Talk:Comparison of file comparison tools

Table Enhancements
I'd like to see a column added that indicates the programs ability to synchronize files. I believe Beyond Compare can do this for example. Also while the table could be improved I found it useful to know what the various programs are, the costs, licensing, and key features and versions etc. HEnnulat (talk) 21:54, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Agruments for Axing the table
If done properly, this table would wind up containing only lots of yesses. Axe it. Shinobu 21:52, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Documents
 * What documents? HTML documents can be compared by all the utilities.
 * Binary (display) Hexadecimal
 * All the utilities can be made to do these. Pipes.
 * Not true at all! Pdev3
 * Tables
 * All the utilities can compare tables in all the file formats they can handle.
 * Metadata
 * Seriously? What is this supposed to mean?
 * Graphics
 * All utilities can compare at least three types of graphics files.
 * Not true at all! Pdev3

(Proposed merge: see talk:file comparison) Shinobu 12:02, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

@Pdev3: that you don't know how to do something doesn't mean it can't be done. In fact the things you tagged with "Not true at all!" are quite easy to do. Shinobu 16:17, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Miscellaneous
I am looking for a File- and Directory-Tree Comparer for MacOS before X... Please don't let fall that under the table! Thanks!! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 157.161.88.147 (talk • contribs) 13:54, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Would be useful to know which tools can handle large volumes of data without needing memory for each file processed (even if no differences were found). I need to compare directories with terabytes of data (millions of files). Even DirDiff on the Amiga could do this (and still can, in the emulation), but every tool I tried on Windows runs out of memory because it seems to allocate memory for each file it processes. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.174.16.236 (talk • contribs) 22:42, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Suggestion: addition of  to tables. (203.87.122.227 01:11, 3 January 2007 (UTC))

The bullet-list of uses in the lead section seems random/arbitrary at best. What is the criteria for the list? How can a diff tool be used to check for rain exposure (for example)? Mrsuperboot (talk) 16:41, 11 June 2021 (UTC)

I also thought the lead in section for this page could use some cleanup. I attempted to do so by removing some redundant bullet points at least. Apparently this wasn't a very popular edit of mine for some reason. I am curious to understand how removing identical and unnecessary bullets is a bad edit. DesertEagle PWN (talk) 19:27, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

Capability of non-standard-latin characters not mentioned
What tool does correctly compare files that have non-standard-latin characters in the name or a folder above? Windiff is ignoring any folder containing any non-latin character, and files are reported unaccessible. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.102.189.110 (talk) 17:09, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Rows missing
The three tables are not the same length. Some of the programs added in the first table are not present in the two other table. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.243.165.186 (talk) 12:21, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Unless my eyes played tricks on me, I normalized all of the tables to contain the same row-headers in the left-hand column. This means that some rows in some tables are empty (i.e., all grey).  Being empty and present hopefully will motivate people to fill-in missing values better than complete absence of the row. —optikos (talk) 15:45, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

CSV diff tools
Same remark as the one related to xml diff tools below: it would be interesting to list wich tools can compare 2 dimensional arrays, eg: compare spreadsheets, csv files. csvdiff is listed and can do that, but maybe there are other tools. --Norz (talk) 09:44, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Need info on handling document formats!
One of the important features is the ability to handle .doc files, .xml files, etc. Many lack ability to handle these (unless you consider treating a .doc file as an opaque binary file, or an xml file as a structureless text file, "handling" them -- obviously noone seriously counts that). Pdev3
 * There is no realy need to compare .doc files with an external program, since Word does a much better job at comparing them, automatically flagging inserted and deleted text with the appropriate authors and dates.
 * Haha, perhaps you have never tried to merge directories with multiple files (much less directories with hundreds or thousands of files). If you are just doing small work on one document, you are in a small, happy world, yes, but, unfortunately, some are not...


 * And note that for any "real" work (at least those kinds of real work where diffing is important, i.e. work where files are interchanged between different people) you shouldn't use .doc files. Word's .doc is not an interchange format.
 * Comparing xml files as text actually works quite well, especially if you pipe them through a normalizer before the comparison. Shinobu 10:42, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Haha, again, I suspect you have only done small work with one or two files. I bet if you had to deal with real live data, changing and many directories, you'd start to get interested in tools that could wrap up the xml normalization for you.
 * The number of files to be compared is not really relevant. Just iterate through your files and pipe them trough the normalizer to the diff utility. If you're lazy, you can write a shellscript or similar utility that does exactly what you want in less than the time needed to figure out what "professional" tool to use and to install it. A similar solution will exist for Word (and it will probably yield better results, since it will automatically play nice with Word's revision control model). Shinobu 19:43, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

