Compare PDFs
See what changed between two PDFs
Choose a file
Differences
Only in AOnly in B
Choose two PDFs and the differences will appear here.
Only text is compared. Fonts, colours, images and layout are not. Both files are opened in your browser and never uploaded.
How to use
Compares the text of two PDFs line by line and shows what changed. Lines only in A and lines only in B are coloured differently, and you get a count of additions and deletions. Both files are opened inside your browser and never uploaded.
When to use it
- Finding which clause moved when a revised contract comes back.
- Checking what an editor changed between a first and a second proof.
- Verifying that a document someone called "basically unchanged" really is.
How to use it
- Put the older version in Document A and the newer one in Document B. Up to 50MB and 200 pages each.
- The text of both files is extracted and compared line by line.
- Differences appear in colour: lines only in A were removed, lines only in B were added.
Good to know
- Only the words are compared. Fonts, sizes, colours, images and layout are ignored, so a document that was only restyled reports as identical.
- Scanned PDFs cannot be compared — they hold pictures, not text. The tool names the file that is missing text.
- For very large documents it reports only whether they differ, not line by line, so the browser is never left grinding.
- Nothing is uploaded, so two drafts of a contract can be compared as they are.
Frequently asked questions
The layout clearly changed but it says they are the same.
This tool looks at text only. If the font, margins, spacing or images changed while the words did not, it reports no difference. To compare appearance, convert both with PDF to JPG and look at the images side by side.
I changed one word and the whole line is marked.
Comparison is per line; it does not mark which character inside a line changed. The surrounding lines stay in place, so you can still see exactly which line to look at.
Headers and page numbers make everything look different.
Headers, footers and page numbers are text too, so they are compared as well. If the numbering shifted, those lines show up as differences. Skip them in the result and read the body lines.
Can I compare three files at once?
Two at a time. With three it becomes hard to tell which line belongs to which file. Comparing A-B and then B-C is clearer and more reliable.