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Add to SafariWhen comparing Kdiff3 vs WinMerge, the Slant community recommends Kdiff3 for most people. In the question“What are the best folder/file compare/diff tools for either OSX, Linux or Windows?” Kdiff3 is ranked 3rd while WinMerge is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Kdiff3 is:
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.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Free and open source
KDiff3 is completely free to download and use. It's also open source released under the GPL.
Pro Can compare directories
It is able to compare whole directory trees.
Pro Supports editing files directly
In addition to comparing two files it also allows you to edit the merge result right in place.
Pro Diff by character not by lines
On comparing two files, difference is shown by characters; not by lines.
Pro The UI is customizable
Allow customizing colors regardless of user/system theme.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pro Compare folders and files
Can show what files has been changed in a folder, allows comparing files in tabs.
Pro In line comparison
Can show differences within a line.
Pro Free & Open source
Winmerge is a free and open source tool.
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.
Pro Lightweight, quick startup
Binary is less than 3 MB, so it starts quickly
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.
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.
Pro Good detection of moved lines
Detects when a block of lines has been moved in the file and shows the relation.
Cons
Con Cannot do inline diffs
Comparison of 2 files is always side-by-side and there's no option for inline views. Overall a rather poor and confusing UI in general.
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.
Con No precise editing of the compared files
Precise work line-after-line is not possible. Only a version after the automated merge-step is editable, but not the two files separately.
Con No longer supported by Homebrew for MacOS
Cannot be installed easily on Mac as of Aug 2019.
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.
Con Slow for large files
Con No image compare
Compare is text based.
Con Windows only
It's only available for Windows. No Mac or Linux versions available. It is possible to run in Linux via WINE, although a bit unstable.
Con Development is spotty
The latest version (2.16.0) was released in November 2018. Before that the last official release was made in 2013. The 2.16.0 is actually one of the two forks (Winmerge-v2-jp) that were kept maintained throughout the years, it just got named as the official release.
The other fork, WinMerge2011 is still being actively developed too. It's on par with the historical version, and has additional features such as showing only differences and a 64-bit version.
An 'official' list of forks is maintained here.
Con No 3-way merge
Cannot merge 3 files, can do only comparisons by pairs.
Makes it unsuitable for merging operations, still useful to compare two versions in the history.
