Compare Suite vs PDiff

Compare Suite is a Windows file comparison tool for office professionals, developers, and webmasters. It compares Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, web pages, and plain text, and can produce reports with comments attached to differences. Spreadsheet comparisons show absolute or percentage changes in numbers and date differences in days. PDF comparison extracts text, so scanned PDFs need OCR before their text can be compared. The software can compare and synchronize local or remote folders, compare files over FTP, and inspect ZIP or RAR archives without unpacking them. Command-line automation and integrations with third-party document management systems and tools are also listed. The maker says processing happens locally and opened files remain on the PC. The free Light plan covers basic file comparison; paid one-time licenses are $70, paid once for Standard and $140, paid once for Professional. A fully functional 30-day evaluation is available. Windows 10 or Windows 7 is listed as a minimum requirement; Word and Excel comparisons require Microsoft Word and Excel, and Office 365 is not supported.

PDiff is desktop software for comparing PDF documents and identifying differences in layout, formatting and page breaks. It displays PDFs side by side, synchronizes extracted text with the pages and highlights deviations in both views. Reviewers can navigate differences, mark changes accepted, hide less relevant changes and add comments. Filtering and review tools include exclusion areas, page ranges, text-flow and table tools, replacement rules, comments and OK checkmarks.

PDiff can compare PDFs with DOC/DOCX, RTF, TXT, XLS and other common formats, converting non-PDF files through their native applications. Outputs include tabular, annotated and side-by-side PDFs, XML, CSV, PDiff project files and CLI return codes. PDiff Professional adds GUI batch processing and command-line operation. CSci Computer Science GmbH describes uses including quality assurance, regulatory compliance, contract and legal review, pharmaceutical packaging and technical documents. The software supports Unicode, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Hebrew. The maker says processing is local and documents are not transferred over the internet. Business customers can request a free full-functionality trial; pricing for editions is on request.