Comparison of generalized diff libraries for Python

It is often said there are more generalized diff libraries for Python than stars in the Milky Way. Here I compare them all.

Did I miss one or do you have suggestions for other criteria? Feel free to open an issue!

What do I mean by "generalized diff"?

While regular UNIX diff is well-suited to comparing files / strings of characters, there are libraries for most programming languages that allow comparing structured data like JSON or that language's JSON equivalent (in Python: dicts, lists and primitives, called "JSON-ish" from here on), producing patches written in terms of that structure rather than in terms of lines and characters. That's what I mean by "generalized diff". I guess other terms would be "data diff", "structure diff", "structured data diff", "JSON diff", or something along those lines.

Comparison

Name / URL	Supported data structures	Diff/patch output formats	Can apply patches	Diffing time complexity
jsonpatch	JSON-ish	JSON Patch (RFC 6902)	✔	?
DeepDiff	JSON-ish arbitrary Python objects that define __slots__ or __dict__	DeepDiff objects dict representation of DeepDiff JSON representation of DeepDiff	❌	O(n) when not ignoring order, otherwise ?
jycm	JSON-ish	own JSON-ish format	❌	?
jsondiff	JSON-ish	own JSON-ish format	✔ (undocumented)	?

Excluded

These projects have names that might suggest they'd fit the bill, but were excluded from the comparison for the stated reasons:

• json-diff: Is just a CLI tool with no (documented) API.
• json-diff-patch: Is just a CLI tool with no (documented) API (yet). Also not released to PyPI yet.