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Developer ToolsToolsGitVersion controlFile Merge

What is the best tool for resolving conflicts when merging file changes?

16

Options
Considered

19

User
Recs.

Nov 1, 2023

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

16 Options Considered

Best tool for resolving conflicts when merging file changes	Price	Platforms	License
-- Meld	FREE	Linux; Windows; Mac (unofficial)	Free and Open Source
-- KDiff3	FREE	Windows, Linux, Mac	-
-- Helix Visual Merge Tool (P4Merge)	FREE	Windows; Mac; Linux	Free
-- WinMerge	Free	Windows	Free and Open Source
-- DiffMerge	FREE	-	-

Meld

Top Pro

Supports editing files directly

In addition to comparing two files it also allows you to edit them right in place. What's more, the diffs are updated automatically. See More

Top Con

Slow on large files

While larger files are supported, they can take a long time to load. (20,000 lines+) See More

Specs

Platforms:Linux; Windows; Mac (unofficial)

License:Free and Open Source

Top Pro

Easy to use and visually appealing

Stragihtforward and you don't need to read tutorials to use it. Just click and select and you instantly see how the difference and merges are connected to eachother. 3 sub- windows, instead of 4, which reduces the mess during merge and let you see more of the surrounding files rather than just 5 lines. See More

Top Con

No option to compare individual rows horizontally

Unlike other options, like Beyond Compare, Meld has no option to compare individual rows horizontally. See More

Top Pro

Three way comparisons

You can compare up to three different files for differences. Plus you can edit files from the comparison view and the diff will automatically update. See More

Top Con

Not having a base value to reference can make merging less certain

Top Pro

Comparing two or more different folders is supported

Meld allows users to compare two or three different folders for differences. But if a user wants to 'zoom in' and compare files contained in these folders, Meld gives you the ability to do so and launch file comparisons between files contained in different folders or in the same folder. See More

Top Con

Missing contextual command line options

Not all contextual elements are exposed to the cli. Specifically the ability to follow our not follow symlinks, but also things like file system metadata parsing. These options and others can only be toggled via the gui's settings window. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Meld is freely available on Linux, Windows and OSX (through MacPorts, Fink or Brew). It's also open source and distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). See More

Top Con

No official OSX Support

Some attempts have been made to port, but nothing easy or fully working. See More

Top Pro

Internationalization

Through the GNOME Translation project and the translators that have worked for it, Meld is available in multiple languages. You can check if your language is supported in the translation statistics page. If you can't find your language or if your language translation is unfinished and you want to help, you can do so by joining the GNOME Translation Project. See More

Top Con

No Explorer context menu integration

In Windows, there is no option to right-click and compare files easily. See More

Top Pro

Supports some simple version control actions

Meld supports the major version control systems (Git, Mercurial, Subversion and Bazaar). You can launch file comparisons between different versions to see what parts changed before commiting. Simple version control actions are also supported and possible. For example: commit/update/add/remove/delete files. See More

Top Con

Very slow mac OS port

Top Pro

Simple GUI

Top Con

Program opens slow on Windows

Update: This issue should be fixed on Meld-3.18.1-win32.msi released on 27 May 2018. See http://meldmerge.org/news.html See More

Top Pro

Fast on Linux

Relatively fast on Linux. See More

KDiff3

Top Pro

Supports 3 way merges

For modern version control systems, 3way merge support is a basic requirement, but many other open source diff viewers do not adequately handle 3way merges. See More

Top Con

Confusing GUI

4 sub-windows (when you really only need 3), a lot of different colors and even more confusing result-window. No links what has changed between versions and and the result. It clearly shows it's dated or rather outdated. Great if you ever need to do a command line merge, otherwise it sucks. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Top Pro

Supports editing files directly

In addition to comparing two files it also allows you to edit the merge result right in place. See More

