Diffnow: Compare two files online and for free

The website Diffnow offers free and online comparison between two files, texts or urls.

Imagine you have two large files that you want to compare. It could be, for example, membership lists from a club from two different years or two versions of a text document. And you want to find the differences easily and quickly and of course for free.
If the files are small, it might be simple enough to do it by hand, but when they are large the task seems rather daunting. There are a bunch of file comparison tools in the computer world that can do the job for you. They are usually called “diff” programs and are actually built into Windows and Mac OS. On a Mac all you need to do is open a terminal window and type: diff file-1 file-2 (where file-1 and file-2 are the files you want to compare).
On a Windows computer, you need to open a command window and do the same, but replace the diff command with the FC command (which stands for File Compare): fc file-1 file-2

Before you get excited, we must tell you that the results from these built-in command-line tools are not easy to read.
Fortunately, there are many comparison tools available online that are also free and easy to use, and produce results that are much more understandable.
One of them is DiffNow , which can compare not only Office documents (doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx) but also PDF, HTML, plain text, and many other file formats.
Using it is simple. Go to https://www.diffnow.com/ and copy and paste or upload the two files you want to compare. Press the “Compare” button and you’ll see a two-pane screen, with the contents of each file displayed in each pane, and with two-way differences highlighted in color. The results can be downloaded if you wish.
The service is free for up to five comparisons per day and for files up to two megabytes. More comparisons and/or larger file sizes can be handled by registering and/or subscribing to their paid service.
This website is something you may only need occasionally, and it’s another free service, available online, without having to buy or install a specialized program to do the job.