When comparing Beyond Compare vs P4Merge, the Slant community recommends Beyond Compare for most people. In the question“What are the best folder/file compare/diff tools for either OSX, Linux or Windows?” Beyond Compare is ranked 2nd while P4Merge is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Beyond Compare is:
Beyond Compare can be used to compare both files and folders. File-Filters possible.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Supports comparing folders
Beyond Compare can be used to compare both files and folders. File-Filters possible.
Pro Supports 3 way merge
Good overview. Clear display of changed lines (background color) and changed characters (foreground color).
Pro Supports editing files directly
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)
Pro Synchronize folders
Can be used to synchronize folders. Including wildcards.
Pro Works well with large files
Pro Can be used to compare image files
This is a useful feature for game developers using Git.
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.
Pro Can compare remote directories
Beyond Compare can compare directories through FTP, SFTP. Also it can compare directories hosted on Dropbox or Amazon S3.
Pro One license covers all major OSs (Linux/Windows/Mac)
Pro Customer Service is awesome and easy to work with
Pro Has Registry compare
You can compare Registry vs Registry or Registry vs .REG file, both local and remote. You can copy values and keys between sides or edit them.
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.
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 No dark mode
Lack dark mode.
Con No touch support
This is important for scrolling
Con Paid proprietary software
Beyond Compare is not free. It offers different license options depending on the number of members in a team and depending on the software version.
Con Directory comparison is not supported
With P4Merge it's impossible to compare two different directories to find differences.
