PII GUI vs SigmaShake

PII GUI and SigmaShake are both guardrails & safety tracked by AIDiveForge. Below is a side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, platforms, and ownership — sourced from each tool's live website and verified before publishing.

PII GUI

The app runs detection locally using on-device models, so nothing is uploaded at any point — no sign-up, no server round-trip, no cloud dependency. You review every flagged item in context before committing to a redaction, which means you catch the false positives before they become permanent holes in a legal document. Custom regex lets you add patterns the model won't know: internal case IDs, account number formats, bespoke identifiers. The export produces a PDF with sensitive text actually gone, not layered over. Where it breaks: single-file, single-session workflow with no batch processing described in the docs, so teams processing hundreds of support logs daily will hit a throughput ceiling fast.

SigmaShake

SigmaShake intercepts tool calls from agents running in Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code Copilot, and Gemini CLI, evaluating each action against a rule set before it executes. The vendor states decisions resolve in roughly 85 ms using deterministic native evaluation — no model inference, no GPU, no token spend. Rules follow an Allow/Ask/Deny pattern, where Ask routes the action to a human approval queue rather than blunting everything with a hard block. The desktop app installs in about 30 seconds with no admin rights; the CLI drops into any shell or CI hook chain. Self-hosting is supported, which means the guardrail layer stays offline and never sends your code or commands to a third-party model.

Attribute	PII GUI	SigmaShake
Pricing	Free	Paid
Price	—	$5/mo
Free trial	No	No
Open source	Yes	No
Has API	No	No
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes
Platforms	Mac, Windows, Linux	Windows 10+, macOS 14+, Linux (Ubuntu 22.04+ / Fedora 38+ / Pop!_OS)
Pros	On-device detection with local models, so documents never leave the machine — which means you can process medical records or legal files that contractually cannot touch a third-party server. Inline review before any redaction is committed, so you catch the false positives that a blind auto-redact would permanently remove from a contract. Custom regex support for account numbers, case IDs, and proprietary identifiers, so the model's blind spots don't become your compliance gaps. Export produces PDFs with text genuinely removed rather than covered, so a downstream recipient cannot recover the original content by manipulating the file. No account, no sign-up, and no trial expiry, so the tool is available when you need it without an approval cycle or a billing conversation.	Deterministic local evaluation at roughly 85 ms per check, so you avoid the latency and per-token cost of routing every agent action through a model-based policy guard. Ask mode holds a risky action in a human approval queue rather than blocking it outright, which means your agent keeps moving on safe tasks while you review the one call that needs a second look. PreToolUse hook integration for Claude Code and MCP server integration for Cursor, Codex, and VS Code Copilot, so the guardrail wires into agents your team is already running without a custom shim. Self-hosted deployment with no model inference, so your code, file paths, and shell commands never leave the machine — critical for teams with data-handling obligations. Per-user install with no admin or UAC rights required, which means individual developers can adopt it without waiting for IT to sign off on an organization-wide rollout.
Cons	No batch processing is described anywhere in the docs or page content — the workflow is one document opened and reviewed at a time. A team processing hundreds of support logs daily will be clicking through files manually, and at that volume they move to a scripted pipeline built on an NLP library like spaCy or Presidio instead. No API surface is available, so redaction cannot be inserted into an automated document ingestion workflow. Any team that needs redaction to happen programmatically — before files hit a storage bucket, for example — cannot use this tool as-is and will need a self-hosted server-side solution. The local model downloads on first use, which means the first run on an air-gapped machine or a machine with restricted outbound access requires planning. The docs describe it as a one-time download, but teams in strict network-controlled environments need to account for that step.	No API is exposed, so teams building custom agent runtimes or embedding safety checks inside their own orchestration code cannot call SigmaShake programmatically — they wrap the CLI binary, which introduces a process boundary and complicates error handling at scale. The SHAKEDOWN benchmark that positions SigmaShake as the top-ranked guardrail was authored by SigmaShake, and competitor scores were modeled from public docs rather than measured runs; teams doing their own evaluation should run independent tests before treating the benchmark as a neutral comparison. Fleet management and team-level policy enforcement are paid-only features, which means a free-tier team cannot centrally audit what rules individual developers are running — a gap that matters the moment more than one engineer is using an AI coding agent on shared infrastructure. Windows support is the primary release target based on page emphasis and download prominence; macOS and Linux builds are listed but community reports on edge cases outside Windows are sparse, so teams running heterogeneous developer environments should validate on non-Windows machines before committing.

Bottom line

PII GUI is free while SigmaShake is paid; PII GUI is open source. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between PII GUI and SigmaShake?

PII GUI is Free and open source, while SigmaShake is Paid. Compare pricing, free trial, API, platforms, and pros/cons in the table above on AIDiveForge.

Is PII GUI better than SigmaShake?

It depends on your workflow. Use the side-by-side attributes (pricing, open source, API, self-hosted, platforms) to decide. AIDiveForge does not rank a universal winner — we publish verified facts so you can choose.