Presidio is an open-source framework for detecting, redacting, masking, and anonymizing sensitive data such as names, credit card numbers, phone numbers, and other personally identifiable information across text, images, and structured data. Originally created at Microsoft and now maintained under the Data Privacy Stack community, it is the de facto standard toolkit for PII protection in data pipelines.
Presidio combines NLP models, pattern matching, checksums, and rule-based recognizers into customizable pipelines. Its Analyzer engine identifies sensitive entities in text using spaCy or transformer models alongside built-in and custom recognizers; the Anonymizer then replaces them with masks, hashes, encryption, or synthetic values; and the Image Redactor applies the same treatment to documents and pictures using OCR. Because recognizers are pluggable, teams can teach Presidio new entity types specific to their industry, from medical record numbers to internal account formats. The project has more than 11,400 GitHub stars, remains actively maintained with updates in October 2026, and is MIT-licensed.
Presidio is completely free and open source under the MIT license, with no paid tiers or usage limits.
Data engineers, privacy teams, and AI developers who must strip sensitive information from data streams, documents, or LLM prompts for compliance and safety.