Awesome Diff Tools

A collaborative list of great tools that show differences between files and folders. Feel free to contribute to this list.

Contents

• Source Code
  • Standard Tools
  • Semantic Diffs
  • Diff Enhancers
• Other Text Formats
• Databases
• PDF
• Binary Data
• Folder Comparison

Source Code

Standard Tools

The most commonly used tools to display changes between two versions of a source code.

• GNU Diffutils - Popular set of tools to compute unified diffs between files, supports two-way and three-way diffs.
• git (diff) - Popular version control system, can compute unified diffs between commits, workings trees, branches, etc.

Semantic Diffs

Programming language aware diffs that provide additional features like hiding syntax-only changes.

• diffsitter - Terminal utility to generate unified diffs, hides style changes, but doesn't detect moved code.
• difftastic - Terminal utility to generate side-by-side diffs, hides style changes and supports many languages, but doesn't detect moved code.
• gumtree - Web/GUI/Text frontend to generate side-by-side diffs, hides style changes and detects moved code.
• SemanticDiff - VS Code extension/GitHub App to generate side-by-side diffs, hides style changes, detects moved code blocks and simple refactorings.
• zograscope - Terminal utility to generate side-by-side diffs, hides style changes, mostly focused on C/C++.

Diff Enhancers

Wrappers that enhance the output of an existing diff tool.

• delta - Pager for (git) diff, adds syntax highlighting, inline and side-by-side view, support for git blame and merge conflicts.
• diff-so-fancy - Pager for (git) diff, changes colors and highlights inline changes, various options to customize output format.
• diffr - Pager for git diff, changes colors and highlights inline changes.
• dunk - Postprocesses the output of git diff to generate side-by-side diffs, supports syntax highlighting and highlights inline changes.
• git-split-diffs - Pager for (git) diff, displays changes like GitHub split diffs (side-by-side diffs) with syntax highlighting.
• icdiff - Standalone application for side-by-side diffs with syntax highlighting.
• riff - Wrapper around (git) diff highlighting which parts of lines that changed.
• ydiff - Pager for git diff, supports unified and side-by-side view, highlights inline changes.

Other Text Formats

Diff utilities for non-code based text formats.

• daff - Library for comparing tables format such as csv files.
• dyff - Pager for git diff (or standalone) for YAML/JSON, enhances display of changes and their location.
• Graphtage - Semantic diff for JSON, JSON5, XML, HTML, YAML, CSV.
• jd - Creates diffs for JSON/YAML files, also supports patching.
• JSON Diff - Online tool to compute a semantic diff for JSON files.
• nbdime - Diffing and merging of Jupyter Notebooks.
• OpenAPI-diff - Utility for comparing two OpenAPI specifications.
• prettier-diff - Wrapper around git diff for JavaScript/JSON, preprocesses the data with a prettifier.
• xcdiff - Terminal utility to find differences between two .xcodeproj project files.

Databases

Diff utilities to compare the schema or content of databases.

• Another PostgreSQL Diff Tool - Compares the schema of PostgreSQL dumps.
• migra - Compares the schema of PostgreSQL databases and generates migrations.

PDF

Diff utilities to compare the content of PDF files.

• diff-pdf - Generates a PDF file with visually highlighted differences based on the input PDFs.
• DiffPDF - Interactive GUI for comparing two PDF files.

Binary Data

Diff utilities to compare binary data.

• diffuse - Compares the content of APKs, AABs, AARs, and JARs.
• multidiff - Utility to diff multiple binary objects or streams of data.
• VBinDiff - Side by side comparison of binary data in hex and ascii format.

Folder Comparison

Diff utilities that can compare the content of whole directories.

• WinMerge - Supports code (with syntax highlighting), text, image and CSV files.
• Meld - Supports text based files, also integrates with version control systems.

Contributing

Contributing is greatly welcomed! Please read the Contribution Guidelines before taking any action.