Paste your old resume on the left, the new draft on the right, and see every line that changed. Same for cover letters. Runs in your browser, nothing uploaded, no signup.
A free, in-browser tool for diffing two versions of a resume, CV, or cover letter. Paste the old version on the left, the new version on the right, and the changes light up character by character. The text never leaves your machine, which matters because resumes contain phone numbers, home addresses, employer names, and the kind of detail you don't want sitting in some random vendor's logs.
Job hunting is stressful. By the time you've sent your resume to ten roles, you have V1, V2, V3-tailored-for-Stripe, V3-tailored-for-Datadog, the version after your career coach edited it, and the cover letter you swore you saved but can't find. This tool exists for that mess. It does one thing: it shows you what changed between two pieces of text.
Underneath, it uses the same diff engine as our general text compare page. We just framed it for resumes. If you're comparing legal paperwork instead, see contract redline. If you keep your master resume in Markdown and export to PDF, our compare-markdown tool is closer to what you want.
The diff runs character-by-character on top of Google's diff-match-patch library (Apache 2.0), then a semantic cleanup pass groups changes into readable chunks. Insertions on the right pane render in green; deletions on the left pane render in red. The two panes scroll-lock together, so when you spot a change halfway down one side, the other side jumps to the same place.
Why character-level instead of paragraph-level? Because a single word swap on a resume can be the whole point of an edit. "Led" becoming "spearheaded" is one verb that signals scope. Adding "$2M revenue impact" to a bullet is the difference between a generic line and a quantified one. A paragraph diff would tell you the bullet changed; a character diff shows you exactly which words moved.
Honest framing: this tool only shows the text difference. It does not score your resume, suggest stronger verbs, check for keywords against a job description, or tell you whether an Applicant Tracking System will like it. It is a diff viewer. If you want grading, that's a different category of product. What this is good for is the practical question: "what did I actually change between these two versions?"
Two text panes, one diff. No login, no upload, no special file format.
Open the previous version in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Pages, or whatever editor you use, select all (Ctrl+A on Windows, Cmd+A on Mac), copy, and paste into the left pane. Pasting strips the formatting, which is fine. The bullets, fonts, and spacing all flatten to plain text. That is exactly what an Applicant Tracking System sees too, so the diff matches what a recruiter parser sees.
Do the same with the newer version. If your only copy is a PDF you exported from LinkedIn or Word, open the PDF in any reader (Adobe Acrobat, Preview on Mac, Edge or Chrome), select-all, copy, and paste. Some columnar layouts collapse oddly when copied from PDF; that is unavoidable. The body text comes through cleanly enough to spot real changes.
Deletions show as red strikethroughs on the left; insertions show as green on the right. Read the change set top to bottom. The header counts tell you how many distinct edits were detected. Pay attention to verbs (did a passive phrase become active?), numbers (did you add or change a metric?), and the skills line at the bottom (did a tool get added or dropped?).
You paid a coach or asked a senior colleague to mark up your resume. They send it back with their edits applied. Pasting your original next to their version shows you exactly what they changed: which verbs they swapped, which bullets they tightened, which metrics they pulled forward. Reading the diff is faster than re-reading the whole thing, and it teaches you their editing pattern for next time.
You keep one master resume with everything you've ever done. For each application you cut it down to a focused one-pager and add keywords from the job posting. Three months later you cannot remember what you cut for the Stripe application versus the Datadog one. Diff your master against the tailored variant to see the cut set, the keyword adds, and the reordered bullets, all in a single pass.
You drafted a cover letter, edited it three times, hit send, then closed the window. A week later the recruiter calls and references something you wrote. Did you say you have AWS certification, or did you cut that line before sending? Paste your draft on one side, the sent version on the other (from your sent email or the application portal), and the diff tells you what you committed to.
Recruiter and hiring-manager workflow. A candidate sends an updated resume after the first interview to reflect feedback or a new role they just left. Paste the original next to the updated version to confirm what actually changed before you push the new version to the hiring committee. Useful for in-house recruiters at companies using Greenhouse, Lever, or Workday, where resume revisions can stack up.
You saved a job posting in March, applied in April, and never heard back. The same role is still open in May, but the JD now lists Kubernetes where it used to say Docker. Paste both versions to see what shifted. A widening JD often means the team is struggling to fill the role, which changes how you frame your follow-up.
Pull your resume from a year ago out of the email you sent it from, paste it on the left, paste the current version on the right. The diff is a tidy summary of what you actually did at work this year. New tools you learned, the project you stopped mentioning, the title bump. It is also a useful exercise before performance review season, because you have a record of what you considered worth listing.
