Adobe Acrobat Redaction Alternative
Adobe Acrobat is the incumbent for PDF work: manual redaction tools are mature, and many teams already have licences. For large DSAR/SAR packs, the bottleneck is finding every piece of personal data to redact — Acrobat does not automatically detect names, NI numbers, and addresses across hundreds of pages. Ghost complements or replaces that workflow: on Pro and Team, AI-powered detection highlights candidate PII. The free tier focuses on manual redaction. You review in the app and export the final PDF.
Where Acrobat shines
Acrobat is excellent when you already know exactly what to redact, when you need print production features, or when your policy mandates a specific Adobe-centric archive. Redaction marks can be applied precisely, and organisations with deep Acrobat expertise may prefer to stay in one ecosystem for final burn-in.
Where teams feel pain
DSAR/SAR and disclosure projects mean searching every page for incidental mentions of colleagues, clients, and identifiers. Manual search-and-mark is slow and fatiguing. Fatigue causes misses. Generic cloud PDF services that store or repurpose your files can introduce subprocessors and transfer questions under GDPR — encryption and strict retention matter as much as detection quality.
How Ghost differs
- AI-powered automatic suggestions on Pro for names, addresses, IDs, emails, DOBs, and more
- Designed for data minimisation — see our security page for details
- Review workflow: accept, reject, or adjust before export
- Free tier manual redaction to try on real documents. Upgrade for AI detection and team features
Using both together
Some teams run Ghost for first-pass detection and review, then flatten or archive in Acrobat. Others stay entirely in Ghost for standard DSAR/SAR PDFs. Your IG team should decide based on retention, audit, and licence economics.