Competitor Summary

DeltaXML has defined the market for XML change control software, with software in production use since 2001 in large corporations, government departments and leading-edge XML providers. When you come to assess the strengths of DeltaXML, you may like to look at other products and apply our Feature Checklist. Naturally new products are introduced to the market all the time and this is not a definitive list of related products. Many of these products really only offer simple XML Diff or visualization of changes in an editor. Our position is to offer XML change control processing in information pipelines, where industrial-scale processing requires total accuracy, high performance and simple configuration.

DeltaXML also offer products that are configured and tuned for specific types of XML data such as OpenDocument, DITA, DocBook, XHTML and others.

Other XML Compare and Diff Products

• Microsoft Diff and Patch
• <oXygen/> XML Editor (visualization of differences)
• Stylus Studio (visualization of differences)
• Altova DiffDog (visualization of differences)
• INRIA XyDiff
• xmldiff, diffxml, X-Diff, XMLUnit, ... open source tools

Feature Checklist

• 100% Accuracy (proved by re-combining the delta to generate the original documents)
• Delta file in XML for customized processing
• High performance - files containing gigabytes of data or documents with hundreds of pages
• Ease of configurability and integration, including built-in pipeline processing software and XSLT and Java filters
• Full standards compliance - Java JAXP/TrAX
• Scalability
• Flexible pricing - from occasional use to mission-critical and OEM use
• Option for changes only or changes in context
• Take advantage of keys in your data to ensure accurate matching
• Handle orderless data as well as default ordered data

Questions to Ponder

When you are thinking about any product or tool which you want to buy or build to solve your problems with change control in XML we suggest you set these questions for yourself:

• Do you want an integrated solution or a standalone utility?
• Do you need to identify exactly what has changed, or just test for equality?
• Do you have an XML "information pipeline" of which this is but one component?
• Do you need to merge documents, as well as compare them?
• Do you need to see just the changes or do you want to see them "in context"?
• What are your performance targets? Size of file? Speed?
• Do you want a delta document with a similar structure to the input documents for easier processing?
• Are your requirements frozen, or might you now or in the future use more advanced features such as Orderless comparisons and sophisticated Keyed matching?