Text Compare
Paste the original and the changed version to see exactly which lines were added or removed, marked with a plus or a minus. You can ignore spacing and blank lines, or capital letters, and copy the differences as a report. The comparison runs in your browser, so your text is never uploaded.
Updated
How to use Text Compare
- 1Paste the earlier version into Original text.
- 2Paste the newer version into Changed text.
- 3Choose whether spacing and capital letters should count as differences.
- 4Read the added and removed lines, or copy the report.
How it works
The two texts are split into lines and lined up with a longest-common-subsequence comparison — the method version-control tools use. It finds the smallest set of additions and removals that turns one version into the other, so a paragraph inserted near the top does not make every later line look changed.
Ignoring spacing trims each line and drops blank lines before comparing, which stops a re-indented copy from looking entirely different. Ignoring capitals compares lower-cased copies while still showing the original wording.
The comparison is by line. A line with one edited word appears as one line removed and one line added, which keeps a long report easy to scan. Texts of more than 4,000 lines are compared more coarsely, from the point where they start to differ, so the page stays responsive.
Your text is processed by JavaScript running in this page and is never sent over the network. That matters when you are pasting a draft, a client brief, meeting notes or anything else you would rather not hand to a server.
Tips and common mistakes
- Put the older version on the left so that additions read as additions.
- Compare clean copies of each draft rather than a tracked-changes copy, which carries deletion marks of its own.
- Paste the copied report into an email or a ticket: added lines start with + and removed lines with -.