Softonic

List Compare Tool

Step 1 / 3

Paste two lists side by side and the tool returns three buckets: the intersection, the items exclusive to list A and the items exclusive to list B. Useful for reconciling email exports, SKU spreadsheets, keyword lists, CSV rows or any collection where you need to answer “what’s in one and not the other?” without opening a pivot table.

How to compare two lists

  1. 1

    Paste list A

    Drop your first list in the left box, one entry per line.

  2. 2

    Paste list B

    Drop the second list in the right box, same one-per-line format.

  3. 3

    Pick options

    Toggle case-insensitive match and trim whitespace to normalize entries before comparison.

  4. 4

    Read the three columns

    In both lists, only in A, only in B: each block shows a count and a copy button.

What the three buckets mean

  • In both lists (intersection): entries that appear in A and in B. Think matched emails in two mailing lists, SKUs present in two inventory dumps, or keywords both your site and a competitor rank for.
  • Only in A (A minus B): entries unique to the first list. Useful for finding unsubscribes, missing rows, or keyword gaps.
  • Only in B (B minus A): the mirror case, entries B has that A doesn’t.

Normalization matters

Two entries that look identical can still miss each other if one has a trailing space or different casing. The two options fix the most common mismatches:

Option What it does
Trim whitespace Strips leading and trailing spaces and tabs per line
Case-insensitive Alice@example.com and alice@example.com count as equal

Common uses

  • Reconciling CRM exports before an import to spot duplicates or gone-missing contacts.
  • Finding the delta between two keyword research files when moving a site.
  • Checking which dependencies changed between two package-lock listings.
  • Comparing student rosters across classes or semesters.

Gotchas

Duplicates inside the same list are deduped before comparison, if A has apple three times, it still counts as one entry. If you need multi-set semantics (count how many times each appears), use a text diff instead.

Frequently Asked Questions

No. The tool treats each list as a set, so moving lines around in A or B doesn’t change the result. Only the contents matter.

Comparison runs in the browser so performance depends on your machine, but lists of tens of thousands of lines work comfortably. Extremely large files are better handled with comm or a spreadsheet.

Paste one column per list, cut the column out of your CSV first. The tool does plain line-by-line comparison and does not parse CSV structure.

No. Each output bucket is deduplicated. If you need to preserve multiplicity, you need a different tool.

No. The comparison is entirely client-side, the lists you paste are never transmitted or stored.

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Tool available in other languages