A comparison tool that's truly beyond compare
June 01, 2019

A comparison tool that's truly beyond compare

Richard Davies | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with BeyondCompare

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.
  • It's made it quick and easy to compare and synchronize directories when restoring a backup or copying code from one environment to another one.
  • There are times when it would be a painstaking task to manually compare or sync two different directories, but BeyondCompare made it a trivial task.
It's much easier to use than command-line tools like diff.
It's easy to install and so easy to use. It's very intuitive, yet makes it easy to understand and use the most advanced features.
In general, it's very easy to use. The one feature that I've had trouble using is the 3-way merge/compare ability.
It's great for:
  • Comparing code between a development environment and a QA or production environment.
  • Comparing a directory with a copy or another version of that same directory (such as a restored backup).
  • Comparing two different versions of a code file.
  • Syncing changes between two files or directories.
It's not great for:
  • Situations where one or more sources don't exist on a local file system (such as comparing different versions of a file in a source code repository).
  • When you want to be able to do comparisons within another program, such as a programming IDE (i.e. Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc).