NextDiff
File, text, and folder comparison for Windows
License: Freemium. Freemium licensing: the software is available to download and use for personal purposes. A paid license is available for commercial use and unlocks the licensed experience.
NextDiff is a free Windows comparison tool designed to help you quickly find differences between two files, text documents, source code files, or folders.
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Version: 2.4 (October 21, 2026)
Changes in v2.4: New color preferences.
What NextDiff does
- Compare files, text, and folders side by side
- Side-by-side text file comparison
- Line-by-line and in-line changed text highlighting
- Compare source code, logs, scripts, configuration files, and documents
- Compare folders and subfolders
- Detect files that exist only on one side
- Mark newer files during folder comparison
- Copy differences from left to right or right to left
- Edit text directly inside the comparison view
- Undo recent merge or edit actions
- Navigate to first, previous, next, and last difference
- Ignore case, whitespace, leading/trailing spaces, and blank lines
- Supports ANSI, ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-8 BOM, and UTF-16 text files
- Free for personal use
Compare Text Files Side by Side
NextDiff displays two files in a clear two-column comparison view, making it easy to identify added, removed, changed, and identical lines. Differences are highlighted with customizable colors, and changed text inside a line is marked separately so you can quickly spot the exact modified words or characters.
- Clear two-column file comparison
- Highlighted line changes and in-line text differences
Compare Complex Documents with Apache Tika
For supported complex document formats, NextDiff can use Apache Tika text extraction to compare readable content from files such as PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, and other document types. This helps you compare the extracted text from documents that are not simple plain-text files.
- Readable extracted text from supported document types
- Useful for comparing complex document content
Smart Difference Navigation
NextDiff includes convenient navigation controls that let you move directly through the differences in the compared files. The comparison status also shows useful summary information, including the number of lines in each file, how many lines are equal, the percentage of matching lines, and the number of different lines.
- First, previous, next, and last difference navigation
- Status summary with equal and different line counts
Edit and Merge Changes
NextDiff is more than a passive file viewer. You can edit text directly inside the comparison grid, and use merge actions to copy a difference from left to right or from right to left. You can copy individual difference blocks or replace differences on one side with the content from the other side, and undo recent changes when needed.
- Edit directly inside the comparison grid
- Copy differences left-to-right or right-to-left
Folder Comparison
NextDiff can compare two folders, including files inside subfolders. Folder comparison helps you see which files exist only on the left side, which files exist only on the right side, and which files appear different. When files are different, NextDiff can also mark the newer file to make review easier.
- See same, different, newer, left-only, and right-only items
- Works with folders and subfolders
Flexible Comparison Options
NextDiff includes several comparison settings to help you focus on meaningful differences. You can ignore case differences, ignore all whitespace, ignore changes in whitespace amount, ignore leading or trailing whitespace, and ignore blank lines. Grid colors, fonts, and line numbers can also be adjusted.
- Ignore case and whitespace differences
- Adjust colors, fonts, and line number visibility
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