What changed between these two?
Paste two documents and the differences appear as you type. For files too big to paste — a database dump, a day of logs — drop them in instead and they are compared on your own machine, never uploaded.
Questions people actually ask
- How big a file can it really handle?
- A couple of gigabytes on each side. The trick is that it never loads the whole file — it streams through it, so what would need 4 GB of memory needs a few hundred megabytes. Pasting is capped much lower, at 512 MB, because that is the longest single piece of text a browser can hold.
- Is my data uploaded?
- No, and it could not be: there is no server here doing the work. The comparison runs in your browser on your own machine, which is the only reason a file you are not allowed to upload can be compared at all.
- Does key order matter?
- No. Two objects with the same keys in a different order are the same object, so they are not reported as a change. Neither is spacing or indentation. Lists are different — order is part of what a list means.
- Why does one inserted row show as everything changing?
- Because by default list items are compared by position, so inserting at the top shifts every one along. If your items have an id, switch "Matching list items" to that field and it will pair them up properly.