ESPIRIDION Indeed there are cheaper alternatives out there, and some are even free. Having said that, I'm glad I purchased Merge. Customer support is impressive, and the application has saved me enormous amounts of time. I just did a brief test with DiffMerge, since it is one of the free alternatives. I compared 2 files. One of them had 5 changes. DiffMerge identified blank spaces I added. Merge did not. DiffMerge did not support drag and drop of the files. Merge did making the work flow faster. DiffMerge would not compare the files initially, since one was xml and the other txt. Merge compared them. I then made the txt an xml file in order for DiffMerge to work. DiffMerge has a single scroll bar. Merge has 2, one for each file. DiffMerge used 2 colors, black for the whole document and red for the differences. Merge used black plus 4 other colors, making it easy to view different sections and/or type of text. DiffMerge is definitely not bad, and as mentioned it is free. Replacing text from one file to another is quick and easy. I'm keeping it :-) I was going to try other applications but did not want to run installers so I skipped them. This was just a very brief test, focusing on a single feature; comparing 2 files. Araxis Merge is still the one for me. It has many additional features, is very fast, supports a wide variety of file formats, and offers superb customer support. (Version 2009.3793) |