redacts properly. It also costs $276 a year, pushes your documents through Adobe's cloud by default, and takes a week to learn.
Free PDF sites are fast and genuinely useful — right up until the file is a medical record or a client's discovery set. Then the upload itself is the breach.
Most redaction tools give up on a scanned file, because there is no text layer to search. DeepRedact runs on-device OCR over every page, so photographed and scanned client files are handled like any other. Names, dates of birth, social security and account numbers, addresses, emails and phone numbers are found and grouped for review — across the whole folder, not one file at a time.
The characters are deleted from the content stream and the page is rewritten. Metadata, annotations, embedded thumbnails and the document's revision history go with them — the four places redacted text usually survives.
Every output file is re-opened and re-scanned for the exact strings that were removed. You get a signed report naming each file, each string, and the result — the document you hand to a supervisor or attach to a production log.
DeepRedact has no server, because it has nothing to send anywhere. OCR runs on Apple's on-device Vision framework; redaction runs on your CPU. The app works with Wi-Fi switched off, and you can verify that with Little Snitch or macOS's own firewall.
That isn't a privacy policy asking to be believed. It's an architecture you can check in a minute — which is the only kind of promise worth making to someone whose licence depends on it.
| Preview | Acrobat Pro | Web PDF tools | DeepRedact | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Truly removes text | Yes* | Yes | Varies | Yes |
| Verifies the output | No | No | No | Yes |
| Whole folder at once | No | Partial | Limited | Yes |
| Finds PII for you | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Reads scanned pages | No | Yes | Varies | Yes |
| File stays on your Mac | Yes | Cloud by default | No | Yes |
| Cost | Free | $276 / year | Free–$12/mo | $79 once |
* Preview's dedicated Redact tool removes text when you export. Its Markup rectangle — one menu away, visually identical — does not.
Discovery productions, exhibit prep, client intake. Bates-numbered output and a per-file log that goes in the production record.
Records requests, insurer correspondence, referrals. PHI found across scanned charts without a single page leaving the building.
Client statements, working papers, audit samples. Account numbers and identifiers stripped in bulk at year end.
Investigation files, reference packs, subject access requests. Names and identifiers removed consistently across a whole case folder.
Claim files and subrogation packets. Policy and member IDs caught wherever they appear, including in scanned attachments.
Contracts, diligence rooms, board packs. If uploading it would be a problem, this is the tool.
DeepRedact includes a free checker that does not redact anything. Open a PDF you redacted last month with any tool, and it reports whether the text is still extractable — the same test the recipient could run.
It extracts every text layer, annotation, metadata field and embedded thumbnail from the file and shows you what is recoverable. It does not modify the document, and it does not need a licence. Use it on someone else's output, including Acrobat's and Preview's.
Most people run it once on an old production, find nothing, and close it. A minority find something, and for them this page was worth loading.
We could assert that redaction often fails. Instead you can check your own files and find out. If your current process is sound, the checker tells you so and you have lost nothing but a minute — we would rather you knew that than bought something you did not need.
Acrobat Pro costs $276 every year, for as long as you need to redact anything. DeepRedact costs $79, once.
Acrobat Pro: $276 / year, every year
No account, no card. Buy from inside the app when you're ready.
Not a feature-limited demo. Run it against a real production folder — that is the only test that tells you anything. Watermark-free output during the trial, because a redaction tool that spoils the file it produces is useless for evaluating.
Email once and the money comes back. Sold through Paddle, which handles tax and invoicing, so your finance team gets a proper receipt with a VAT or GST number on it.
Volume pricing and a single invoice. Get in touch and you'll hear back from the person who wrote the app.
Yes, several — and for occasional single files they are fine. Preview is free and built into every Mac, and Smallpdf and iLovePDF are free in the browser. The catch with the web tools is that using them means uploading the document, which is the one thing you cannot do with a client file or a medical record. The catch with Preview is that it does one file at a time, cannot read scanned pages, and never checks its own work. DeepRedact exists for the cases where those limits actually matter.
For a single file, open it in Preview, choose the Redact tool — not the Markup rectangle, which only draws a box — mark the text, then use File → Export as PDF rather than Save. For a folder of files, for scanned documents, or when you need evidence that the redaction held, that workflow stops being practical, which is where DeepRedact comes in.
Because DeepRedact checks, and hands you the evidence. After writing each file it re-opens the output, extracts all text and metadata, and searches for the exact strings it removed. The report names every file, every string, and the result. If anything survived — a stray annotation, an embedded thumbnail — the file is flagged rather than silently passed.
Yes. Pages with no text layer are read with Apple's on-device Vision OCR, and matches are redacted as image regions with the recognised text destroyed. Nothing is sent anywhere to do it.
That is what it is for. Point it at a folder, review the detected items once across the whole set, and apply. Progress is per file, failures are isolated rather than aborting the run, and the report covers the batch.
Automatic detection finds the patterned data — identifiers, dates, contacts — reliably, and names well. It is a first pass, not a replacement for review, which is why everything detected is presented for approval before anything is written, and why you can add your own terms and patterns. Anyone who tells you their detection is perfect is selling you something.
There is no upload path in the app. Run it with Wi-Fi off and it behaves identically. Watch it with Little Snitch and you will see one connection, at activation, to check the licence key — and nothing after that.
If you redact one file a month, use Preview — genuinely. DeepRedact is for people doing it across dozens or hundreds of files, who need scanned pages read, and who need to prove afterwards that it worked. If none of those is true for you, you don't need this.
Run the trial against a folder you have already sent out. It takes two minutes, and it is the most useful two minutes this page can offer you.
macOS 14 or later · Apple silicon & Intel · 14 MB