Compare Adobe PDF Documents with Compare Suite

PDF documents are an excellent way to share some important information, as you can be sure that your colleague will see the file exactly as you see it. It’s really important, as achieving this goal with HTML or Word format is a tricky task.

Compare two PDF documents

PDF comparison problem

While PDF solves the formatting challenge, there are certain disadvantages of this format. It’s not that easy to extract text information from PDF document, and without having this information 3rd party compare products cannot compare documents.

Compare Suite supports PDF format and it can extract text for the comparison from PDF documents. An obvious limitation is for PDFs that were created as a result of scanning something.

Pdf matching is a matter of second for Compare Suite

OCR – work with scanned PDFs

If you scanned some document and created a PDF document, then it needs some additional processing before you can actually compare it against others. This PDF is actually an image packed into PDF, so this image need to be recognized.

The type of software that recognize images and convert them into editable text are called “OCR” (Optical Character Recognition) software. A good toolkit is provided by Abby. Including, they have a web-based OCR which is very handy.

Broken Structure

Ever then comparing two PDFs might be a challenging task, as their structure will be broken. Compare tools won’t be able to find synchronization points and get two documents compared.

You might want to switch to “By keywords” compare method in this case. It won’t compare files word by word, but it will highlight all unique and shared keywords, which is a great starting point for the further analysis.

Compare PDF and Word

With Compare Suite you are not limited to PDF-to-PDF comparison only. You can actually compare PDF to Word, or PDF to HTML. Most likely different document structure won’t allow you to run word-by-word comparison, but you can always switch to “By Keywords” for better results.

Use Compare Suite as your default diff pdf tool

What users say

Compare Suite definitely makes comparing PDF documents easier. The colour coding of the added, modified, or removed lines makes comparing multiple document quick and painless. Read more…

Nykole Masters, Information Quality Analyst, AHS, Calgary, AB, Canada

We use Compare Suite for comparing various Word, PDF, HTML documents for differences in versions. I also have a few apps that require a comparison tool to be used to tell differences between document versions. Read more…

Terry Bennett, Rusted Works Org., Canada

I convert a PDF phone and address listing to text only and then I compare the previous year’s list to the new one to add on new listings and update information for our mailing list. Read more…

Laura Lujan, Oral Surgery, Toronto. Typist.

I have to compare customers’ invoice files in PDF format. I have been using your product for months and I am very content with it. Read more…

Peter Skerletov, A1 Telekom, Vienna, Austria. Software Tester.

Have you tried comparing two PDFs? What is your secret in making the comparison successful? 

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Where Compare Suite is used:

Compare Suite Features:

Compare FileCompare documents to find differences regardless of the format: MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, PDF.

Compare FoldersCompare two local or remote folders to find and synchronize any changes made.

Compare by KeywordsUse the keywords comparison to analyze non-related documents created from different formats.

Compare ArchiveArchive comparison: compare Rar and Zip archive files without unpacking / unzipping.

COmpare Web-PageCompare web pages as code with HTML tags or as text as seen in a web browser.

Compare ImagesCompare two images of various formats to find all possible differences, even slight ones.

Compare MultimediaMultimedia comparison. Compare information from multimedia and graphic formats.

Ignore WordsIgnore words. Compare Suite can ignore certain keywords or strings during comparison.

Integrate with DMSDMS Integration. Easily integrate Compare Suite into 3rd party document management systems.

Highlight SyntaxSyntax highlighting for .pas, .asm., cpp, PHP, XML, bat, css, dpk, xsl files supported.

Compare FTPCompare files located on FTP as easily as on hard drives or local area networks.

Compare Command LineUse command line to automate comparisons and integrate it with 3rd party tools.

Compare UnicodeUNICODE is fully supported: open and compare documents in any language or encoding.


Review compared documents:

Compare ReportCreate a fully customizable comparison report on two files or folders.

Compare CommentsWrite your own comments on changes you or your colleagues make, improving collaboration.

Audit DocumentUse document audit to accept or decline changes made in plain text files.

What is Compare Suite?

  • It is a file compare tool
  • In office Compare Suite helps to compare word files, Excel spreadsheets, web-pages
  • Software developers and web-masters use Compare Suite to do version compare, approve changes in documents or compare certain file types like XML, PHP, C-Sharp
  • Office managers use Compare Suite to diff PDF files, compare invoice files
  • Compare Suite also make it much easier synchronization of directories