About Compare Text
Compare Text is a free, in-browser tool for comparing two pieces of text and seeing what changed. Paste, drop in a file, or upload from disk. The diff runs locally and the result appears in the same page.
The site has a small set of rules it sticks to: no upload, no signup, no logging of what you paste, no ads. The tool you see is the whole product. There is no premium tier hiding the useful features behind a paywall.
Why we built it
The honest answer: the existing options were frustrating. Most "online diff" sites are heavy with ads, slow to load on a phone, and quietly cagey about what happens to the text you paste. A few are fine. Most are not. We wanted a tool that loads in under a second and runs entirely in the browser.
There are perfectly good local tools already. Microsoft Word has a Compare documents feature, but it is local-only and tied to Word. git diff is excellent for files in a repository, but plenty of comparisons are not in a repository: an email someone sent you, a paragraph a colleague rewrote in a chat, an AWS IAM policy you are about to apply. Other web diff tools cover that gap, but the ad density and tracking made us want a cleaner alternative.
What we use it for ourselves
This tool is not theoretical. We use it every week. A short list of recent uses: reviewing translation revisions for the site itself, comparing two AWS IAM policies before applying the new one, spotting drift in Terraform plan output between two runs, and diffing two versions of a contract clause.
The variety matters. The same diff engine handles a 50-word paragraph and a 5,000-line config file, and the editor stays responsive in both. That is the bar.
What's not here
No analytics on your input. No Google Analytics, no Mixpanel, no Hotjar, no PostHog, no session replay. No ads. No tracking cookies. No signup wall. No pricing page, because there is no paid tier. No "sign in with Google" prompt that quietly creates an account.
If any of that changes, we will say so on the privacy page and bump the date. That page also walks through how to verify the in-browser claim using your browser's DevTools Network tab, in about three minutes.
What's on the site
The current set of tools, all sharing the same diff engine and editor:
Compare Text is the original general-purpose text-diff tool, and the home page. Compare JSON adds JSON-aware formatting, minifying, and validation before the diff. Compare XML and Compare YAML do the same for those two formats. Contract Redline is the same engine framed for legal redlining, where the change list and the inline highlight matter more than the raw character count. The privacy page covers the data side.