Both RegexBuddy and RegexMagic are designed to make it easy to create regular expressions. But the approach is totally different. The main design goal behind RegexBuddy is to make it easy to learn and work with the regular expression syntax. RegexBuddy makes no attempt to shield you from the complexities of regular expressions. Instead, it tries to make your life easier by clearly explaining and showing you how a regex works, or doesn’t. As such, RegexBuddy is primarily of interest to people who already know or who want to learn the ins and outs of regular expressions. Complete beginners can use RegexBuddy, but there will be a learning curve. RegexMagic has the opposite goal. With RegexMagic, you don’t deal with the regular expression syntax at all. Instead, you work with high-level RegexMagic “patterns” to tell RegexMagic what you want. RegexMagic generates complete regular expressions for you. As such, RegexMagic is primarily of interest to people who want to quickly generate regular expressions, without learning (much) about regular expressions as a technology. Experts will find RegexMagic useful for specific tasks such as generating a regex that matches numbers between 256 and 512. There’s nothing difficult about the regex 51[0-2]|50[0-9]|[34][0-9]{2}|2[6-9][0-9]|25[6-9], but unless you use RegexMagic, it is a chore to create. The best deal is of course to get both products. Use RegexMagic to generate new regular expressions from scratch. RegexMagic makes that far easier than RegexBuddy. Use RegexBuddy to edit regular expressions written by other people. You can paste any regular expression into RegexBuddy, even if it’s formatted as a literal string or regex in source code. RegexMagic cannot edit existing regular expressions, unless they were generated with RegexMagic and you have the RegexMagic file for them. | “Thank you for your excellent products! I use them all regularly and am very satisfied with them. I have PowerGREP, EditPad Pro, RegexBuddy, and RegexMagic. I consider them all essential tools, and a great value. I initially thought PowerGREP was more than I needed and too expensive, and therefore bought a cheaper competing product. What a bad decision and a waste of money! After trying to make do with an inferior product, I bought PowerGREP and have never looked back.” — Brent Nelson 27 August 2009, Texas, USA |