XML Diff Tools
Does anyone have any pointers to XML diff tools? Should we create a seperate page for XMTL diff tools? Thanks --Dan 16:06, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
 * There is an XML::Diff Perl library. -- Beland 20:03, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Altova DiffDog is one...it is listed in the first table, but not the features tables.--Ericjs 15:06, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Non-linear ?
What does non-linear refer to? Is it to do with the time required to compute the diff? Gary van der Merwe (Talk) 09:24, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

This question has still not been answered - I've looked at the sites for the tools that are marked as supporting non-linear compare; none of those sites made any reference to the term. Doing a Google search for "non-linear compare" and "nonlinear compare" didn't seem to turn up anything relevant in the first few pages of results. I'd like to propose that this comparison criterion is removed from the list. -- 203.206.161.248 (talk) 03:37, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Seconded: I wrote one of these tools and don't know what it means! 87.198.170.2 (talk) 10:40, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
 * The column-header for this column was sloppy terminology. "Sublinear" poorly tried to refer to whether the most-microscopic unit of reporting a difference was a line or something smaller than a line, such as a token between whitespaces or a character.  The oblique terminology has been replaced with direct terminology that is clear to understand.  Please fill in for the respective products of which you have intimate knowledge. —optikos (talk) 13:46, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Filters
Tools than can compare a set of files can typically exclude file names matching a pattern from comparison. This is called "filtering" by some.

However, some tools also provide the possibility to ignore changes in a comparison. For example differences in white space, uppercase/lowercase, or even any line matching a regular expression. The latter is quite useful for excluding automatic keywords inserted by version control systems like CVS, SVN or SourceSafe. Amongst the few tools I know this feature is provided by GNU diff, meld and WinMerge.

So I suggest to add another table, called "filters to ignore changes". Column "Character casing" of table "Aspects" would move there. Additional columns are "white space" and "regular expressions".

-- Alba7 09:25, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

large files
There should be a column about the maximaum lenght of a file (most tools unly support up to 2GB) and how large files are scanned (if both files are loaded into memory as a whole, like in windiff amd winmerge, the maximum file lenght is theoretically only half of the system-memory (in reality less, because some memory is used by the OS and the app istself) and if the application is 32bit, it is also limited to 1GB, because this is the maximum, most x86-OSes can assign to x32-tasks. This problems can be avoided, by only storing the differences in he memory and if there arre too many differences, it would be possible to store the differences in a temporary file). --MrBurns (talk) 00:27, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

p4merge
Can anyone provide justification for the p4merge license being 'free for personal use'? The tool itself, though it comes with the perforce visual client, when installed alone has no license agreement at all. The perforce website states that you can use downloads for any reason provided you do not modify the software. Dsav (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 21:43, 31 May 2009 (UTC).
 * I've changed the license to 'freeware' since this directly contradicted the Perforce website --Dsav (talk) 01:01, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Video / Audio Comparison
There is no software in the list to compare two video files or audio files to show which file is the correct one (i.e. storage or download was not 100% correct). The software should show and play the part when they are different). Who know such software and can complete the list? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.173.95.85 (talk) 09:05, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Would you please list some structured compare tool?
It would be helpful to list some structured compare tools such as Compare++, Compare it!; They can detect code structure changes, functions relocation such as moved lines/functions which often occurred when doing code refactoring. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Liuxin4335 (talk • contribs) 06:27, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Missing diff tools
It seems there are some notable missing tools from the list.

What about KDiff or Tortoise Diff? The new integrated VS diff (not windiff) could be for completeness though it lacks most features. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.89.113.109 (talk) 16:27, 16 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Nobody has come around to add them, you're free to do so if you believe you can significantly contribute to the article. That's generally how these things work — Masklinn (talk)

Also cmp (Unix), which I just discovered as a really bare-bones binary compare utility. 72.48.75.131 (talk) 06:05, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

Araxis Merge http://www.araxis.com/merge/ is also missing 129.187.200.248 (talk) 13:44, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

Also missing "diffuse" http://diffuse.sourceforge.net/ ? Haven't used it much but found it when looking for something that can compare more than 3 files at once, and it seems to do this kind of n-way diff quite nicely. 130.217.40.226 (talk) 01:49, 31 July 2014 (UTC)


 * I agree that diffuse should be included. It's the only tool I could find that can compare any number of files.--208.125.94.82 (talk) 21:20, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Missing Araxis Merge. Missing ViceVersa Pro. Missing Windows command console tools Xcopy and Robocopy. Ironic that not a single one of the powerful file and folder comparison tools that I've used for the past 10+ years are on this list. N3362 (talk) 20:28, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Missing DevArt Code Compare: https://www.devart.com/codecompare/ 14:42, 20 October 2016 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.152.249.250 (talk)

