The page is divided into three columns, so that the middle column shows configuration structures which are exactly same on both configuration files, and the columns on left and right show entries that differ between the servers.

The comparison algorithm uses heuristics to determine whether two differing configuration statement structures are instances of the same configuration entry, or completely distinct. If the structures are determined to be the same, albeit different, they will be shown in the left and right column of the same table row. If no similarity to any other statement is found by the algorithm, the statement structure will be shown alone in either the leftmost or rightmost column depending on which server it was found from. If several separate structures seem to match on one of the servers to a single structure on the other server, all apparent matches will be shown on the other column.

Since the heuristic comparison algorithm is based on similarity, it can sometimes yield both false negatives and false positives, i.e. it can fail to recognize two statements as representations of the same structure if the differences between the two are great. Equally, if there are two very similar structures that do not represent the same configuration data at all, they may still be recognized as being instances of the same data.