Top Con

Slow for large files

Top Pro

Supports manual code aligning

With selecting code in one window and hitting Ctrl+Y, then selecting some other code in second window and also hitting Ctrl+Y you can manually align the code. See More

Top Con

Problems when files have different number of lines

For example, if you add 3 lines: A, B and C locally but on the other change there are only A and C, Kdiff3 will work out that A was added, then it says that B conflicts with C but adds C again anyway. See More

Top Pro

Diff by character not by lines

On comparing two files, difference is shown by characters; not by lines. See More

Top Pro

Can compare directories

It is able to compare whole directory trees. See More

Top Pro

Context menu shortcut

You can right-click a folder/file and the options: Save <file> for later Compare with will be available, making launching KDiff3 really convenient. See More

Top Pro

Preprocessing before calculating differences

There are options that may pre-process compared files before Kdiff3 actually do a comparison - to ignore for example automatically generated dates and/or revision numbers added by commit hooks. See More

Top Pro

The UI is customizable

Allow customizing colors regardless of user/system theme. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

KDiff3 is completely free to download and use. It's also open source released under the GPL. See More

Helix Visual Merge Tool (P4Merge)

Specs

Platforms:Windows; Mac; Linux

WinMerge

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Top Pro

Good detection of moved lines

Detects when a block of lines has been moved in the file and shows the relation. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows

License:Free and Open Source

Top Pro

Good navigation

Keyboard shortcuts (and toolbar buttons) to navigate to next (previous) difference, side panel shows a map of the files with changed lines and allows to jump to a given place. See More

Top Pro

Filters

Can filter out files for folder comparison, lines for file comparisons, with regular expressions. Options also allow to ignore whitespace differences, white lines, case change, line-ending changes, etc. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight, quick startup

Binary is less than 3 MB, so it starts quickly See More

Top Pro

Good shell integration

Select two files and compare them. Alternatively, select one file, navigate elsewhere, select the other file to compare. Also supports drag'n'drop of files / folders from Explorer. History of past comparisons. See More

Top Pro

Free & Open source

Winmerge is a free and open source tool. See More

Top Pro

In line comparison

Can show differences within a line. See More

Top Pro

Compare folders and files

Can show what files has been changed in a folder, allows comparing files in tabs. See More

Top Pro

File edition

You can quickly copy changed lines (or files in folder comparison) in both directions with keyboard shortcuts. You can edit the files as well, with syntax highlighting of some languages. See More

DiffMerge

Beyond Compare

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Top Pro

Resolves many git merge conflicts without requiring any user action

Beyond Compare does a better job at resolving merge conflicts than git itself - you can review everything. In daily practice, it turns out many git conflicts are super easy to resolve (or already resolved on load) by Beyond Compare, particularly when you're working on repositories where some people tend to rebase rather than merge. This saves you a lot of time when you want to sync with such rebased branches/mainline. It is also very helpful that conflicting diffs (next to diffs from baseline) are marked up as such and diffs can be toggled as 'conflicts' (red exclamation mark in left-side visual diff-zones overview-strip in BC: on/off). See More

Top Con

Paid proprietary software

Beyond Compare is reasonably priced but not free for commercial use. It offers different license options depending on the number of members in a team and depending on the software version. See More

David Schwartz's Experience

I tried BeyondCompare once years ago and now I can’t use anything else. I haven’t found a single feature in another tool that it doesn’t have. It’s 3-way merge is light years ahead of every free tool I’ve tried and often resolves all conflicts without needing any help. The diff tool has a simple switch to show/hide “minor” changes like indentation or comments, which saves so much time. And it really shines when you want to diff or sync entire folders. The only con is that it isn’t free, but even then I’d argue it’s underpriced— it’s so much better than its free competition that I don’t think it’s fair to compare them. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows; Mac; Linux