Missing Diffoscope: https://diffoscope.org/ (Debian "Reproducible Effords", in-depth comparison of files, archives, and directories) 194.25.240.90 (talk) 13:16, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

Missing "sdiff", in Unix/Linux since before 1980. A wrapper for "diff" that produces side-by-side output. Mdmi (talk) 13:17, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Note that this is a comparison of stuff that already has a Wikipedia article. You can pitch in by writing a new article for one of these tools, provided proper sourcing exists. - MrOllie (talk) 21:23, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Missing UltraCompare: https://www.ultraedit.com/products/ultracompare/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by CoreyEMTP (talk • contribs) 19:47, 30 June 2022 (UTC)

Why is Lazarus listed as a diff tool?
Lazarus is surely a great piece of software and unique in many aspects, I use it a lot myself, but I cannot figure out why it would be listed here as a diff tool. Lazarus is an excellent open source cross platform IDE and RAD studio and while it has many unique features that cannot be found in any of the few other available IDEs of the same caliber the only thing it is still completely lacking is any sort of usable diff tool (just displaying the output of something similar to "diff old new" but only similar and not compatible with it's counterpart patch in a separate editor window does not count for me).

Or was its listing here (and the complete empty row in the features matrix) meant as some sarcastic remark indicating the complete lack of any diffing? I suggest removing this wrong entry.

--82.83.216.185 (talk) 21:15, 4 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Surely you can just remove it (it's apparently been added at 16:47, 22 April 2009 and never been touched since) if you believe it doesn't belong here. — Masklinn (talk) 21:00, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

NetBeans
Why is Netbeans not listed ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.35.17.21 (talk) 09:34, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

DiffChecker?
Do other people feel that the web site DiffChecker is not appropriate here? It can't really be used in any serious way to do a file merge. Mgolden (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 21:35, 11 November 2011 (UTC).

WinMerge support of Binary comparison
Contrary to this article, WinMerge stable release does not seem to support binary compare (hex compare). According to http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/winmerge/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=61 it's only in dev versions. 212.29.231.179 (talk) 09:24, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Still does not support . Deleting feature from table. \chAlx (talk) 18:59, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Comparison tools failed to compare comparison tools
What an irony that not a single of the comparison tools compared in this article could actually be used for comparing the comparison tools. —Kri (talk) 22:40, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

DiffMerge
Added this back as Vrenator deleted, but this is a real tool and there is no reason not to include it. An automatic deletion tool to remove what I spent some time adding in is quite rude. Please read what you delete before deleting!
 * I have removed it again - Please read the note at the top of the article when editing,

"This article is limited only to comparison tools that have a separate article on Wikipedia. Please do not add examples without an existing Wikipedia article. If you want to add a notable comparison tool to this article please write a separate article on the comparison tool first and then link to it from this page." Please do not keep adding it  Vrenator     talk   09:40, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

You should delete many of the entries then, because they don't all have their own page. You are reducing the fidelity and quality with a deletion power trip. Who says "This article is limited only to comparison tools that have a separate article on Wikipedia"? Do you own this article? You are hampering the sharing of knowledge for what? the satisfaction of knowing you can undo changes automatically and systematically with the twinkle tool? I won't get into an undo war with you. Please revert the changes or we need to seek community and moderator input. Avé 21:13, 19 December 2012 (UTC)


 * If you go into edit the article you will see the words that I quoted about only adding tools with their own page. All the other additions link to Wikipedia articles. DiffMerge had an article which was deleted in August 2011 because there was no demonstrated notability. If you can provide citations demonstrating notability then you are welcome to create an article first. see WP:WTAF. I am not being "Rash", "Rude" nor am I on a "Power trip" so please could you keep your comments Civil  Vrenator     talk   10:27, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=61 it's only in dev versions. 212.29.231.179 (talk) 09:24, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

That's an arbitrary rule not worth keeping. "You can't mention anything here that doesn't have its own article" - How does that help this article to provide a broad overview of the available tools? A tool can be worth keeping on comparison tables, because it's worth being found and used, even if it doesn't merit a whole article of it's own. The notability threshold for an own article may not be reached, but it's still a useful tool, well executed, free and more noteworthy than some other tools on this page. I came here to explicitely compare DiffMerge's features to others and need to look for this information in the revision history - that's sad. RainyAfternoon (talk) 08:06, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

diff, diff3 Max Supported File Size
The last time I checked, 2 GB referred to significantly more data than 64 bits — Preceding unsigned comment added by Authun (talk • contribs) 08:46, 10 October 2013 (UTC)


