XenCompare
A Windows desktop utility for comparing two revisions of a technical PDF drawing. One-time purchase. Runs on Windows 10 and later.
What it does
Compare
Drop an Original and a Revised PDF and XenCompare detects every visual difference between them. Changes are marked with numbered clouds directly on the drawing.
Review
Step through each detected change one by one. Confirm it, ignore it, mark it as needing further review, or attach a note. Review state is preserved if you adjust the alignment and rescan.
Export
Export a stamped comparison report: a PDF with a cover page, the annotated drawing, and a per-change table with before/after thumbnails. A CSV of all differences is written alongside it.
Technical details
- All processing runs locally using PDFium. No files are sent anywhere.
- Source PDFs are always opened read-only. Neither input file is ever modified.
- Detection compares rendered pixels at a fixed resolution. It works on any PDF regardless of how it was produced.
- The exported report is always a new file chosen by the user. The originals are never overwritten.
- Detection uses a tolerance-based ink mask — identical pages produce zero detections, and anti-aliasing fringe does not create false positives.
- Alignment is translation-only in the automatic path. Fine rotation and scale can be adjusted manually with the arrow keys.
- No account, no internet connection, and no telemetry.
What it does not do
- Edit, annotate, or modify the source PDFs in any way
- Compare text content or document metadata — comparison is pixel-based
- Compare more than one page pair at a time (multi-page support is not yet available)
- Perform optical character recognition (OCR)
- Detect moved objects automatically — a moved element appears as one removal and one addition until manually paired
- Connect to any cloud service or require sign-in
⏳ Coming soon