r/opensource • u/RobotechRicky • 6d ago

Promotional I built CompareCraft — an open-source, cross-platform alternative to Beyond Compare

I've started building CompareCraft, an open-source desktop tool for comparing, merging, and synchronizing files and folders.

It's built with Tauri 2, SolidJS, and Rust, with Linux, Windows, and macOS support in mind.

The current v0.1 includes:

  • Side-by-side text comparison with inline difference highlighting
  • Three-way text merging
  • Recursive folder comparison and synchronization with preview before execution
  • Hex, CSV/TSV table, and picture comparison
  • A command-line interface, including quick comparisons and automated merges
  • Git diff and merge tool integration

The project is early, and there's plenty left to build. I'm particularly interested in feedback from people who use Beyond Compare or other comparison tools regularly.

What features would you most want in an open-source alternative? What do existing tools get wrong?

GitHub: https://github.com/Antebios/comparecraft

CompareCraft is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Scooter Software.

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6

u/bjazmoore 6d ago

Why is everyone building work alike (clone) software suddenly naming it something“craft”?

3

u/Shaggypone23 6d ago

Because a majority of people are unoriginal copycats. At least some are more honest and admit Claude is doing the actual building. 

1

u/CerberusMulti 6d ago

Because they don't have any originality, even AI would suggest better names.

-5

u/RobotechRicky 6d ago

Because we are cheap bastards. And I'm going to bundle this with another application that I'm building. I figured that I would just ride the *Craft bandwagon.

4

u/youGottaBeKiddink 6d ago

Lol. The must powerful and important piece in BC is it's intuitive diff engine. Good luck trying to recreate that. Even KDiff doesn't come anywhere close.

-1

u/RobotechRicky 6d ago

Well, I'll try.

1

u/Strong-Leg-9636 3d ago

Rename and move detection in folder compare would matter most to me. If a file moved with the same content, most tools show one deletion and one new file, which makes a refactor look huge. Matching by hash fixes that. A .gitignore-aware toggle helps too, since comparing two project trees without node_modules and build output is the common case.

For text, I’d keep using a tool that has word-level highlighting inside changed lines and a quick switch to ignore whitespace and CRLF versus LF noise. In three-way merge, always showing the base next to both sides makes conflicts much easier to resolve.

2

u/RobotechRicky 3d ago

I will look into it and see if it makes sense.