Beyond Compare against other compare tools

[booleys1012]

All,

I used to work for the software division of one company (which used BC2), and have since moved on to another company. I am now arguing my case for getting BC3 at the new company to speed up the efficiency of some of our development tasks.

Not too long from now, I will have to go up in front of the entire building and argue my case. One point that I know I will be gutted on, is "why BC and not some other free tool, such as Meld". (we work in both a windows and Linux environment).

I have come up with some of my own arguments for BC, listing features not commonly found in other diff tools (such as replacements, reports generation, manual realignment, etc), but was wondering if there was an official list somewhere or if anyone can help me compile a list of the strengths in BC that you can't find in other alternatives.

Thanks!
Justin

[Craig]

Hi Justin,

We don't have a big feature list on the website right now, but I was able to come up with a pretty hefty list of things we have over Meld and our other free competitors.

• Windows support. I'm sure you can get Meld working on Windows, but I doubt it's easy, and our chief free Windows competitor, WinMerge, doesn't support Linux.
• Dedicated output panel for merges. Meld uses the merge-to-center approach, which we don't think is as intuitive as ours. WinMerge doesn't support 3-way comparisons at all.
• Our comparison algorithm can match up similar lines. Pretty much everyone else uses the same algorithm that GNU diff does, which can only do equals/not equals comparisons between lines. You can strip whitespace, or ignore case or a particular regular expression, but that's it. BC actually computes similarity scores for lines, so ones that have had non-trivial changes (renames, added parameters, etc) can be lined up correctly.
• Saved sessions that you can setup and use later. Workspaces containing multiple sessions.
• FTP, SFTP, FTP over SSL, including support for multiple simultaneous connections. I know numerous people who use BC as their primary FTP client. Meld may support something like this through Gnome's VFS layer, but it wasn't obvious to me.
• Zip, Tar, GZip, Cab, Rar, 7-zip archives and BCSS snapshots. I don't know of any competitor that has archives files as well integrated as BC does.
• Data compare (grid) for CSV and tab delimited files.
• Hex compare for arbitrary binary files.
• Image compare for most major image formats.
• Replacements in text compare.
• Manual align/isolate in text compare.
• Alignment overrides (replacements) in folder compare.
• Source control integration (Windows only). Adds check-in/check-out/undo checkout support directly to the file and folder viewers. Supports any version control system that integrates into Visual Studio (pretty much all of them). Meld's version control integration is different and won't support as many Windows vcs's.
• Syntax highlighting, and file formats that define importance. A lot of competitors just have a single list of regular expressions that you ignore for all file types, without being able to have different ones for C++ files vs. HTML files.
• Printed/html/plain text differences reports.
• Command line scripting.
• Directory comparison supports excluding files based on their names, paths, sizes, last modified times, attributes, and source control status. This combined with sessions is especially powerful.
• Dedicated sync interface with mirror and update commands.
• Directory compare includes Copy/Move/Delete/Rename/Touch/SetAttributes. Meld, at least, doesn't have much for manipulating directory compares.
• Compares binary DFMs as text (only applicable for Delphi programmers).
• Dedicated support staff available via email, phone, and forums.