Compare and diff two YAML files. Fast, secure, and completely free. All processing happens in your browser — no data is sent to any server.
YAML Compare parses two YAML documents into their underlying data structure — the same nested maps, lists, and scalar values that JSON would represent — and reports differences at that structural level rather than line by line. YAML is especially sensitive to formatting quirks that don't change meaning: indentation width, flow vs. block style, quoted vs. unquoted strings, and key ordering can all vary between two files that describe identical configuration. This tool sees past that formatting and reports only genuine differences in the actual data.
YAML configuration files — for CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes manifests, application settings — are routinely reformatted by editors, linters, or auto-generation tools without the actual configuration changing at all. A plain text diff flags every reformatted line as a change, making it genuinely hard to spot the one value that actually matters, like a changed replica count or an added environment variable. Comparing at the data level instead surfaces exactly the differences that would change how the system behaves.
No — indentation width is purely a formatting choice in YAML; the comparison is based on the parsed data structure, so consistent nesting with different indent widths is treated as equivalent.
Anchors and aliases are resolved to their actual referenced values before comparison, so the tool compares the effective data rather than the anchor syntax itself.
Yes, both styles parse to the identical underlying map, so they're treated as equal by the structural comparison.
Each document is parsed and compared separately, in order, so you can review differences within each individual document of a multi-document file.
No, parsing and diffing both happen locally in your browser.