BeyondCompare is Beyond Compare
November 28, 2017
BeyondCompare is Beyond Compare
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with BeyondCompare
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.
- We can quickly and easily compare files and folders on our local as well as networked drives.
- Some of our web services are on Amazon S3, BeyondCompare can also work in these directories to help us sync them up.
- We do not have any versioning applications employed at this time so BC is a vital tool to help us keep our files and folders up to date.
- kdif and winmerge
These are free and opensource applications. They do not have most of the features that BeyondCompare has. Even though they are free to use, the reasonable cost of BeyondCompare makes using it over these competitors a no brainer.