How to see what changed between two versions of a document

The other side sends back the contract "with a few small changes." Your landlord sends a renewed lease that "is the same as last year." Reading both versions side by side and hoping to spot the difference is how a changed deadline or a new fee slips through.

Compare them in a minute

1. Open Compare PDF. Drop the original into the left box and the revised version into the right. Both stay on your device.
2. Look through the changes. The pages appear side by side with the differences marked: red for words only in the original, green for words only in the revision. Every change is listed underneath; click one to jump to it.
3. Download the report: a PDF listing every change with the words before and after, plus each pair of pages that differ, marked up side by side.

It finds changes even when text moves

The two documents are compared as a whole, not page by page. If a paragraph added on page 2 pushes everything down, that shows as one change rather than every later page being different, and moved text is still found.

Pictures, layout and scans

Switch to the Visual view to compare the pages pixel by pixel. That catches changes to pictures, layout and scanned pages that have no text. To compare scans word by word, run both through OCR PDF first.

This is a reading aid, not legal advice: it shows you what changed, and you still decide what the changes mean. For anything important, send the report to whoever advises you.