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Kaleidoscope vs P4Merge

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When comparing Kaleidoscope vs P4Merge, the Slant community recommends P4Merge for most people. In the question“What are the best folder/file compare/diff tools for either OSX, Linux or Windows?” P4Merge is ranked 5th while Kaleidoscope is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose P4Merge is:

P4Merge is free of charge.

Specs

LicenseProprietary

PlatformsMac

Pricing ModelSubscription ($8/month)

LicenseFree

PlatformsWindows; Mac; Linux

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best folder/file compare/diff tools for either OSX, Linux or Windows?

What are the best diff tools for Git?

What are the best merge applications for Git?

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

Pros

Pro
Simple UI

Kaleidoscope has a beautiful and simple UI. It displays the two files that are being compared side to side, highlighting all the differences in a way that's easy to understand.

Pro
Diff within a line

When working in code, line-by-line diff can still be hard to spot small changes within the line. Kaleidoscope will highlight what has changed.

Pro
Supports comparing folders

Pro
Image difference viewer

Kaleidoscope supports image diff viewer in addition to git diff. It's able to find even the slightest changes between two versions of the same image.

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 following
git 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.