Quick Start Guide Leave feedback

This guide walks you through installing GroupDocs.Comparison for Python via .NET and comparing two documents end to end. By the end you will have a working environment, an output file showing the differences between two sample documents, and the code skeleton to extend for your own use cases.

• Python 3.5 or newer — verify with python --version.
• A package manager — pip is bundled with Python.
• Two sample documents to compare. You can download source.docx and target.docx used in this guide, or use your own.

On Linux and macOS, GroupDocs.Comparison also requires libgdiplus and font support — see the installation guide for the exact commands.

Install GroupDocs.Comparison from PyPI:

pip install groupdocs-comparison-net

The wheel is roughly 150 MB and bundles the .NET runtime; no further setup is required on Windows.

Save the following snippet as quick_start.py in the same folder as source.docx and target.docx, then run it with python quick_start.py.

from groupdocs.comparison import Comparer

def quick_start():
    # Initialize Comparer with the source document and add the target.
    with Comparer("./source.docx") as comparer:
        comparer.add("./target.docx")
        # The result file contains the merged comparison highlighting added,
        # deleted, modified, and style changes.
        comparer.compare("./result.docx")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    quick_start()

Binary file (DOCX, 25 KB)

Open result.docx to see the differences highlighted in colour: insertions in blue, deletions in red, style changes in green.

Beyond writing a merged result file, you can iterate over the individual changes:

from groupdocs.comparison import Comparer

def list_changes():
    with Comparer("./source.docx") as comparer:
        comparer.add("./target.docx")
        comparer.compare()
        for change in comparer.get_changes():
            print(f"Type: {change.type}, Text: {change.text}")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    list_changes()

Type: 2, Text: Cool
Type: 2, Text:  
Type: 3, Text: test 
Type: 2, Text:  signatures
Type: 2, Text: Our 
Type: 2, Text: char[
Type: 2, Text: 255]
Type: 2, Text:  
Type: 3, Text:

Without a license, GroupDocs.Comparison processes only the first two pages of any document and stamps trial badges on the output. To unlock the full feature set, apply a license — either via the GROUPDOCS_LIC_PATH environment variable (zero-code) or by calling License().set_license(path). Request a free 30-day temporary license at purchase.groupdocs.com/temporary-license.

See Licensing and subscription for the full set of options, including metered licensing and stream-based license loading.

• Compare documents — the full API surface for two-document comparison.
• Accept or reject detected changes — reviewer-style workflows that pick and choose which changes to apply.
• Customize changes styles — change highlight colours, fonts, and decorations.
• Load documents — paths, streams, password-protected files, custom fonts.
• Save comparison results — output format, metadata, output password.
• AI agents and LLM integration — work with the API from Claude Code, Cursor, and other AI assistants.