Document comparison software is widely used across the businesses. It manages to change the way employees interact with each other and make the most of their time. Nowadays, it is one of the basic needs of businesses irrespective of their size, department or industry. Being a high-end technology, it mainly deals with document comparison, signature verification and data analytics software.
The Best Document Comparison Software for Law Firms & Legal Professionals. You can compare two Word documents and highlight differences online, free. Use the easy file comparison tool when you need to make sure that a document has been edited correctly or simply want to find duplicates in a large set of files.
Document comparison software is a great thing to have but if you don’t know what document comparison software is, then that information is no good. The best way to learn about this software is to learn more about it.
Compare two files, highlight differences and see which lines they have in common. Get rid of all the errors in your documents and make a perfect file. Free software to compare two files. This is the best document comparison software for lawyers and other legal professionals.
My Favorite Free Document Comparison Software For Windows:
DiffMerge is my favorite document comparison software. It provides a variety of tools to compare two documents with ease. It also lets you merge three documents in one document file by resolving conflicts in them.
I liked Compare Files too because of its simplicity. It lets you manually analyze two documents line by line. It is lightweight and portable.
Draftable
Draftable is a popular online software for comparing PDF and Word documents. You can perform a side-by-side comparison of two documents; simply drag and drop the files in the provided space or click and upload.
You can use Draftable to compare documents online for free. You don’t have to create an account and you can compare documents with up to 300 pages. However, each document shouldn’t be more than 10 MB.
You can set Draftable to check for content changes only, style changes only, or content and style changes. Content changes check for word and sentence changes while style changes check for changes in text color, font style, size, and other formatting styles.
From the comparison window, the changes are featured in the right-aligned tab and also highlighted in the document. You can print either or both documents directly from the website with all the highlights visible. You can download it as a PDF too.
Aside from PDF and Word, you can compare PowerPoint files too. After comparing, you can share results with others using a secret URL or embed the comparison in your website. Draftable also includes a paid desktop version.
Copyleaks
Copyleaks is a platform against plagiarism. The free File Compare tools lets you compare up to 10 documents at a time. You don’t need an account to compare documents with Copyleaks unless you want to perform a private comparison.
To compare documents, you either upload the files or copy and paste the text in the provided space. If the work is published online, you can simply enter a URL to compare. Hence, with Copyleaks, you can compare documents with web pages. Note that Copyleaks only supports Word and PDF documents.
Copyleaks is an advanced online document comparison software as it uses AI technology. The multi-language adaptability feature allows you to compare files in different languages.
This online software calculates the similarities and differences in percentages. It checks for identical words, minor changes, and paraphrased and omitted words; you can turn off any of these features. The overall score tells you how unique or not one document is from the other and you can view the total number of similar words.
If you have an account, you can download the comparison reports to your device. To get the best experience with Copyleaks, you should use Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome browsers.
Diffchecker
This is a user-friendly online text comparison software. As the name states it’s a difference checker and helps you find the differences between two documents. You can copy and paste text or select a Word file.
DiffChecker features an exclusive PDF comparison tool. Also, there are free tools for comparing images and Excel files. This tool works very fast. After pasting your text or uploading documents, you’ll get results in less than five seconds after clicking the Find Difference button.
As mentioned earlier, this tool is only concerned about differences. It highlights differences in the first document in red and the other in green. You can switch text windows and merge texts/files.
When you compare PDFs, you can check for differences in text, image, OCR text, and file details. DiffChecker lets you save your comparison to expire in 24 hours, one week, one month, or never. You can share the results via public links and directly share them to Facebook and Twitter.
Although DiffChecker is available for free, you can access features like real-time comparison, unified view, character review, and private sharing if you purchase the pro version for $8 per month. In addition, DiffChecker features a desktop version.
Adobe Acrobat Pro DC (suggested)
Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is an excellent tool to compare documents, and especially PDF files. You can use this feature to compare two different documents or multiple versions of the same document.
If several persons are working on the same document, keeping track of all the revisions can be quite difficult. With Acrobat Pro DC, you can quickly compare the text and other elements to quickly spot the differences.
You can visualize the files side by side to better identify the changes. Alternatively, you can also apply a series of filters so that Acrobat Pro DC highlights the changes regarding particular elements such as text, images, annotations, and more.
Adobe Acrobat Pro DC offers amazing features and it’s without a doubt the best program to compare two documents.
How to compare documents using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC
- Navigate to Tools
- Click on Compare Files
- In the left-hand pane, click on Select File to choose the file to compare
- Click on Select File this time in the right-hand pane to select the second document or the newer version of the same document
- Hit the Compare button to launch the comparison process
- Select the Go to First Change option to review each different individually.
