TextArray vs JSONLint
Updated September 1, 2026
JSONLint is the name most people reach for when a payload will not parse. It describes itself as "a validator and reformatter for JSON", and around that core it has grown a tree view, a minifier, a comparison view, schema validation, a JWT decoder and converters to CSV, YAML, XML, SQL and several languages. There is also a Mac app and a Chrome extension.
TextArray does the same JSON jobs — format, validate, diff, flatten, convert to CSV or to a typed struct in a dozen languages — and then keeps going into text, encoding, dates, subtitles, CSS and everything else. The trade is breadth against a site that is unambiguously about one format.
Where JSONLint is strong
- A single, obvious home for JSON work — you never have to search for the right tool on it.
- A tree view for reading a large document, which is a genuinely different way of looking at a payload than an indented dump.
- Native surfaces beyond the website: a Mac app and a Chrome extension.
On the JSON overlap the two are close, and which one wins depends on the specific job. JSONLint has the tree view; TextArray has the wider set of generated targets — Go, Rust, Swift, Kotlin, Zod, Protobuf, Mongoose — and a JSON diff that reads structurally rather than line by line.
The difference that will decide it for most people is what happens to the payload. TextArray runs every tool inside the browser tab and states so on every page, with a build-time check that fails the deploy if any page would contact a third party. A payload pasted into a validator is often the one thing in a debugging session you would rather not send anywhere, and that constraint is the reason this site exists.