Compare Two Lists - Find Differences

Paste your items into List A and List B, then look at the A Only panel for items exclusive to List A, or B Only for items exclusive to List B. For three or more lists, use Multi-List Compare.

Yes. Click the Upload File button in the toolbar above either input box to browse for a file. You can also drag and drop a file directly onto the input box - just drop it anywhere over the text area and it will load automatically.
Supported formats: .txt, .csv, .tsv, .log, .md, and other plain text files.
Size limit: 5 MB per file. For larger datasets, split the file first and compare in batches.
Not supported: Excel (.xlsx), Word (.docx), or PDF files - export to .csv or .txt first.
CSV note: Files are loaded as plain text - each row (including all columns) is treated as one item. For best results use single-column files. To compare a specific column from a multi-column CSV, use the Column Compare (coming soon) tool instead.

Yes. Each input panel has a Sort button (the arrow icon) that opens a dropdown with four options:
• A → Z - alphabetical ascending (apple, banana, cherry)
• Z → A - alphabetical descending (cherry, banana, apple)
• 0 → 9 - numeric ascending (2, 10, 100) - non-numeric items go to the bottom
• 9 → 0 - numeric descending (100, 10, 2)
You can also sort the results by choosing a sort order in the Options panel before comparing.

Yes. In the Options panel, uncheck Case Sensitive. The comparison will then treat "Apple" and "apple" as the same item.

Intersection (A ∩ B) shows only items that appear in both lists. Union (A ∪ B) shows all unique items from both lists combined. For example, if List A is apple, banana and List B is banana, cherry, the intersection is banana and the union is apple, banana, cherry.

Copy each column from Excel and paste into List A and List B. The tool will instantly show which values exist in one column but not the other. Alternatively, save each column as a .txt file and drag it onto the input box. If your data has multiple columns and you need to match rows by a key column, try the Column Compare tool.

Yes. Enable Ignore Leading/Trailing Spaces and Ignore Extra Spaces in Options to normalize whitespace before comparing. For example, apple and apple will be treated as the same item. If items still appear identical but won't match, they may contain invisible characters - use the Invisible Character Detector to find hidden characters like non-breaking spaces or zero-width spaces.

Yes. Enable Ignore Leading Zeros in Options so that "007" and "7" are treated as the same value.

No. All processing happens entirely in your browser. Your data never leaves your device and is never sent to any server.

Use the Output Format dropdown in Options to change how all four result panels display. Plain gives one item per line. Numbered adds 1. 2. 3. prefixes. Markdown Bullets adds a dash before each item. HTML <ul> and HTML <ol> produce ready-to-paste HTML list markup. Hashtags prefixes each item with # and removes spaces. JSON Array wraps results in a JSON array. Quoted wraps each item in double quotes - handy for SQL or config files. All four panels update simultaneously.

Yes - list comparator, list diff tool, and list compare tool are just different names people use to search for the same thing: paste two lists here and instantly see what's shared, what's unique to each list, and the combined set. No installation or account needed.