Softonic

Text Diff Checker

Step 1 / 3
Next: changed text

Spotting the three words that changed between two versions of a contract, the extra comma in a CSV export, or what exactly shifted in a config file, all of it is impossible to do by eye past a few hundred lines. Paste two versions of your text and this diff checker shows additions in green, removals in red, and inline highlights for changes on the same line.

How the diff is produced

  1. 1

    Paste two versions

    Paste the original text first, then the version you want to compare with it.

  2. 2

    The tool runs Myers diff

    The same algorithm git uses, producing the minimal sequence of edits.

  3. 3

    Lines get aligned

    Unchanged lines stay adjacent; inserted/deleted lines keep blank space on the other side.

  4. 4

    Inline highlights

    Within modified lines, only the changed words are shaded so you can see exactly what moved.

Diff colour conventions

Colour Meaning
Red Removed: the line is only in the original text
Green Added: the line is only in the changed text
Darker red or green The words that changed inside an edited line
White Unchanged (context)

Common use cases

  • Contract revisions, see exactly which clauses changed between v3 and v4 of an agreement before signing.
  • Config-file audits, verify what a teammate changed in nginx.conf before pushing to production.
  • Translation QA, align two localisations of the same string to catch missing punctuation.
  • CSV export comparisons, spot which rows differ between last week’s and this week’s data dump.
  • Code review without Git, quick one-off comparison when you don’t want to spin up a repo.

Tips for clean diffs

  • Line endings never count as edits. Windows (CRLF) and Unix or macOS (LF) line breaks compare as the same, so there is nothing to convert first.
  • Strip trailing whitespace in both before comparing; otherwise invisible spaces register as edits.
  • For JSON or YAML, format both with the same indentation first. Reformatting masks real changes.
  • Sort alphabetically if you’re comparing two lists whose order doesn’t matter (like dependencies).

Limits of line-based diffs

Line-based diffs are great for code and config. They’re mediocre for prose, where moving a sentence two paragraphs shows as one deletion and one insertion rather than a move. For manuscript editing, word-level or sentence-level diffs give cleaner results.

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. The texts are compared line by line in any language or script, so Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, accented letters and emoji all work. Inside an edited line the changed words are marked; in Chinese, Japanese and Thai, which do not put spaces between words, the changed characters are marked instead.

Up to 20,000 lines and 500,000 characters per text. Past that, or when two long texts are too different to compare line by line, the tool shows a message instead of freezing the page: compare a smaller part of each text, or use git diff or a desktop diff tool. A comparison with more than 5,000 rows shows the first 5,000 on the page, and the unified diff you copy still holds every change.

Turn on the “Ignore whitespace” option to skip differences that are only indent or trailing-space changes. Useful when reformatters (Prettier, Black) produce noise you don’t care about.

No. The two texts stay in your browser: they are compared on this page and are not sent to our servers or added to the page link. Between the steps they are kept in this browser tab only, until you close it or choose Start over.

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