See exactly what changed between two versions of text
Paste an original version into the left box and a modified version into the right box. The comparison highlights added lines in green and removed lines in red, line by line, so you can spot exactly what changed without reading through both versions manually.
Common uses
- Comparing two drafts of an article, contract or essay.
- Spotting changes between two versions of code or configuration.
- Checking what a colleague edited in a shared document.
- Verifying that a "find and replace" only changed what you intended.
How the comparison works
The tool compares text line by line rather than character by character — each line in the original is matched against the corresponding line in the modified text, with unmatched lines marked as additions or removals.
Does it highlight word-level changes within a line?
The current comparison works line by line — if even one character in a line changes, the whole line is marked as removed and added. This makes large changes easy to spot at a glance.
Is there a limit on how much text I can compare?
There's no fixed limit — the comparison runs in your browser, so very large documents depend on your device's available memory.
Does it matter which version goes in the left box?
Yes — the left box is treated as the "original" and the right as the "modified" version, so lines only in the left are shown as removed, and lines only in the right are shown as added.
Can I use this to compare two versions of code?
Yes — the line-by-line comparison works for any plain text, including source code, configuration files, and structured data, not just prose.
Using this in a Central Government office
Comparing two versions of the same document is routine work on a file and unusually consequential — an amendment that changes a threshold or a date, a draft returned with edits that were not flagged, an OM superseded by a later one where only two sub-clauses actually moved.
Where this comes up
- A returned draft where the changes were not tracked, and you need to know what was actually altered before it goes up again.
- An amended rule against its earlier version — identifying precisely which words changed rather than reading both in full.
- Two versions of a statement or return received from different sources, to find the discrepancy.
- Checking OCR output against the original after extracting text from a scan.
What a text comparison can and cannot tell you
It shows you every textual difference, including whitespace and punctuation, which is exactly what you want when the question is whether anything moved. It cannot tell you which differences matter — a reordered clause and a changed monetary limit look the same to the tool. Read the flagged changes, do not just count them.
It also compares text only. Differences in tables, formatting, signatures, page layout or annexures will not appear. For a formal comparison of two signed documents, the text diff is a first pass, not the whole exercise.