The formatting drift that trips up resume comparison most often, with what to do about each. Drawn from real pasting between Microsoft Word, Google Docs, LinkedIn, and PDF exports.
| Topic | What this tool does |
|---|---|
| Line endings (Word vs Google Docs vs LinkedIn export) | Word on Windows uses CRLF (\r\n); Google Docs and LinkedIn typically use LF (\n). The diff treats CRLF and LF as different, so a copy from one source against a copy from another can flag every single line as changed even when the words match. Paste both, then if the whole document is highlighted, suspect line endings before suspecting yourself. |
| Bullet character drift (• vs - vs *) | Microsoft Word loves the Unicode bullet U+2022 (•). Markdown editors use ASCII hyphen (-). Some templates use asterisk (*). Switching tools between resume versions silently swaps your bullet character, and every bullet line shows as changed even though the wording is identical. Find-and-replace one character to the other before diffing if the noise is bad. |
| Trailing whitespace from copy-paste | Pasting from a styled document often appends a single trailing space to every line, which the diff treats as a real difference between an end-of-line and a space-then-end-of-line. Open both panes, select-all, and check whether one side has consistent trailing spaces. A find-and-replace of " \n" to "\n" cleans it up. |
| Smart quotes from Word ("curly" vs straight) | Microsoft Word and Pages auto-correct straight quotes (") to typographic curly quotes (“ ”) and apostrophes ('’). LinkedIn and most plain-text exports use straight quotes. The diff sees U+201C and U+0022 as different characters. If your old version came from Word and the new one from LinkedIn, every quoted phrase will flag as changed. Find-and-replace fixes it. |
| Unicode characters from Word symbols | Em dash (—), en dash (–), ellipsis (…), and the non-breaking space ( ) all sneak in from Word auto-correct. They look identical to their ASCII counterparts but the diff treats them as different. The non-breaking space is the worst offender because it is invisible. If a line looks identical but flags as changed, copy a few characters from each side into a hex viewer. |
| Multiple spaces between words | Pasting from a justified-text resume sometimes brings double or triple spaces along, especially after periods. The diff flags those as different. A find-and-replace of two spaces to one space across both panes normalises it before you start reading the changes. |
| Paste-from-PDF artefacts (column layout collapsed) | Two-column resume layouts copied out of a PDF often collapse so that the right column appends to the bottom of the left column rather than interleaving. The body text is correct but the order is wrong. The diff cannot tell the two columns apart from the original linear layout, so it will highlight wholesale changes. Either re-export the PDF as single-column, or paste the source document instead. |
| Encoding (UTF-8 vs Latin-1) | Most resume tooling outputs UTF-8 these days, which the diff handles natively. Older tooling or legacy databases sometimes return Latin-1, in which case accented characters in names (García, André) come through as garbled bytes. If names look broken on one side only, the source file is in the wrong encoding. |
No. This tool only shows the text difference between two versions you paste in. It does not grade your resume, score it against a job description, suggest stronger action verbs, or tell you whether an Applicant Tracking System will rank it well. Tools that do that are a different product category and they do useful work, but this is not one of them. The job here is to answer one question quickly: what changed between version A and version B? Bring your own judgement on whether the changes are good.
No. It treats both panes as plain text. There is no concept of an "Experience" section, a bullet list, or a contact header. That is intentional. Resumes come in too many shapes for any structural parser to handle reliably, and the moment one breaks the parse the diff becomes useless. A plain-text diff always works. The trade-off is that a reordered bullet looks like a delete plus an insert rather than a move, which is something to be aware of when reading the output.
Paste the text. Open each PDF in Adobe Acrobat, Preview on macOS, or any browser that can display PDFs (Edge, Chrome, Firefox), select all (Ctrl+A), copy, and paste into the appropriate pane. Most modern PDFs have selectable text, which makes this work. PDFs that are scanned images of paper resumes do not, and you would need OCR first. Two-column resume layouts sometimes collapse oddly when copied, with the second column appended to the first; that is a PDF reader quirk, not a diff issue.
No. The diff runs entirely in your browser. The text you paste never leaves your machine, never hits our servers, and is not stored anywhere when you close the tab. Resumes contain personally identifiable information (full name, phone, address, employer history), so this matters more than it does for, say, comparing two paragraphs of marketing copy. You can verify by opening your browser's DevTools, switching to the Network tab, and watching as you paste both versions. There are no outbound requests when the diff runs.
Indirectly. The tool does not analyse keywords against a job description. What you can do is paste the job description on one side and your resume on the other, then read the diff to see which words appear in one but not the other. That is a rough proxy for keyword gaps, not a real ATS analysis. Real Applicant Tracking Systems like Greenhouse, Lever, and Workday rank candidates using signals that go well beyond raw keyword overlap, including structured fields you fill in during the application itself.
A standard one or two-page resume is well under any practical limit. The character-level diff stays fast up to roughly 100 KB of text per pane, which is far longer than any normal CV. Academic CVs with extensive publication lists, or full curriculum vitae from senior researchers, can run longer; if either pane exceeds that range you may notice the highlight pass takes a second or two. Cover letters are typically a few hundred words and run instantly.
Your resume never leaves your browser. The diff, the highlighting, and the rendering all run on your machine. We do not upload the text, log it, or pass it to any third-party service. This matters more for resumes than for most content because resumes contain personally identifiable information: full name, phone number, home address, current employer, and a complete employment history. You can verify our claim directly. Open your browser's DevTools, switch to the Network tab, paste both versions, and watch. There are zero outbound requests when you run the comparison.