License:Proprietary

Top Pro

Has rules for adding ignore-masks and replacement rules

So parts you don't want to see in your comparision can be hidden with ignore masks. Parts that are okay to be changed can be set with change-lists so beyond compare knows what's the replacement value and skips displaying this. So you can focus on the for you important changes. For example with the ignore mask I was able to compare two logs with different timestamps but nearly same content. (beginning with timestams the first x characters adding to ignore) See More

Top Pro

Supports comparing folders

Beyond Compare can be used to compare both files and folders. File-Filters possible. See More

Top Pro

Supports 3 way merge

Good overview. Clear display of changed lines (background color) and changed characters (foreground color). See More

Top Pro

Supports editing files directly

Often when you resolve conflicting merges, you'll find that you want/need to fiddle with the result a bit, do some hand tweaking in there. Beyond Compare is also a full-text editor, allowing you to apply such 'post fact' manual edits within the diff tool, resulting in a fast and powerful merge conflict resolution process. See More

Top Pro

Easy visible color coding of whitespace-only vs. real/important edits for faster change inspection and decision making

This is very useful in both 'git merge' activity and regular 'git commit' diff inspection (the combo of Beyond Compare and TortoiseGit results in a superb UX) to quickly inspect and decide on merge conflicts and applied changes/edits. 'Whitespace' isn't set in stone: you can configure Beyond Compare so that it can recognize various things as 'unimportant whitespace-like changes', e.g. leading spaces, trailing spaces, but also comments, etc. See More

Top Pro

Opens popular archive formats as directories

Compare archive to directory or to another archive, update ZIP archives by copying files from other side or by editing them directly in compare view. See More

Top Pro

Has file conversion/preprocessing feature

You can run a script or executable based on file extension before showing a file. Great for beautifying XML, extracting text from MS Office documents, running dis-asm etc. See More

Top Pro

Works well with large files

Top Pro

Synchronize folders

Can be used to synchronize folders. Including wildcards. See More

Top Pro

Specialized viewers for different file types

Beyond Compare doesn't simply do text comparisons, but has specialized viewers for Excel files, CSV (or other delimited) files, tables, registry entries, etc. See More

Top Pro

Fast keyboard shortcuts to jump between merge conflicts and to resolve them

Has different keyboard shortcuts to jump between (both up & down) merge conflicts and basic change edits (non-conflicting); together with 'take left side, take right side, take left, then right', etc. keyboard shortcuts, the git merge resolve process is 100% keyboard driven and faster than when you must move the mouse and/or swap between keyboard and mouse. The different shortcuts for conflict navigation vs. change navigation makes it very easy to go through a change set and see if you ultimately agree or disagree with the edits. See More

Top Pro

Can be used to compare image files

This is a useful feature for game developers using Git. See More

Top Pro

Can compare remote directories

Beyond Compare can compare directories through FTP, SFTP. Also it can compare directories hosted on Dropbox or Amazon S3. See More

Top Pro

One license covers all major OSs (Linux/Windows/Mac)

Top Pro

Customer service is awesome and easy to work with

Xcode

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Notepad++

Specs

Platforms:Windows

License:GPL-3.0-or-later

Multi Language Support:Yes

Auto Complete:Yes

Kaleidoscope

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Specs

License:Proprietary

Pricing Model:Subscription ($8/month)

Sublime Merge

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Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Features:Line Staging, Syntax Highlighting, Image Diffs, Merge Tool, Git Flow Integration, Submodule Management, Themes, Custom Commands

Pricing:FREE evaluation without time limit, $99 for personal license (including updates for 3 years), $75 per seat and year for business license, $168 for personal license bundle including Sublime Text (3 years of updates)

AraxisMerge

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Specs

Platforms:Windows, Mac

Diffinity

Specs

Platforms:Windows

Syntax Highlighting:yes

Side-by-side view:yes

SemanticDiff

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Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

License:Proprietary

Syntax Highlighting:Yes

Side-By-Side View:Yes

DirEqual

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ExamDiff Pro

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