If you ever end up in a software project where you're helping maintain 100s or 1000s of "diff the output file against the expected file" style regression tests,

If you ever end up in a software project where you're helping maintain 100s or 1000s of "diff the output file against the expected file" style regression tests, and some of the files you're diffing are CSV files or so on, beyondcompare has some features that can help a lot. e.g. it can do CSV-aware diffing & help you suppress irrelevant details such as row order (supposing you don't care about row order), or you can mark the timestamp column as irrelevant and ignore differences from that column only. Often files differ superficially as streams of bytes but might be equivalent at a higher level (in terms of the data encoded in the bytes of text) & beyond compare can help with some of this. If you're in a team with this kind of semi-automated semi-manual regression testing workflow for changes, where there's human-in-loop engineering effort to review regression tests that indicate 'there's some difference between actual output and expected output' and decide if the new output is "OK" or not, the cost of a beyond compare license likely pays for itself in less than a month in terms of freeing up hours of engineering effort. That said, you can often do better than this by investing engineering effort to build a custom domain-specific file normalizer / differ tool, to e.g. deserialize values, normalize them to eliminate irrelevant details, compare them for equivalence in a domain specific way, show actionable diffs when they differ, which might give a much better result than a high quality general-purpose tool beyond compare.