EDIFACT stands for Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce, and Transport and is a standard developed by the United Nations. The EDIFACT standard provides an internationally agreed message format, directories, and guidelines for multi-country and multi-industry EDI communications.
Tradacoms is an EDI standard introduced in 1982 as a precursor to EDIFACT and subsequently maintained and extended by GS1 UK. The development of Tradacoms ended in 1995 in favor of the EDIFACT EANCOM subsets.
ANSI X12 stands for American National Standards Institute X12 and refers to the American EDI standard developed in 1979.
Developed in 1987, EANCOM was created as a subset of the EDIFACT standard.
EDI via the XML open standard differs greatly to other standards-based EDI, because XML is made up of information gathered into tags rather than having set positions for the data like the EDIFACT and X12 standard.