Other great features:
- Can create and edit PDF files
- PDF conversion
- Compare documents
- Ability to sign PDFs
- Text recognition
Soda PDF (recommended)
Soda PDF is a full-featured PDF creation and management software that allows you to edit, convert, e-sign, and compare documents.
The popular Acrobat alternative is accessible through any device with a web browser and it comes in two editions. Both the Standard and Pro versions can be used to compare two documents.
The Review Module in Soda PDF lets you compare two documents, as well as insert comments and add shapes like arrows or stars.
On the other hand, its ability to work from the cloud and on multiple devices can enhance productivity if several persons are working on the same project.
Here are other great features included in this tool:
- Create PDFs from 300+ file formats in just a few clicks.
- Convert PDF files to Word, PowerPoint, Excel, HTML, and image formats with no loss of information.
- Scan a document and extract the text with the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Module.
- Protect your documents by adding 256-bit passwords, different permission levels, or a digital signature.
- Insert images, links, or even add watermarks to the background of your documents via the Insert Module.
ABBYY FineReader
Using this program, you will get the opportunity to find the differences in text between two versions of a document. This tool will eliminate the time-consuming line-by-line matching.
The Compare Documents feature is able to identify the changes between the document’s versions in various file formats that include PDF, Word and more.
The result can be saved in Word or PDF formats, and insignificant differences can be ignored and removed from the report before you finalize it.
ABBYY FineReader is simple to use and powerful, so it’s a must-have program that compares two text files.
Other great features:
- With the help of ABBYY FineReader, you will be able to enjoy a comparison between files that will save you time and effort.
- This software allows you to detect all the differences in a text between two versions of the same document in just a matter of seconds.
- The software is incredibly intuitive, and you can use it to compare texts productively.
- You will be able to compare two versions of a text across different file formats such as Microsoft Office files, PDFs, paper scans and more.
- Of course, you will also be able to compare the same type of files.
- ABBYY FineReader supports text comparison in 35 languages, and the program is able to detect a document’s language automatically.
- There will not be any change left to go unnoticed.
- The changes are highlighted in the two documents, and they will be displayed side by side making them easy to notice.
- Only the changes that affect the content meaning will be highlighted, and the irrelevant modifications are excluded.
Beyond Compare Version 3
Beyond Compare lets you easily compare files and folders, including text files (with syntax highlighting for HTML), Word Docs, and PDF files, among others. Available for Windows and Linux for $30 (standard edition) to $50 (pro edition).
ExamDiff
ExamDiff is another free document comparer software. To start with, it lets you browse two documents to compare. After that, you can see comparison between the two in split windows. It displays the changes by line numbers in both documents. You can easily view and analyze non-identical content in a particular line number. Tools to navigate to previous to next change or vice versa are also provided. Number of difference are shown at the bottom of its interface.
It also lets you edit documents individually. You can recompare files as well after editing them. Other options of this document comparison tool let you view documents separately, swap them, save unix diff files to compare them in future, etc. You can also search for content within documents.
It provides an option to associate particular file types to it. You can add document formats to browse and compare, including DOC, DOCX, PDF, RTF, etc.
It is an easy to use document comparison software. It provides all key features on its toolbar to quickly use them. You can set preference for comparison results, like ignoring white space in lines, ignore case, ignore leading and/or trailing white space, etc. Also, it lets you change color schemes for added, deleted, and changed lines.
WinMerge
WinMerge is an open source document comparison software for Windows. It lets you compare two documents on its split interface. The comparison is shown by highlighting similar and conflict content. As above mentioned software, this one too does comparison by line numbers. It displays number of lines and characters in respective documents at the bottom of its interface.
In the respective comparison windows, you can even edit each document in real time. Later, changes can be saved. In case you want to analyze any/both of the two documents in read-only mode, you can do that too. To make both the documents identical, enable the Merge Mode. It lets you copy content from document at left to document right or vice versa. But, make sure that you have disabled read only mode for the two. When documents become identical, it displays the message for the same on its interface.
Easy navigation options are also available. Other tools for syntax highlighting, locking panes, swapping panes, location panes, zooming in/out, etc. are also provided in this software. You can also apply line filters (with regular expressions) and file filters (delphi filter, XML/HTML devel, etc.). It also provides a text editor.
Conclusion
If you create documents to share with your customers, or want to be able to compare different drafts of documents, or are part of a team that works on different versions of the same document – such as wikis, blog posts or eBooks – then it may be worth for you to take a closer look at document comparison software. The ability to find changes between two versions of a document is a useful tool for all sorts of businesses.
Document comparison is a powerful tool that students, professional writers, and academic researchers of all types use day in and day out. To get the most out of this handy feature, though, it helps to understand some of the ins and outs of document comparison software.