> text lists
Compare two lists
Who is in both lists, who is missing from the other? Members against payments received, class list against slips handed in, inventory target against actual, newsletter against unsubscribes.
Try an example
List A
One line per entry, for example copied from Excel or an email.
With comma or semicolon, every line is also split there. “Table” reads cells copied from Excel as columns.
File for list A
CSV, TXT or Excel (.xlsx), also by dragging it here.
List B
One line per entry, for example copied from Excel or an email.
With comma or semicolon, every line is also split there. “Table” reads cells copied from Excel as columns.
File for list B
CSV, TXT or Excel (.xlsx), also by dragging it here.
What counts as the same?
The rules only apply to the comparison. The output is always the entry as it stands in your list. Invisible characters (non-breaking space, BOM at the start of a file) never get in the way.
The comparison runs by itself as you type. From 20,000 lines in total, it runs only when you press the button.
Duplicates within a list
Almost the same, please check
These entries are only in A or only in B, but differ by just one or two characters. Maybe a typo. The tool does not treat them as the same: Check for yourself and correct the list if they are the same.
Both apply to the open tab. Copy: one line per entry, for tables the whole row with a tab between the cells. CSV: for Excel (semicolon, UTF-8 with BOM), with column names and the count per list.
Keep both lists for later
This page does not save anything by itself. If you need both lists and the rules again later, save them as a small file on your own device and load it here again.
More for text: Compare texts line by line · View and clean up CSV · Sort and count lines · Readability (German)
Both lists stay on this device. Nothing is uploaded or saved.
How it works
- 01Paste list A and list B, or load one file each (CSV, TXT, Excel .xlsx). For tables, you choose the column to compare by, optionally two together such as last name and first name.
- 02Under “What counts as the same?”, set what should not matter: upper and lower case, spaces, umlauts, leading zeros, punctuation.
- 03Read the result in four tabs: only in A, only in B, in both, all once. Copy each tab or save it as a CSV for Excel.
Examples: Member list as A, payments received as B, then “Only in A” shows who has not paid yet. Class list against slips handed in shows who is still missing. For inventory, A is the target stock and B is what was counted. For a newsletter, A is the subscribers and B the unsubscribes: “Only in A” is the cleaned list.
Lists are compared as sets without order: All that matters is whether an entry appears in the other list, not where. To compare two versions of a text line by line in their order, use Compare texts. If an entry appears several times in a list, it shows up once in the result, with the count behind it, and the duplicates are listed separately above. For tables, the result shows the whole first row with that entry, and for “In both” the row from A and the row from B side by side. Whether the first row of a table is a header is only a guess by the tool: It takes it as a header if it looks like column names (name, email, no.) or sits above a column of numbers. Below the column choice, it then says which row does not count because of that. If that is wrong, flip the switch “First row is the header”.
“Almost the same” looks for typos: entries that are only in A or only in B and differ by at most two characters (one character different, one too many or too few, two swapped). Entries up to 4 characters may differ in only one character, and entries shorter than 3 characters are not compared. The search only runs while both sides have at most 3,000 such entries each; above that, the tool says it is off. With long, similar entries (addresses, IBANs), the search can take a few seconds; it runs in the background, and the tabs are ready before it. These are only suggestions, nothing is treated as the same automatically.
Up to 200,000 entries per list. Each tab shows the first 500, while copy and CSV always contain all of them. CSV files up to 20 MB, Excel files up to 50 MB; the delimiter and character encoding of a CSV are detected. For Excel, the last saved value of a formula counts, hidden rows count too, and the old .xls format is not read. When splitting with comma or semicolon, there are no quotation marks: A comma in a name (“Müller, Erika”) splits the entry. For such lists, choose “One entry per line” or load the file as a CSV.