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BeyondCompare is a powerful tool that is widely used in software development organizations for code diffing and file comparison. Users …
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What is Beyond Compare?
Beyond Compare from Scooter Software headquartered in Madison is a utility for comparing different version of documents and seeing the differences. It also allows changes to be merged and synchronized.
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What is Beyond Compare?
Beyond Compare from Scooter Software headquartered in Madison is a utility for comparing different version of documents and seeing the differences. It also allows changes to be merged and synchronized.
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Beyond Compare Technical Details
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| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Beyond Compare from Scooter Software headquartered in Madison is a utility for comparing different version of documents and seeing the differences. It also allows changes to be merged and synchronized.
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.2.
The most common users of Beyond Compare are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
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BeyondCompare is a powerful tool that is widely used in software development organizations for code diffing and file comparison. Users rely on BeyondCompare to compare files and folders of any format, extension, or size quickly and easily. With its long-standing reputation and over 20 years of experience, it has become a trusted choice for developers.
BeyondCompare simplifies the process of locating misplaced files or documents and provides a side-by-side viewer/comparer that displays various conditions such as same, orphans, newer, missing, etc. This functionality is highly appreciated by users as it helps them identify differences and navigate directly to them.
The tool offers a wide range of choices, including information, location, duplicates, and newest. This versatility makes it suitable for various tasks such as comparing directories between development and production servers in web design and development projects. Additionally, users in web coding, data entry, and graphic design departments rely on BeyondCompare for comparing code, spreadsheets, and combining documents from multiple sources.
Furthermore, BeyondCompare serves as a reliable source code diff tool that eliminates manual work and reduces the risk of human error. It is often preferred over the default mergetool utility included with Git for handling difficult merges in the development team. The tool is also used for recursively comparing directory structures and merging differing files into a single file.
BeyondCompare's usefulness extends beyond software development. It is commonly employed for operational tasks like comparing various formats such as plain text, folders, and structured data. Users appreciate its ability to look at configurations, validate registry settings, determine differences between files of any type, troubleshoot web-based applications by comparing configuration files, compare SQL code and DDL, and perform data validation tasks.
Additionally, BeyondCompare offers the capability to compare image differences, making it a versatile tool for ensuring content and format consistency during code comparison or other scenarios where visual comparison is required.
Overall, BeyondCompare has established itself as an essential tool for developers and professionals in various disciplines, facilitating efficient file comparison and code review processes while minimizing errors and saving valuable time.
Folder diffing feature: Users have found the folder diffing feature in Beyond Compare to be extremely helpful, allowing them to easily see differences in deeply nested folder structures. Several reviewers specifically mentioned this as a standout feature of the software.
Flexible diffing rules: The flexibility of the diffing rules in Beyond Compare has been praised by users. They appreciate being able to set rules to include or exclude files, folders, and lines from their comparisons. This customization option has received positive feedback from multiple reviewers.
Quick and accurate identification of differences: Reviewers have mentioned that one of the strong points of Beyond Compare is its ability to quickly and accurately identify differences between files. This efficient comparison process has been appreciated by several users who value time-saving features in the software.
Syntax Highlighting Needs Improvement: Some users have expressed dissatisfaction with the syntax highlighting feature of the software, stating that it is basic and requires additional installation or customization. They mention that the lack of precision in rules, attributes, and names can be problematic.
Outdated User Interface: Several reviewers have mentioned their disappointment with the old-looking user interface of the software. They feel that a more modern interface would be preferred to enhance user experience.
Performance Issues with Large Files: Many users have reported that the software can be slow when comparing folders with many files or large file sizes. This has caused frustration for those working on projects involving extensive data analysis or development tasks.
Users have made several recommendations for Beyond Compare based on their experiences with the tool. The three most common recommendations are as follows:
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Many users recommend Beyond Compare for comparing and merging code, as well as validating code with earlier versions. They find it effective in identifying differences in code and believe it is worth the price.
