When comparing Sublime Merge vs P4Merge, the Slant community recommends P4Merge for most people. In the question“What are the best free 3-way merge tools for Windows?” P4Merge is ranked 4th while Sublime Merge is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose P4Merge is:
P4Merge is free of charge.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Pure Git behind the scenes
All actions are real Git actions which minimizes confusion and makes it perfect for beginners and professionals alike.
Pro Speed
Nothing is faster. I used to use Gitkraken, but on large projects Gitkraken is barely usable.
Pro Very keyboard friendly
All actions have either direct hotkeys or corresponding entries in the palette (same as Sublime Text). This means a very streamlined and fast usage.
Pro No account info needed
No account- or server checkbacks (only for updates). All password handling is pure Git which means much less trouble and confusion.
Pro Portable version
Windows portable version.
Pro "Native" performance (Python based)
Very good performance.
Pro Using the trial version forever without limitations
Sublime Merge may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however, a license must be purchased for continued use. There is no enforced time limit for the evaluation.
Pro Lifetime testing
The product is paid but you can test for your life without paying (similar to sublime text).
Pro Excellent user interface
The user interface is designed excellently, and it's really fast to navigate with mouse or keyboard. It's never obscured which git commands are used, and commands can be modified/extended if desired. The visual appearance of the interface can be changed via themes, new git commands can be added, and even the menus can be extended.
Pro Not subscription based
A license gives you 3 years of updates, and you can use the product after that indefinitely.
Pro Bundled license available with Sublime Text (which is an amazing text editor)
Pro Free
P4Merge is free of charge.
Pro 3 way merge support
P4Merge presents merge information in 4 panes - BASE, LOCAL, REMOTE and MERGE_RESULT.
Pro Detects minimal changes without having a common ancestor
After a merge sometimes you have conflicts. You can resolve them by using a merge tool. You can run git mergetool --tool-help
to get more details about what tools are supported.
You will get an output like the followinggit mergetool --tool=<tool>
may be set to one of the following:
p4merge
tortoisemerge
vimdiff
vimdiff2
vimdiff3
The following tools are valid, but not currently available:
araxis
bc
bc3
codecompare
deltawalker
diffmerge
diffuse
ecmerge
emerge
gvimdiff
gvimdiff2
gvimdiff3
kdiff3
meld
opendiff
tkdiff
winmerge
xxdiff
Some of the tools listed above only work in a windowed environment. If run in a terminal-only session, they will fail.
Pro Also has image diffing
For those who are working in both text based source code or files, as well as images, its nice to have the diff functionality of both present in the same product.
Pro Cross-platform with a good Mac port
P4Merge works on Windows, Linux and OS X.
Cons
Con Too expensive
And they're continuing to increase the price over the time, from the $60 that was at the start.
Con Directory comparison is not supported
With P4Merge it's impossible to compare two different directories to find differences.