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).

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!!

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.

I agree with edrandall, however I gave it more then a 60 second test. I had two non-system 750GB drives with similar contents (both around 400GB used of various contents: ISO, videos, zips, etc). I ran the CRC compare of the two drives and left it overnight. Next morning when I came to work I found my C:\ drive (system) filled up with BC3* tmp files totaling 150GB and system almost unusable, not to mention Beyond Compare did finish with bunch of "stream read/write errors".

After above happened, I looked in the application options to change temporary folder location or any settings but those simply did not exist.

I'm continuing to search for other folder comparison tools with small footprint similarly good UI and ability to tweak temp folder use so that it doesn't negatively impact system performance.

It requires some learning/tweaking but once you get the hang of it, comparing files and folders is not a hassle any more.

It is one of the best file and folder comparison tool. Excellent feature, user friendly, advance feature that allow to control white-space, line-ending, time stamp, file size comparison, file pattern include/exclude, binary comparison, rule based comparison. it can ignore changes in code comments for source code files. provides 3-way comparison is awesome. It can compare images and provide visually diff. Session and workspace feature is excellent.