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Another common recommendation is to use Beyond Compare for general file comparison needs. Users find it easy to learn and use, and they believe it surpasses other tools they have tried in terms of functionality.
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Users also suggest integrating Beyond Compare into version management tools and text editors. They find it beneficial in automating tasks and reducing manual work, making it a valuable tool for developers working with Microsoft Office tools.
Overall, users find Beyond Compare useful for a variety of comparison tasks, such as comparing files, folders, images, and plain text. They recommend trying out the free trial before purchasing and encourage comparing it against its competition to determine which tool best suits individual needs.
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Reviews
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October 09, 2022
Best file comparison tool
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Beyond Compare for daily use in order to quickly compare code files. Its one of the oldest and most mature tool available in the market. All of our engineering team rely on Beyond Compare when we need to have an overall comparison. The plus point of Beyond Compare is the support for Excel sheet comparison and binary file comparison.
- Highlight specific lines, quickly copy/merge diff lines at a click of a button
- Allows you to have diff/merge in the same window.
- Compare large folders with multiple files, have a summary of differences.
- Freeware is not available, we have to buy the license after 30 days.
- Syntax highlight for well known programming languages should be provided i.e. Java, C#, C++
- Sometimes slows down when working with huge files
In my company, I develop software and sometimes I use BC to compare the source code of similar modules belonging to different software applications. So I can quickly evaluate the missing procedures in some applications and add or update them more quickly. Another use of BC is to evaluate similar XML record paths and find out which differences need to be corrected. BC is great for these types of problems. BC is fantastic because it can also compare the image differences!
- Compare folders
- Compare XML Files
- Compare VB.NET / C# Files
- The GUI is old style
- Better integration with Visual Studio
February 27, 2020
Beyond Compare - Really good at all comparisons, file/folder/drives
I've been a user of Beyond Compare (BC) for over 20 years. I use it nearly every day to compare files, folders, network drives. I search for a file and BC will ignore (when needed) folder structure making easy to locate misplaced files or documents. BC is a side to side viewer/comparer of names for anything on a drive. It is very visible, showing the same, orphans (left or right side), newer, missing, etc., all useful conditions. Information, location, duplicates, newest are among the many choices. Sessions are remembered. BC does such an excellent job, I've never had a need to reach for another "Beyond Compare" software. I know of nothing it does not do.
- Compare: files, folders, drives, update or make changes
- Solid operation
- I have dual 32" 4k monitors. Add enlarge/use ctrl-scroll wheel to enlarge font view
January 18, 2020
Beyond Compare
As far as I know, Beyond Compare is used in the Engineering Department. It makes our life easier to compare multiple files or directories. And it is the best in the industry. It saves us a lot of time in the code review process and also in all the steps of the software development life cycle.
- Compare files, directories.
- Integration to the Visual Studio Source Explorer and Microchip MPLAB X IDE.
- It could do a better job in comparing .CSV or Excel files.
November 07, 2019
Beyond Compare - Easy to use for a quick check!
I utilize Beyond Compare for validation purposes - specifically our source systems’ data feed in comparison with the actual data stored within our data warehouse. This software offers a rudimentary solution for data comparison.
- Ease of use - simply utilize standard folders to select each of the files to utilize for comparison.
- Once files are selected the software does the work - cross checking equivalent rows between the two files
- Highlights errors in red to easily troubleshoot discrepancies in the files
- For date formatting discrepancies the software does not automatically mark the dates as equivalent; for instance ‘2019/10/15’ vs. ‘15-OCT-2019’. This would be considered a difference.
- The columns/report must be ordered similarly. If extra data is available in one file, it should be removed or extra rows will be marked as differences.
- For spreadsheet comparison, the user must save the file on the proper tab and then “recompare” within the tool. There is no way to switch between sheets in the software.
October 04, 2019
Beyond Compare Review
This product is mainly used by a select number of people at my company, those that have a specific need to look at configurations for system setup. It is extremely useful for looking at any file type to determine what the differences are and quickly pinpoint lines that are not consistent. It is also used to validate registry settings between production systems.
