How to compare two versions of a contract
When the other side sends back a "clean" version without tracked changes, a document comparison shows you exactly what they changed.
Why compare instead of trusting tracked changes
Tracked changes only show the edits someone chose to track. A redline produced by comparing the two final documents shows every difference, including edits made with tracking off, changes in a PDF you can't edit, and accidental changes in sections nobody mentioned.
Step by step
- Open the PDF comparison (it also accepts Word .docx files, and you can compare a PDF against a Word file).
- Drop the version you sent on the left and the version you received on the right. The text is extracted on your device; the documents are never uploaded, which matters for confidential agreements.
- Read the Redline view: deletions are struck through and insertions underlined, word by word, like tracked changes.
- Press F7 to jump from change to change so you don't miss anything in a long document.
- Export with Export → Print / save as PDF to keep a record of the comparison.
What to look at closely
- Numbers and dates: amounts, percentages, notice periods, deadlines. A single changed digit is highlighted inside the sentence.
- Small words with big effects: "may" versus "shall", "and" versus "or", "not", "reasonable", "sole".
- Defined terms: a changed definition alters every clause that uses it.
- Moved clauses: a clause moved to another section can change its scope. Diffspot marks moved blocks so you can tell them apart from new text.
Getting a clean comparison from PDFs
PDFs store text as positioned fragments rather than paragraphs, so line breaks may differ between two exports even when the words are identical. The redline view compares word by word, which makes it robust to this. Page breaks are kept as markers so you can find each change in the original. Scanned PDFs have no text layer; run OCR on them first (most scanner apps and PDF editors can).
If you have the Word files, compare those: their paragraphs are preserved exactly, along with tables, headers, footers and footnotes.
Diffspot compares text. It doesn't compare formatting, so bold or font changes won't appear. Always confirm important changes against the original documents.