#SOFTWARE SIMILAR TO BEYOND COMPARE SOFTWARE#
#SOFTWARE SIMILAR TO BEYOND COMPARE TRIAL#

That allowed us to keep competing even when we were lagging in other areas. In our case BC’s directory comparison is much more powerful than the alternatives, and we have viewers for other file types like images, binary files, and data files.

We work 8 hours a day on it, which gives us more time to develop new features than someone doing it as a hobby, and we can afford commercial libraries that someone providing a free utility can’t.Īs for the commercial competitors, it’s mostly a matter of providing something that they don’t. The big advantage we have here is that people are paying us for the software, so we have strong incentive to provide good tech support and to provide the features they want.

How do you manage to run a successful business with so many competitors, many of them free?Ĭompeting with the free tools hasn’t been as hard as I expected. There are lots of different file comparison tools. There’s one other full-time developer, one part time developer, two in tech support, two in sales, and our president, who handles everything else. How many other people work on Beyond Compare on the business side and on the development side? My non-development tasks include managing the build process, interfacing with our component vendors, keeping track of any interns, and tech support, when there’s difficult questions or when the dedicated staff don’t have time. Most of my time is spent working on the directory comparison and the virtual filesystem layer (ftp, zips, version control), but there are very few places in the program that I haven’t worked on. I’m the lead developer and I started here in late 2000, a few months before significant development on v2 started. How long have you been working on Beyond Compare and what is your role? I did a lot of programming for fun before then, but this was my first professional job and my first introduction to Delphi.

#SOFTWARE SIMILAR TO BEYOND COMPARE SOFTWARE#

I started at Scooter Software straight out of college.

How had they succeeded despite ignoring much of the conventional wisdom? Craig Peterson of Scooter Software kindly agreed to answer my questions.Ĭan you tell me a bit about your background before working on Beyond Compare.

#SOFTWARE SIMILAR TO BEYOND COMPARE TRIAL#

But I was intrigued by some of the unusual decisions they had taken: competing in a market with lots of free alternatives going 6 years between major upgrades re-writing from scratch releasing a Linux version and having an extremely generous trial policy. It is a very polished and powerful piece of software with a big following. I am a fan of file and folder comparison utility Beyond Compare from Scooter Software.

Software similar to beyond compare