- It allows for scrolling through both documents at the same line level meaning you are not required to skip between files to look at what is different between the two.
- A comparison between registry hives can easily pinpoint issues for hundreds and thousands of records.
- Tabbing can allow for multiple compares to take place at the same time.
- Some of the more advanced features of doing binary compare are a bit tedious to get right, but this is a very nitpicky problem to have.
October 04, 2019
Gets the job done
We use it to compare files and make sure they match exactly in terms of content and format. This allows us to be confident when we make a process change or to determine what may have changed if we have issues.
- Compares text files.
- Compares folder structures.
- Easy to use.
- Can give false issues.
October 03, 2019
Beyond Compare is a must-have tool for your toolbox.
We use Beyond Compare for many tasks:
- Deploy files to production.
- General purpose FTP and SCP clients.
- De-duplicate and merge files.
- Compare source code trees.
- Compare JPG and PNG images.
- It's the best FTP and SCP file transfer client we found. It's fast, rock-solid, and has never let us down.
- We can compare huge file trees quickly. The filtering (diffs, orphans, sort order) is extremely powerful. We can locate minor file differences quickly.
- Rule-based comparison helps by eliminating minor differences in JPG image headers, text file line endings, MP3 metadata, etc.
- The ability to install in portable mode is a key feature for IT support work.
- Mac, PC, and Linux versions are available.
- The native decoding of file metadata (MP3, image formats) is very powerful.
- The tabbed interface allows multiple operations to run simultaneously.
- I often need to exclude folders or files from the comparison. Currently, the fastest way is to right-click and then pick "exclude" from the context menu. Having the ability to multi-select folders and then exclude the group would be nice.
- Sometimes we need to verify MD5 and SHA256 fingerprints, and this would be a nice enhancement within the tool.
September 26, 2019
Merge Conflicts? Beyond Compare is the last tool you'll ever need.
Beyond Compare is used within our development teams to provide a robust comparison solution amongst text files as well as for use in recursively comparing directory structures on disk. Not only does Beyond Compare highlight differences between files, it also provides easy to understand merging capabilities, making it very simple to merge differing files into a single file.
- Text File Comparisons - Beyond Compare provides multiple views into comparing files against each other, and can even do 3-way comparisons.
- Text File Merging - Beyond Compare can help the user merge two differing files into a single cohesive file encompassing all changes. It also does a good job of highlighting merge conflicts before a user conducts a merge.
- File structure comparison - Beyond Compare can compare two directory structures on disk and identify the differences in the file lists between them. This is incredibly handy for installer development.
- Outdated user interface - Beyond Compare's interface looks relatively old - with low-res icons and text defaults that remind you it was probably written 15 years ago.
- Beyond Compare integrates with version control systems on the command line, but I'd like the ability to invoke version control from within the GUI as well.
- This is going to be a silly complaint - but I'm having a hard time coming up with any other "cons" for Beyond Compare - I've never liked its icon. Why is there a tire in it?
Beyond Compare is a useful tool for operational tasks. We use it to compare various formats, include plain text, folders, and other structured data. It also works really great as a source code diff tool. Using it to compare eliminates manual work and reduces the risk of human error in long lists/data sets.
- Compares more than just text files.
- Extensive compare and merge functionality, eg. ability to adjust side-by-side lines.
- Can save common comparisons for re-use or sharing.
- No easy integration with IDEs.
- No syntax highlighting or other useful editing tools.
June 01, 2019
A comparison tool that's truly beyond compare
I use BeyondCompare for a variety of tasks related to web design and development. I frequently use it to compare directories between our development and production web servers. It's also great for general purpose file comparisons, such as comparing a backup file or directory to the actual file or directory to determine if anything has changed. Overall, it's a great utility that any sysadmin, developer, or power user should have.
- Compare two files or directories and easily see what's the same or different between the two sources.
- Synchronize changes between two files or directories.
- Be able to ignore insignificant differences such as code comments, minor timestamp differences, or certain file types, such as temporary files.
