Beyond Compare

I am so happy to have purchased this (version 3) after using the trial quite a while ago. It is fantastic, for comparing so many different things. I use it for backing up, finding duplicates, keeping files that are the latest and dumping the older, seeing the various changes you have made in a document, slight changes of images using tolerance... the list goes on. I honestly am surprised at how many functions this helps my workflow while on the computer - I needed it for doing basic comparisons early on, but have found so many ways to use it in my workflow. It truly is "Beyond Compare" ;)

I am looking forward to trying the new 3-way-compare in version 4, and I will likely be upgrading to 4. Plus Scooter Software has excellent support. Highly recommended!

I seriously have no idea how I could possibly work without this tool. Never would have thought the need to compare files and directories would come up so often. I use it for things unrelated to programming several times every week (plus many times every day for programming work).

Versatile and well done. I use it to compare and manage folder structures having same/similar content - BC4 makes it easy!

This is THE best multi-platform compare and merge tool I've ever used.
I've been using it for years myself, and have found it worth spending the money on.
I even went so far as to get my company to use it. I myself validated it as an official tool for our medical software.
Love

I have used Beyond Compare (BC) for several years but would like to caution users on a problem that I have discovered. Under Windows, BC works great except for a characteristic (feature?) of Windows itself. While Windows treats a Windows shortcut properly providing an option to copy a shorcut or follow it, if you are using BC under Windows to perform Folder Sync on files created under UNIX/Linux, or on a network file system containing UNIX/Linux files, Windows underlying file system follows links transparently to BC instead of treating them as shortcuts. Consequently, instead of simply matching the link file, because of Windows treatment of the link, the pointed to file/folder will by synced. For a link to a folder, all files and, recursively, any folders will be synced and, therefore, copied resulting in duplicate files/folders in the output location. A link to a parent folder will result in recursive copying until BC's folder depth limit is reached. Boo Windows!!

This is a great application. In my 40 year career as a software engineer this was the best money spent for any application. I was able to use this application to save a small company from losing a multi-million dollar contract. The company had their contractors quit and leave them with very old commented code and new source with all comments stripped out. With Beyond Compare, I was able to compare the old and new source easily recover the valid comments. Because it was easy to see source code added since the older revisions, I was also able to add back the contractually required comments for the new code.

Best for 5 years, most complete software to compare

• Very good with Folder comparing/sychronize.

• There is no RTL support for text compare

As a note - there is a free version called Beyond Compare Lite. Don't know limitations though, but there is a sure no 3-way merge. And probably no directory comparison. It comes with some IDE. Particularly with free RAD Studio Starter Edition.

Extremely good.
It supports Japanese, French and German as well as English. And a lot of platform (I'm happy to use it on Windows XP).
User Interface is sophisticated and easy to use.
Comparison results are easily comprehend.
I change to this from WinMerge which I have used for a long time,

As far as I can tell, the Mac version of BeyondCompare doesn't support comparing a file or folder against a version control system. If this is a must-have feature for you, as it is for me, you'll want to look elsewhere.

very few updates and with just bug fixes - don't expect new things...

I've used Beyond Compare extensively for years (since previous versions). I am always pleasantly surprised how well it works. For example its support for comparing the contents of Zip and 7zip files is great! I'll often use it instead of a dedicated compression tool to update the contents of a compressed folder.

It does a great job at the basic comparison and merging operations, but I love the extra features like the ability to compare to a FTP server. This is great when I am migrating a web app between servers or updating it from a local staging instance.

I've used other tools prior to Beyond Compare, and occasionally on the recommendation of someone else, but always find Beyond Compare to be the best tool for the job.

I was going through major withdrawal after moving to Mac and not having Beyond Compare anymore. After a suggestion from Scooter Software support I installed Beyond Compare under Wine on my Mac and was surprised how well it worked. It handled all the paths just fine and worked exactly like I expected it to.

I followed David Baumgold's tutorial on installing Wine with MacPorts. It took a little while (mostly waiting for the download and build processes, which the tutorial said would take a while) and worked great. Way better than the alternatives, even the ones that are designed for Mac. I found it worked better on Mac than either Araxis Merge or DiffMerge, and they have Mac specific versions (Araxis isn't as flexible and actually gave me a lot of errors for basic operations, while DiffMerge just doesn't come close in the feature department.)

Of course if you are on Windows then Beyond Compare is the first choice. I haven't used it on Linux, but expect it works well there too.