Text Compare

Paste two versions of text to find line changes. Use the comparison options for prose, configuration, logs, or code snippets.

Left Text

Right Text

How to compare two texts

Paste the earlier version in the left pane and the later version in the right pane.
Select Compare to highlight line differences, or enable Auto compare while editing.
Review the status and marked lines. Use Swap to reverse the versions and the copy controls to copy either input.

Worked example: a configuration change

Place these two lines on the left:

environment=staging
retries=3

On the right, change the first line to environment=production and keep retries=3. The first line is marked as modified and the second remains unchanged. Adding timeout=30 on a new line produces an added line.

Choose comparison options carefully

Ignore whitespace compresses runs of whitespace and trims each line for comparison; it does not rewrite the inputs. Ignore case compares lowercase forms. These options can hide meaningful differences in code, indentation, passwords, or case-sensitive names.

Trim trailing spaces and Normalize line endings do change both inputs. The latter converts Windows CRLF and old-style CR line endings to LF. Keep a source copy before applying cleanup.

Frequently asked questions

Does this compare words or characters within a changed line?

The highlights are line-based. A modified line is marked as a whole; the tool does not create word-level annotations or a merge result.

Can I compare source code?

Yes, as text. No language parser runs, so this does not establish whether two programs behave the same.

Is there a file-size limit?

Processing is limited by browser memory. Very large documents use faster matching and may group changes differently; a desktop diff is better for large files.