Spot every change before you sign: comparing two versions of a text
A landlord sends the “final” lease. A client returns your proposal with “a few tweaks”. A service updates its terms. In each case, what matters is not what stayed the same but the one number or sentence that changed.
Why reading side by side fails
Our eyes are good at meaning and bad at detail. We skim familiar sentences and miss that “30 days” became “15 days”, or that a clause about deposits quietly disappeared. On long documents, nobody can reliably catch every change by eye.
How to compare
- Copy the old version into the left box of the text comparison tool and the new one into the right.
- Use Words for contracts and prose, Lines for lists, data and code.
- Read only the highlights: green was added, red was removed.
Tick “ignore extra spaces” if the new version was reformatted, so layout changes don't bury real ones.
What to look for in contracts
- Numbers: amounts, percentages, deadlines, notice periods
- Small words that flip meaning: “may” vs. “must”, “and” vs. “or”, “not”
- Removed protections and added obligations
- Changes to renewal, cancellation, fines and jurisdiction
Don't paste contracts into just any website
Many online diff tools send your text to their servers, where it may be stored or logged. A lease, an employment contract or a medical letter is personal data. Pandoo's comparison runs entirely in your browser.
Scanned documents
If you only have a scan, extract the text with image to text (OCR) first, then compare — and double-check the numbers, since OCR can misread them.