Alternative to Beyond Compare

[Gary Beene]

I'm an enormous fan of Beyond Compare - have used it for over a decade. I plan to keep on using it.

But, I want to recommend a free alternative to some mostly nontechnical friends and family. WinMerge and Exam Diff Pro come up a lot in my searches, but there also several others. I've not used any of them.

Can someone recommend something suitable for my lower tech friends and family?

[Stuart McLachlan]

WinMerge is pretty good and you can't beat the price

It's simple to use, does a good job of "diff"ing a current source code file with a selected backup and it's dead easy to merge the backup diff lines into the current file.

I haven't used it for directoy comparing and merging, but based on what it does with files, I would expect it to be just as easy to use.

[Gary Beene]

Howdy, Stuart!

Thanks for the reply. WinMerge does seem to be at the top of the free lists - I will give it a try. It's the folder to folder comparison that I am most interested in.

[Mikael T]

Hi Gary,

Maybe you could use the robocopy command, it has a long list of options so you could tailor it to your needs.

It has been around for some time and is very flexible.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/robocopy

Look at Logging options almost at the bottom of the page.


Here is a example from Youtube that compare folders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mt1Mw5ZrBQ

/Mikael