beyond compare gets bonus points for having special features for diffing and merging tabular data. for example, if you're comparing a couple of CSV files, you c

beyond compare gets bonus points for having special features for diffing and merging tabular data. for example, if you're comparing a couple of CSV files, you can mark some columns as unimportant to help focus on diffing and merging differences in the remaining columns you deem are important. this can be quite helpful if manually regression testing tabular output from some report generating tool, where most of the output is deterministic but the tool pollutes one column with timestamps or ids that differ every run. the ability to compare and merge directories is also nice (although a number of open source diff and merge tools also support this -- e.g. kdiff3, meld)