AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Hexlock – Replace PII in text with fake data that has the same format
PII redaction that preserves data format, tokenized values stay usable in LLM pipelines - ttarvis/hexlock
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
TokenDagger is a drop-in replacement for OpenAI’s Tiktoken (the tokenizer behind Llama 3, Mistral, GPT-3.*, etc.). It’s written in C++ 17 with thin Python bindings, keeps the exact same BPE vocab/special-token rules, and focuses on raw speed. I’m teaching myself LLM internals by re-implementing the stack from first principles. Profiling TikToken’s Python/Rust implementation showed a lot of time was spent doing regex matching. Most of my perf gains come from a) using a faster jit-compiled regex engine; and b) simplifying the algorithm to forego regex matching special tokens at all.…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
Redact API▲87Secure application PII using a simple API call with Pangea
2023 · crowdstrike.com · its alternatives →
- 3
I made a free tool that stuns LLMs with invisible Unicode characters. *Use cases:* Anti-plagiarism, text obfuscation against LLM scrapers, or just for fun! Even just one word's worth of “gibberified” text is enough to block most LLMs from responding coherently.
Nov 2025 · gibberifier.com · its alternatives →
- 4AL
Hi HN, I’m one of the maintainers of Bridge Anonymization. We built this because the existing solutions for translating sensitive user content are insufficient for many of our privacy-concious clients (Governments, Banks, Healthcare, etc.). We couldn't send PII to third-party APIs, but standard redaction destroyed the translation quality. If you scrub "John" to "[PERSON]", the translation engine loses gender context (often defaulting to masculine), which breaks grammatical agreement in languages like French or German. So we built a reversible, local-first pipeline for Node.js/Bun. Here…
Dec 2025 · medium.com · its alternatives →
- 5
noirdoc▲96PII guard for Claude Code to keep client data out of context
Apr 2026 · noirdoc.de · its alternatives →
- 6
HextEdit is a fast, native hex editor for macOS. View and edit the raw bytes of any file, inspect binary data with the byte inspector, and search large files without waiting.
2021 · hextedit.app · its alternatives →
- 7
Over the last few years, I've needed an easy way to quickly serialise and deserialise various network protocols safely and efficiently. Most of the libraries that existed at the time were either quite heavy, had less than stellar performance, or were an abstraction level above what I was looking for. I decided to put together my own class to do the job, starting with an easy, low-overhead way to move bytes in and out of arbitrary buffers. Along the way, it picked up useful bits and pieces, such as buffer structures and allocators that made the byte shuffling faster, often being able to do it…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Canonizr▲54Precise document extraction for your agents — zero retention
Apr 2026 · canonizr.com · its alternatives →
- 9
Hexel Editor▲78Native macOS hex editor with a brain for file formats
Aug 2026 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 10RA
a very simple pure key => value storage system that speaks Redis protocol with Postgres as storage engine and more
2018 · alash3al.github.io · its alternatives →
- 11
Terminal based bit manipulator in ncurses. Contribute to mellowcandle/bitwise development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
HeimWall▲34Signal, not surveillance. See how your engineers use Cursor, Claude Code, and Copilot: catch leaked secrets, PII, and confidential data, without blocking them or reading their prompts.
Jul 2026 · heimwall.ai · its alternatives →
- 13
pixrep▲2Hey HN, creator here. I've been experimenting heavily with large-context multimodal LLMs (like Gemini 3 Pro) for coding tasks. I noticed that feeding raw text files consumes a massive amount of tokens and often clutters the context window. Inspired by recent research (like the DeepSeek-OCR paper) suggesting visual encoders can be more efficient than text tokenizers for structured data, I built pixrep. It’s a CLI tool that converts your codebase into a structured, syntax-highlighted PDF hierarchy. Key features: - Token Efficiency: In my local benchmark, a repo requiring ~31k text tokens was…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Commoditizing Data Tokenization for All SME Business
2025 · sam-uday.in · its alternatives →
- 15FD
2019 · translate.tonic.ai · its alternatives →
- 16
I built the desktop app that detects and redacts personal data (or PII) locally without sending any text to server. It supports rule-based filtering and AI model-based redaction (eg openai privacy filter). It's open source and free. Please check out the repo and https://pii-gui.vercel.app/
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Secure Your Data with local PII Redaction before using LLM
Jun 2026 · pii-redaction.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Turn PDFs, DOCX, and URLs into clean markdown.
Jul 2026 · tokendrop.tech · its alternatives →
- 19
- 20NR
Sharing screen is really scary today with all PIIs and secrets sprawling around your screen, so I built [name-redacted], a small Chrome extension that spots API keys, tokens, emails, and throws a blur overlay on them in real time. The goal is to make screen-sharing feel safe again without adding steps to a demo. Everything runs locally—regex + entropy heuristics compiled to WASM—and the extra CPU cost averages ~1 ms per mutation on my M1. Custom rules can be added with a JSON file for teams that have proprietary token formats. visit [url-redacted] Feedback please <3
2025 · its alternatives →
- 21
Save token costs and remove code spaghetti
Aug 2026 · hexum.dev · its alternatives →
- 22
Cut AI token costs 30-60% with smarter JSON encoding
Nov 2025 · toonifyit.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Privacy proxy for LLM & RAG. PII → consistent pseudonyms.
Mar 2026 · cloakpipe.co · its alternatives →
- 24
If you just want to use it, try here - https://pdf2md.trieve.ai . I think the LLM's are astoundingly good at converting complex powerpoint style infographics. I wouldn't normally think folks on HN would find this interesting as the general concept has been posted about already in the past few months. We were heavily inspired by Zerox[1]. However, the stack we went with was fun and over-engineered which is more likely to create interesting discussion. We use all the same tools at Trieve (our main product), but wanted to see if they would be a good fit for something that needed to…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- TokenDagger – A tokenizer faster than OpenAI's Tiktoken alternatives
- Redact API alternatives
- Stun LLMs with thousands of invisible Unicode characters alternatives
- A local-first, reversible PII scrubber for AI workflows alternatives
- noirdoc alternatives
- HextEdit – A fast and native hex editor for macOS alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →