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Compare documents side-by-side

RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers

Published: November 12, 2021

Wouldn’t it be nice to pull up tow versions of the same PDF or Word doc and have a program that compares them? Sure it would. Here are eight apps that do just that.
First up is, obviously, Adobe Acrobat. If you have it the pay version, there is a “compare” option. This highlights the edited text and images and lets you know what has been added, removed or modified. You can then create a clean comparison report that lets you navigate changes going forward.
The only problem with Acrobat, of course, is the price. Here are some cheap-to-free alternatives, some of which are actually plagiarism checkers that you can use to compare documents.
Diffchecker (https://www.diffchecker.com/). (I just downloaded this). Diffchecker has both online and desktop versions, has both a free version and a minimal pay version. Diffchecker compares two different documents in a variety of formats, and then creates a clean report showing the differences.
Copyleaks (https://copyleaks.com/) is primarily used as a plagiarism detector, but has a text comparison function in Word, PDF and other formats. It has also recently introduced multi-language functionality. It has a free 10-day trial, and then it will cost you unless your text is under 2500 words. After that it is $25/month.
DiffPdf is a small Windows utility that compares two PDFs side-by-side. It has a customizable interface and no page limitation, but isn’t cheap. After a 20-day free trial, it costs a one-time fee of $160. There seem to be different versions of this utility, so just Google it.
Draftable (https://draftable.com) is a cloud-based service that compares and cross-checks documents of different formats—like comparing a PDF document to a version of the same document in Word, etc. It highlights differences/changes according to their nature in separate panels beside the panels that hold the two original documents. After a 5-day free trial, the full Windows version is $129/year. The online version is free but limited to 300 pages.
KIWI PDF Comparer (https://kiwipdfcomparer.com/) has a vast range of tools and both free and paid versions.
As well, full-fledged PDF editors like ABBY FineReader have similar comarision functions, but as part of a larger and more expensive package.


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