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Compare PDFs

Diff the text of two PDFs page by page.

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PDF · up to 100MB per file

About Compare PDFs

Finding what changed between two versions of a document by reading them side by side is slow and unreliable — the differences that matter are often a single number or a negated clause.

This tool extracts the text of both documents and reports the differences page by page, so you can see where the two versions diverge.

How to use Compare PDFs

  1. Step 1

    Upload both PDFs

    Add the original and the revised version.

  2. Step 2

    Compare

    Text is extracted from each and matched page by page.

  3. Step 3

    Review the differences

    Read the reported changes and download the report.

When it helps

  • Checking what a counterparty altered in a returned contract.
  • Verifying that a reissued invoice differs only in the amount you expected.
  • Comparing policy revisions before approving them.
  • Confirming a converted or repaired file still matches the original text.

Good to know

  • Comparison is text-based, so it will not detect changed images, colours or layout.
  • Scanned documents need OCR before they can be compared.
  • If pagination shifted between versions, differences appear from that point onward — read the report in context.

Compare PDFs: frequently asked questions

Working with AI on documents, sensibly

Extraction comes before intelligence

Every AI document feature begins with the same unglamorous step: turning the file into text. A digital PDF exposes its characters directly; a scan must be read by OCR first. Whatever reaches the model is only as good as that extraction, which is why a crisp export and a crooked photograph of the same page produce noticeably different answers.

If a result looks wrong, check the extracted text before blaming the model. Missing columns, merged words and dropped diacritics almost always trace back to the source rather than the analysis.

Context windows and long documents

A language model can only consider a limited amount of text at once. Long documents are therefore handled in sections, with the results combined — a reliable approach for summaries and question answering, and a weaker one for questions that require holding the entire document in mind at the same time, such as counting every occurrence of a term across four hundred pages.

Ask focused questions about specific sections rather than sweeping questions about the whole file, and you will get markedly more dependable answers.

Verify before you rely

Models produce fluent text whether or not they are certain, so a confident summary can still misstate a figure, a date or a negation — the last being especially costly in contracts, where dropping a single 'not' inverts the meaning. Treat output as a well-informed first draft.

Spot-check anything consequential against the source page, and never paste material you are not permitted to share into any AI tool, including this one. Where a document is confidential, prefer the browser-only tools that never transmit it anywhere.

Common problems and fixes

The tool says it found no text
The document is image-only. Run OCR to create a text layer, then repeat the request.
The summary misses an important section
Summaries prioritise recurring themes. Ask directly about the section you care about instead of requesting a general overview.
Numbers or names appear slightly wrong
OCR routinely confuses 0 with O and 1 with l, and models can carry the error forward. Verify figures against the original page before using them.

Terms worth knowing

OCR
Optical character recognition — converting pictures of text into machine-readable characters.
Context window
The maximum amount of text a language model can consider in a single request.
Hallucination
A confident but incorrect statement produced by a language model that is not supported by the source.

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