AnyFormat

00 Utility

Diff Checker

Line, word or character level. Contracts and configs stay local.

01Original
02Changed
03Options 4
  • No upload The conversion runs in this tab. Your file never travels — not to us, and not to the advertising.
  • No sign-up, no email, no daily cap There is no account system to sign up to.
  • No size limit we invented Only your device's memory — about ~2 GB on a desktop browser, ~400 MB on a phone.
  • Turn your Wi-Fi off and convert anyway The conversion needs nothing but this page. Ads will not load without a connection; your file will still convert. That is the whole claim, and it takes five seconds to check.

Paste two versions of anything and see what changed. Both panes accept a dropped file. The documents people most need to diff — a contract, a config with credentials in it, a customer export — are precisely the ones that should not be uploaded to compare.

Choosing the granularity

Line is right for code, config files and data. It is how git diff works and it is fast on large inputs.

Word is right for prose. A reworded sentence shows as one line changed at line granularity, which tells you nothing; word granularity highlights the actual edit.

Character is for the cases where a single character is the difference — a changed digit in an identifier, a swapped operator, a homoglyph. It is the slowest and the noisiest, so reach for it last.

Line endings and invisible differences

Trailing whitespace is ignored by default, because it is almost never the difference you care about and a file that has been through a Windows editor is full of it. CRLF and LF are normalised before comparing, so a file edited on Windows and one edited on macOS compare equal when their content is the same.

If you specifically need to find whitespace differences — you are debugging a YAML file, or a checksum mismatch — turn off "Ignore trailing whitespace" and switch to character granularity.

Diffing JSON usefully

Two JSON documents that are semantically identical often diff badly because the key order differs. Run both through the JSON formatter first with Sort keys and the same indentation, then diff the results. What is left is the real difference.

Other names for this

Also searched as “text compare”, “compare two files”, “text difference checker”.

Questions

Can I compare two files rather than pasting?
Yes. Each pane accepts a dropped file, and the file never leaves your machine.
The two texts look identical but it shows differences.
Usually invisible characters — a non-breaking space, a zero-width space, or a different Unicode dash. Switch to character granularity to find them.
How large can the inputs be?
Line granularity handles files of several megabytes comfortably. Character granularity is quadratic in the worst case and gets slow well before that.
Does my text leave the browser?
No. Everything runs as JavaScript in this tab — there is no server involved and no request is made. Open the Network panel and watch, or turn your Wi-Fi off and keep using the tool.