Item: Beyond Compare
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Beyond Compare

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Return on Investment

The time savings of looking through two nearly identical files can be great, especially during an incident where the time to resolution is critical.

Alternatives Considered

Notepad++

Notepad++ is the only other product I have seen that has something similar to what Beyond Compare specializes. While Notepad++ can perform the same type of function, it is not nearly as robust or as easy to navigate as beyond compare. It is well worth the investment for the time savings it allows.

Support Rating

I have never needed support for this product other than learning how to use a new feature I was not familiar with. User forums and user groups that have used this product for their own purposes have always sufficed for anything that I needed help using with the product. Some of the features could be a little better outlined, but overall very easy to use.

Key Insights

Do you think Beyond Compare delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Beyond Compare's feature set?

Yes

Did Beyond Compare live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Beyond Compare go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Beyond Compare again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Splunk Cloud, SolarWinds ipMonitor, Slack

Likelihood to Recommend

File compare between configurations of differing systems is where this program shines and can reduce what would normally take many minutes or hours to show exactly where the differences are located. It is especially nice if you don't centrally manage servers to identify registry settings remotely on two servers and not have to expand all the keys manually but go right to where the problem is located.

Comments

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Beyond Compare Review