You can easily tell what the differences are and how to resolve them. The built-in tools can take care of most conflicts, leaving only the most challenging for manual resolution.

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

So parts you don't want to see in your comparison 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 you can compare two logs with different timestamps but nearly same content (beginning with timestamps the first x characters adding to ignore).

This allows you to copy differences from either side, but instantly edit them while you're there. With syntax highlighting.

Works on Mac, Windows and Unix.

This is useful when resolving Git conflicts where you can see the original version and the two conflicting checkins. Clear display of changed lines (background color) and changed characters (foreground color). It can also be used to merge changes where no version control like Git is used.

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

Can be used to synchronize folders. Including wildcards.

This is a useful feature for game developers using Git.

C, C++, C#, SQL, Pascalw, xml, Python, and many more built-in and available online.

In Beyond Compare you can easily press some key combinations to copy a snippet between 2 files/folders or set a base folder for further comparison. They are very useful if you are a software integrator.

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.

Aligns diff sections by entering empty blocks instead linking related sections by curved lines. This allows synchronised scrolling which eases to keep track and focus.

Delimited data files can be compared cell-by-cell in a Table Compare session. Data can be sorted and aligned on key fields, and unimportant columns can be ignored.

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.

Easy to configure for updating websites. Can define rules for file comparison, ignored files, and folders.

A customer support forum is provided and you get quick replies to your e-mails.

File comparison can be based on CRC checking, a full binary comparison or a set of predefined rules like file size time stamps etc.