Sanitext vs Google Cloud DLP

What is Google Cloud DLP?

Google Cloud DLP, rebranded as Sensitive Data Protection, is part of Google Cloud. It inspects text, images, and structured data for sensitive information and can de-identify it through masking, format-preserving encryption, redaction, or tokenization.

It is powerful and broad. It detects 150+ infoTypes (names, emails, card numbers, national IDs, and more) and integrates deeply with BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and other GCP services. That depth is also its cost: you configure inspection templates, de-identification templates, IAM roles, and often VPC Service Controls before your first call.

Pricing is per byte. Content inspection runs about $2-3 per GB and de-identification about $1-2 per GB, with a 1KB minimum charged per request. The 1KB floor means short calls (a chat message, a log line, a support ticket) get billed as if they were 1KB, so the metered model only gets cheap at very large batch scale.

Sanitext vs Google Cloud DLP: feature and price comparison

Both tools find and mask PII. The difference is the pricing model, the setup, and where your data goes. Sanitext runs an open-weights model on its own Cloudflare infrastructure, so there is zero per-token AI cost and pricing stays flat. DLP charges by the gigabyte and rewards huge batch jobs over small real-time calls.

When Google Cloud DLP is the better choice

We will be honest. Google Cloud DLP is the better fit in several real cases, and you should use it when they apply.

Pick DLP if you are scanning huge volumes of data already sitting in GCP, like petabytes in BigQuery or Cloud Storage. Per-byte billing gets cheap at that scale, and the native connectors save you from building pipelines.

Pick DLP if you need 150+ infoTypes including many country-specific national ID and government formats that Sanitext does not cover. Sanitext focuses on common entity types: names, emails, phones, addresses, dates, URLs, account and card numbers, and secrets.

Pick DLP if you need format-preserving encryption or reversible tokenization for analytics that must keep the data shape. Sanitext redacts to clear placeholder labels like [EMAIL]; it does not encrypt or re-identify.

Pick DLP if your security team requires everything inside GCP under VPC Service Controls and existing IAM policy. If you already live in Google Cloud, staying there can be the right call.

Where Sanitext wins

For real-time text redaction in apps, logs, prompts, and tickets, Sanitext is simpler and cheaper to reason about.

Flat, predictable pricing. Plans start free (one-time 300K characters, no card, never resets), then Hobby $29/mo for 12M chars, Pro $149/mo for 120M, and Scale $499/mo for 450M. Overage is $0.35-0.60 per 1M characters, up to about 2x cheaper than metered hyperscaler rates. No 1KB minimum, so short calls do not get overcharged.

Sixty-second self-serve. Sign up, pay through Stripe, get an API key, and run a curl. No IAM roles, no inspection or de-identification templates, no VPC setup, no GCP project at all.

Clean redaction output. POST /v1/detect returns entity spans with label, byte offsets, score, and matched text. POST /v1/redact returns the text with each span masked as [LABEL], ready to log or send to an LLM.

Privacy by design. Your text is processed on Sanitext infrastructure, never sent to a third-party LLM. We log counts and timings only, with no raw-text retention. EU data residency and a DPA are available on Enterprise.

Multilingual by default. Sanitext detects PII in 30+ languages out of the box, no per-language template tuning.

How to switch from Google Cloud DLP to Sanitext

Migration is straightforward because the core job is the same: send text, get spans or redacted text back.

1. Map your infoTypes to Sanitext labels. DLP infoTypes like PERSON_NAME, EMAIL_ADDRESS, PHONE_NUMBER, and CREDIT_CARD_NUMBER map to Sanitext labels FIRSTNAME, LASTNAME, EMAIL, PHONE, and ACCOUNT or card detection. Note any country-specific infoTypes Sanitext does not cover so you can keep DLP for those if needed.

2. Replace the call. Swap your projects.content.deidentify request and its inspection or de-identification template for a single POST to /v1/redact with your API key. There are no templates to maintain.

3. Drop the placeholder mapping. DLP returns your configured masking or surrogate format; Sanitext returns [LABEL] placeholders. If a downstream system expects DLP-style output, do a one-time find-and-replace on the label format.

4. Test on a sample and compare spans. Run both tools over the same batch, diff the detected entities, and confirm coverage on your actual data before cutting over. You can do this on the free tier first.

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