Compare PDFs
See what changed between two versions of a PDF: every added, removed and changed line, with the changed words marked. No upload, no signup, no watermark.
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Find what changed between two versions
A contract comes back “with a few small edits”, a policy is updated, a report goes through another draft. Reading both versions side by side to spot the differences is slow and easy to get wrong. This tool reads the text of both PDFs and lists exactly what was added, removed or changed, so you can check each change instead of rereading everything.
How to compare
- Choose the two PDFs, up to 100 MB each: the older version first, then the newer one. You can reorder them with the arrows.
- Press Compare.
- Read the summary under the result, then download the report and open it in your browser.
Reading the report
The report is a single web page that opens in any browser, offline. It starts with a count of changed, added and removed lines. Below, each difference is shown in two columns, the first file on the left and the second on the right, with the page numbers it sits on. Removed words are struck through in red, added words are highlighted in green, and a couple of unchanged lines around each change give the context. Long unchanged stretches are folded into a single line.
What counts as a change
- Changed: a line that still mostly matches its old version, such as a new figure or a reworded phrase. The differing words are marked.
- Added or removed: lines found in only one of the two files.
- Ignored: extra spaces and blank lines, which differ between exports without meaning anything.
Tips for a clean comparison
- Compare like with like: two exports from the same app give the cleanest result. A version printed to PDF from a browser and another exported from Word may break lines differently.
- Check the summary first: a handful of changes is easy to review; hundreds usually mean the two files were laid out differently, not rewritten.
- Look at numbers closely: a changed date, amount or deadline shows as one marked word in a changed line, easy to miss when skimming.
Good to know
- Text only: pictures, colors, fonts and layout aren’t compared.
- Scans hold pictures of text, not text, so there’s nothing to compare; the tool says so.
- Very different files: if almost everything changed, the report lists every line of both as removed and added rather than pairing them up.
- For an editable copy of either version, use PDF to Word or PDF to Text.