 * 64 bits refers to the amount of data addressable by a 64 bit value (i.e., 2^64). This was fixed in https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_file_comparison_tools&oldid=816501926, but then reverted https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_file_comparison_tools&oldid=816711101 (apparently, because WP:COMPUNITS, huh??) Npostavs (talk) 20:09, 8 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Npostavs, for mentioning my old edit and its weird revert. I was actually rather pissed that it was reverted with a stupid reasoning, but I was growing sick and tired of Wikipedia exactly because of these foolish reverts made by dumb and trigger-happy people that don't really look into what they are reverting; so instead of objecting, I just left Wikipedia for a while to let it rot. The problem with this specific revert was of course that the reverter did not look into what I actually did, but only saw part of it, and then reverted the whole thing because a tiny part of it didn't follow the Holy Book, the Manual of Style. The person could have been helpful instead of disruptive by actually adjusting it to Wikipedia's silly standard of not following the standard instead of reverting the whole damn thing. What he did was kind of like reverting an entire helpful addition with the reasoning that it contains a spelling error, instead of simply being helpful and correcting the spelling error. I actually thought my edit was quite helpful in translating the rather non-layman sizes of "64 bit" etc. into actual memory sizes. Laymen cannot be expected to understand how much data 31 or 64 bits can address (Authun illustrated this very well above), and we do not write Wikipedia for specialists; we write for laymen, so writing "31 bits" or "64 bits" is a clear failing from our side. --Jhertel (talk) 23:55, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

araxis merge
http://www.araxis.com/merge — Preceding unsigned comment added by SysTom (talk • contribs) 16:22, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
 * +1, I also miss it from the tables. --94.21.221.129 (talk) 15:51, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

API
Other features ought to include API. — Preceding unsigned comment added by SysTom (talk • contribs) 16:24, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

ECMerge
ECMerge is missing, maybe because it doesn't have its own wikipedia page either. If someone wants to take the trouble... It is quite good, although the latest version is a little old now (september 2014). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gabrolf (talk • contribs) 11:48, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Semantic Merge by Plastic
http://semanticmerge.com/ CarlJohanSveningsson (talk) 10:08, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

FTP support in KDiff3?
I currently have KDiff3 installed on Windows, and cannot find any way to compare files/folders via FTP. Searching for information online, the only thing I found was that KDiff3 "has support for KDE-KIO (ftp, sftp, http, fish, smb)": https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/kdiff3

I'm not familiar with KDE-KIO; but as I see it, that means KDiff3 does not truly offer FTP support. I think at most, we could mention "supported by OS" in the "FTP support" column, as is done for FileMerge. But I think it's misleading to colour the cell in green, as KDiff3 only seems to support FTP on Linux systems. Tanynep (talk) 19:15, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

Windows Explorer Integration
I will be the first to admit that this is a very Windows-centric thing, but one feature that that can make a significant difference to the ease of use of a diff tool is integration into Windows Explorer. As an example, Beyond Compare integrates very well, while WinDiff has no integration at all. Adding a column to the "Other Features" table to cover this would, IMHO, improve this page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.198.85.139 (talk) 22:13, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

Kdiff3
Where is Kdiff3? It is super-popular and free. Why it was removed? Is this (bad) joke?.. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.179.70.44 (talk) 04:28, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

I agree. My impression was that it is among the best, which is why I use it a lot. If this doesn't get fixed soon, I'll probably do some more digging. Alias65536 (talk) 14:40, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

It got removed on 2017-03-03T17:00:46‎ reasoning Rm entry which lacks a wikipedia article. If all the other utilities mentioned in this article do have their own wikipedia article, then of course kdiff3 should have its own as well, before it gets listed in this one. But then ... this is neither my rule nor my decision, I am just trying to explain you what happened. --johayek (talk) 20:28, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

If it doesn't have a wiki-page then it does not exist. This is just stupid. --2A02:8109:8AC0:4C12:3DC5:5981:27CD:EDA8 (talk) 10:59, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

Viewing Diff Files
There seems to be a lack of a function that goes the other way.

Countless tools allow the user to compare two files and produce a 'diff' of the changes between them.

But what if you have only a 'diff' output and want to see the original and changed versions side by side? Just the 'diff' text is not very readable.

I have put in some real effort to finding a tool to do this and have followed several dead ends to tools that claim to have this function but actually do not, or that no longer exist in Windows format. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.35.117.25 (talk) 12:42, 7 February 2020 (UTC)