Text diff
Two panes, word-level inserts and deletes, no upload.
Highlighted diff
This runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
About Text diff
Compares two texts and highlights word-level inserts and deletes in your browser, without sending either side to a diff website.
The image compare tool on this site already tells you when two pictures disagree. Text is a different job. A changelog, a contract redline, two versions of a config, or the email you are about to send versus the one you sent last week — those need a word-level diff, and the websites that offer one are happy to store both sides 'to generate the link'.
Paste the original on the left and the changed copy on the right. The library behind the highlight is diff-match-patch, the same family of algorithm that powers a lot of editor diffs. Equal spans stay plain, deletions go red and struck through, insertions go green. The side panel counts how many hunks were added or removed so you can see the scale of the edit before you read it.
This is not git and it is not a merge tool. There is no three-way merge, no ignore-whitespace toggle, and no patch file download. If you need to apply the change, copy the right-hand text. If you need to compare two screenshots instead, use the image diff under Compare — that one is pixels, this one is characters.
How to use Text diff
- 1Paste the original text in the first pane.
- 2Paste the revised text in the second pane.
- 3Read the highlighted diff underneath. Green is added, red is removed.
What it won't do
- Two texts only; no directory diff and no binary files.
- No ignore-whitespace or case-insensitive mode.
Common questions
Is this the same as the image diff under Compare?
No. Compare/diff is a pixel heatmap of two pictures. This page diffs text. They share a word because both answer 'what changed', and they share nothing in the implementation. Use the one that matches the thing in your clipboard.
Does the text diff treat a whole line as changed if one word moved?
It works at word granularity after a semantic cleanup pass, so a single swapped word lights up that word rather than the entire paragraph. Huge block moves can still look noisy. That is a property of the algorithm, not a setting I hid.
Can I download a .patch file from the text diff?
No. The output is a visual highlight for humans. Unified diffs belong in git. If you need a patch, run diff(1) or ask your editor; I will not emit a file format I cannot apply here.
Related tools
Why this one doesn't upload your file
There is no server to upload to. This page is a static file, and the work happens in your browser using the same graphics and WebAssembly code that renders every other site you visit. Your file is read from disk into memory, processed, and handed back as a download. Once the page has loaded you can disconnect from the network entirely and it keeps working. The longer explanation