Why I Built CompareStack
The jobs that kept repeating
I kept needing the same small jobs: see what changed between two pieces of text, read a PDF or Word revision without a visual proofing tool, check a spreadsheet export, and make a minified JSON or SQL paste readable enough to review.
Those jobs already have serious tools—Git, Word, Excel, an IDE. They are the wrong shape when the input is a file someone emailed, a payload from a log, or a query copied out of a ticket. CompareStack is the narrow set of pages I wanted for that case.
What I decided to build
Nine tools, in three groups. Document comparison covers pasted text, PDF text, Word text, and spreadsheet rows. Developer tools cover JSON validation and pretty-print, a whitespace SQL formatter, and a brace-based code indentation pass. Encoding tools cover raw URL encoding and standard Base64.
Each page is supposed to say what the implementation actually does. PDF Compare reads extracted text. It does not compare pixels and it does not OCR scans. Base64 is encoding, not encryption. The SQL formatter does not validate a dialect.
What I am not claiming
CompareStack is a personal project. I do not publish user counts, customer lists, or review scores. It does not replace version control, Track Changes, or a document management system.
If a page and the code disagree, the code is the source of truth. That is why the how-it-works page and this site’s changelog exist: so the description can be corrected in public when the behavior is clearer than the old copy.