Compare PDF
See what changed between two files.
Drop your PDFs hereor click to browsePDF only, up to 250 MB each.
Files stay in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
What this tool does
Compares the text of two documents and shows what changed between them. Both files are read in your browser, page by page, and the differences are lined up page against page: added lines are marked in green, removed lines are struck through. Only text is compared — layout, images and formatting are left out — so this suits contract drafts and revised petitions rather than redesigns.
How to use it
- Drop two PDFs. The first in the list counts as the original and the second as the new version, so move them if the order is wrong.
- Run the comparison and read the summary line: lines added, lines removed, pages changed.
- Work through the changed pages; switch on Show unchanged pages when you want to see everything.
- Download the report as a text file if you need a copy to keep or send on.
Common questions
- What exactly gets compared?
- The text, line by line, with each page held against the page of the same number. A moved logo, a different typeface or a wider margin does not show up as a difference.
- One file has an extra page in the middle and now everything after it is marked as changed.
- Pages are matched by their number, so an inserted or deleted page shifts every page after it out of line. Comparing the sections before and after the insertion separately gives a readable result.
- It reports no differences, but the documents are scans.
- A scanned page is an image and carries no text to read, so there is nothing to compare and the result comes out empty. Run OCR PDF on both files first, then compare the versions that have a text layer.