- It could make it easier to compare more than two sources.
February 10, 2019
A System Administrator's "Must Have" Tool
I work in our QA department, and all of the Systems Administrators (Microsoft Windows) use BeyondCompare when troubleshooting configuration files for web-based applications. What are the differences between this configuration file and that one? Load both of them into BeyondCompare for text searching and - bingo! - any differences stand out like a sore thumb.
- Comparing two configuration text files side-by-side is a snap. BeyondCompare quickly and clearly shows each and every line of text that differs between the two. That makes it very easy to see, for example, if someone modified a config file, or if a URL is wrong, etc.
- When comparing two files that are lengthy, BeyondCompare has this wonderful feature that allows you to clear out all the clutter and see only the lines that differ. What a huge help!
- Need to compare the contents of one folder with the contents of another folder? Easy peasy! BeyondCompare to the rescue.
- If you want to merge the contents of two or more folders, again with BeyondCompare it is a snap. Drag-and-drop the folders into BeyondCompare and ba-da-bing you've solved your issue.
- Want to keep the contents between folders synchronized? What a headache to have to do that manually, and often only because we forget, "Oh. Yeah! I modified that file last week and forgot to synchronize it with my target folder." BeyondCompare to the rescue. Folder sync is also a snap.
- Want to merge the text content of two or more files? Good luck with doing that manually. Use BeyondCompare!
- There are several operations that one can do with BeyondCompare, but the icons for them are all on one line, so you have to scroll (using a> on the sides of the screen) to see the next six options. It would be nicer if one could have them in a grid and move them around so they're in the order you want.
- I'm not a big fan of the "Auto-saved" sessions feature because I don't generally keep coming back to the same files. I'm all over the network looking at configuration files and those that I place temporarily on my desktop. At least they created a relatively simple right-click, clear contents option so I can get rid of the session's clutter.
- I would especially like to have an ability to have BeyondCompare open on one monitor and have it interact with content in a remote desktop session that is open on a second monitor, like being able to drag and drop content from the RDP session to BeyondCompare would be amazing.
As far as I know, it is not used by whole department but rather some specific people all over the organisation. I know that BeyondCompare has a lot of functionnalities but the ones that I've used the most were script compare and folder compare. I have also used it some time ago in order to promote changes. The software makes it easy to identify differences and apply changes to either the base file or the compare file.
- The ability to compare whole directory structure is really nice and time saving. This allows to quickly identify at the file level what matches and what doesn't. You can then move into each file to see what is different.
- When comparing files, you can go through changes and for each of them decides if you want to apply a file's version of that different line to the other one. When promoting changes, this allows you to go through the changes one more time by promoting each "delta" one by one.
- Can connect to servers to compare remote files. This was a great benefit for us.
- It would be nice to compare more than 2 sources. Not a common problem but sometimes we can have several versions of a script and it would be nice to quickly get a report of which of these are identical.
- The ability to specify custom characters to ignore by folder/file could be helpful but I have to say that it is more a "nice to have" than an actual problem.
January 12, 2019
Comparing files and folders at its best
We are using BeyondCompare in the software development organization for file comparison. Often we have to compare files quickly and easily. These files can be not only source code, but other kinds of files, like xml, xsl, xls, even binaries. We have tools that process binary files required by the business and sometimes we need to compare them to debug some production issues.
- Finds and shows the differences between files quickly and accurately
- Allows you to update either file(merge) when the difference is found, just by clicking on the arrows
- Folder comparison is one of the most useful features for software developers
- The integration with the mouse right click menu is extremely helpful
- The User Interface could use a big uplift. It is old looking, people will prefer something more modern.
- A little slow when comparing folders that have many files or large file sizes
- Sometimes when the differences between files are caused by moving text, it is difficult for the tool to identify that, and it is a pain for the user to merge the files.
- As in most comparison tools, the alignment can cause some issues, by showing too many differences between files which are caused by the alignment.
