MP4Tools vs MP4Joiner: What Is the Difference?

They are not competing products, and you do not have to choose between them. MP4Joiner is one program; MP4Tools is the suite that contains it. When you “download MP4Joiner”, what you actually download is the MP4Tools installer.

The relationship, plainly

  • MP4Tools = the suite (and the installer package), by Alex Thüring, free and open source under the GNU GPL.
  • MP4Joiner = the suite’s merging program: it joins multiple MP4 files into one, without re-encoding when the clips share encoding parameters.
  • MP4Splitter = the suite’s splitting program: it divides one file into parts. It joined the suite in version 3.0 (2015); before that, MP4Joiner stood alone.

Why the filenames say MP4Tools

The current release files are named MP4Tools-3.8-win32.exe, MP4Tools-3.8-MacOSX.dmg and MP4Tools-3.8.tar.bz2 because the package being versioned and shipped is the suite: version 3.8 of MP4Tools, released 20 November 2019. Installing any of them gives you both programs at once — there is no separate “MP4Joiner-only” installer to hunt for, and a file named like a standalone MP4Joiner installer did not come from the project.

Which name should you search for?

Either lands in the right place: the project is hosted on SourceForge under the MP4Joiner name, while its downloads carry the MP4Tools name. For the files themselves, use our download page; for the splitting half, see MP4Splitter; and for the release timeline behind the naming, see the version history.

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