GrapeCompare is a private, sandboxed macOS comparison app for files, folders, images, structured data, and three-way merges. All comparison work happens on the Mac; the app has no account, telemetry, network entitlement, or cloud upload.
Requires macOS 15 or later, on Apple silicon or Intel. The supported installation channel is the Mac App Store. See the product website for supported workflows. GitHub hosts the source code, not a supported installer. Homebrew and historical GitHub release downloads are not supported installation paths for the current app.
After installation, stage inputs one at a time or drop two files or two folders to compare. Keep up to 16 file versions on the shelf and choose any two, including while viewing a comparison. Paste images onto the shelf to compare independent clipboard snapshots. Use Finder Open With, drag and drop, or the Compare Files Shortcut. Access is limited to items you select. Three-way merging takes manually selected base, left, and right inputs; it does not connect to Git.
- Text comparison with line and character-level differences, navigation, filters, unchanged-text folding, restored reading positions, editable output, and unified patch export.
- Recursive folder comparison with filename/path search, an inline file preview, previous/next changed-file navigation, restored selection and expansion, and reviewed, transactional copy, replace, move, recoverable delete, dry-run reports, and undo.
- Image comparison with side-by-side, overlay, heatmap, alignment, metadata, and pixel metrics, and restored zoom, pan, mode, split and alignment per input pair.
- Semantic JSON, plist, XCStrings, and Xcode project comparison.
- Read-only inspection of app bundles, signatures, entitlements, provisioning profiles, Mach-O files, and asset catalogs without launching inspected code.
- User-selected three-way text and image merging.
- Finder Open With, drag and drop, recent comparisons, and a Compare Files Shortcut.
GrapeCompare intentionally does not include a command-line tool, Git subprocess integration, difftool/mergetool hooks, arbitrary-path URL schemes, or a non-sandboxed distribution build.
GrapeCompare requires macOS 15 or later. Open macos/GrapeCompare.xcodeproj,
select the GrapeCompare scheme, and build for My Mac. Both Debug and Release
enable App Sandbox with user-selected read/write access and app-scoped security
bookmarks.
bash macos/Tests/run-tests.sh
ruby macos/Tests/validate-localizations.rb
xcodebuild -project macos/GrapeCompare.xcodeproj -scheme GrapeCompare \
-destination 'platform=macOS' -configuration Debug buildThe only supported product distribution is the Mac App Store. Archive and upload with Xcode using Apple Distribution signing and a Mac App Store provisioning profile. Do not disable App Sandbox for any build.
See SUPPORT.md, SECURITY.md, and CONTRIBUTING.md.