Detection engines: Bombus and Osmia
What Bombus and Osmia are, how they differ, and which one your organisation uses.
Detection Profiles
Choose which sensitive data BeeSensible detects per app, and how strictly
| Entity | Level | Enabled |
|---|---|---|
| Email address | Standard | |
| Full name | Standard | |
| Phone number | Standard | |
| Street address | Standard | |
| IBAN | Critical |
BeeSensible uses two detection engines: Bombus and Osmia. Both detect the same 65 data types, but they work differently. Your organisation uses one of them based on your subscription and configuration.
Bombus
Bombus 1.2 is BeeSensible's preferred engine and the newer of the two. It combines fast AI techniques with hard rules, working together as one judgement for each data type: IBAN numbers, BSNs, names, addresses, phone numbers, and all other supported categories.
Characteristics:
- Higher recall. It misses fewer sensitive items than Osmia.
- Fewer false positives. It flags less that should not be flagged.
- Live as you type. Results appear while you are still writing.
- Resilient. If Bombus is briefly unavailable, detection falls back to Osmia automatically.
Bombus is the engine behind the real-time highlighting in the browser extension, and the preferred engine for Document Redaction.
Osmia
Osmia 3.3 is the earlier, single-model engine. It is lighter than Bombus and does its detection in one pass.
Characteristics:
- Fast and reliable.
- Simpler than Bombus: a single model rather than the combined approach.
- Used as the automatic fallback for Bombus, and as the default for free accounts.
Which engine runs on your text
The engine that runs is shown in the detection panel whenever a result is displayed. You do not choose the engine per analysis; the choice is made at the organisation level by your BeeSensible administrator.
| Use case | Engine |
|---|---|
| Realtime Privacy (browser extension, typing) | Bombus, falling back to Osmia |
| Document Redaction | Bombus, falling back to Osmia |
| Free accounts | Osmia |
On-device and cloud
Both Bombus and Osmia can run on-device through the desktop app, or in BeeSensible's EU cloud. This is a separate setting from the engine choice, made per organisation. In on-device mode, no text leaves the user's machine. In cloud mode, the text is sent to BeeSensible's EU servers, analysed in memory, and discarded. The engine itself does not change between modes; only where it runs changes.