January 04, 2019
Best Bang-For-The Buck I've Ever Purchased
First off, let me disclose that I use Beyond Compare every day in my job as a DBA and SQL programmer. I recommend it to users every opportunity I get. I can't believe we haven't purchased an Enterprise license for it yet (I think one exists). We just have individual users requisition it from their respective department heads. Seems like something we need to buy en masse. It is my go-to choice for comparing SQL code, DDL, and just about anything.
- Comparing database objects between test and production.
- Comparing different versions of the code.
- Clearly highlighting just the differences between text blocks.
- Migration of differences from one source to another.
- Copy and paste from spreadsheets, code editors, just about anything.
- Don't love the printing options. They could be improved.
- I haven't been able to figure out how to compare more than 2 objects at a time. Yes, that could be difficult, but it would come in handy once in a while.
- Wish it had code editor formatting built-in, though these are all wishlist items. None of this is advertised by the product.
December 13, 2018
The best file and folder comparison tool. No doubt.
I use BeyondCompare mostly for code diffing and also for personal matters. In my day-to-day job, BeyondCompare is an essential tool in my toolset that allows me to see differences between files and folders no matter the format, extension or size.
- Folder diffing. It allows you to see differences in deeply nested folder structures.
- File diffing. It allows you to see differences in files no matter their complexity.
- Diffing rules. It allows you to set rules to include/exclude files, folders and lines from your comparison.
- Probably the only thing that might require improvement is syntax hightlighting on code files, the feature is in my opinion very basic and requires you to install or fine tune syntax hightlighting languages that usually lack precission in rules, attributes, names.
May 22, 2018
Try BeyondCompare or continue living in BC
BeyondCompare was used by our development team mostly as a diff tool for use with Git version control. It is a far better solution than the default mergetool utility included with Git and makes handling difficult merges easier to deal with.
- Ability to compare files, directories, FTP sites, cloud storage (Dropbox, OneDrive, Amazon S3, Subversion and WebDAV) and archive files (tar, gzip, bzip2, Microsoft CAB, WinRAR, Zip, 7-zip, and IMG/ISO disk images).
- 3-way text merging. Allows you to see the original file, the remote version and your local version all at the same time to reconcile differences.
- Ability to synchronize folders.
- Can be configured to work with version control systems.
- Works on Windows, Linux and OS X.
- The interface can be a little overwhelming at first.
- During a 3-way merge, BC does not make it obvious which files are which so it gets confusing at times.
May 16, 2018
BeyondCompare is the best!
We use BeyondCompare to compare code files and config files changes while developing software. It is being used across the organization for code comparison needs. It helps to resolve any code-merge conflicts.
- Compare code written by others.
- Resolve any potential conflicts that may arise during software development.
- I do not see any cons.
November 28, 2017
BeyondCompare is Beyond Compare
In our department of web coders, data entry and graphic design, we use it for everything from comparing code to massive spreadsheets. We can compare almost any file types and entire folders of files. We we receive documents from multiple sources we can easily combine them using BeyondCompare saving us countless hours or going line by line. The highlighted areas of the display make is simple to see where the differences are and move directly to them.
- Being able to switch between seeing the entire document to just seeing the differences is very helpful when dealing with large amounts of copy. The ability to set the grammatical elements to compare also saves time and effort.
- Sessions are great and can be sued to save and reuse an important compare you've done and retain the settings and rules you applied.
- Accessing documents from the right-click menu is invaluable, quick launch of the program with your files loaded and ready to compare.
- BC has a large number of file formats you can compare and the ability to change document formats or create your own is a plus.
- Every once in a while there are serious alignment issues in BeyondCompare and it is hard to see exactly where everything lines up but you can choose the "align to" to compare important differences as blocks of added and deleted text rather than changed text.
- It is difficult to select and or move blocks of copy when BC breaks them up into sections that are not the same on both the right and left sides. You usually have to manually select the row or rows you want to move.
- Sometimes when a file is changed outside of Beyond Compare it does not update or recognize it and overwrites or eliminates any changes made. This may be a PC memory issue but I am not sure as it does happen occasionally.