Academia and industry are increasingly concerned with producing general-purpose model comparison techniques to support many software engineering activities, e.g., clone detection or model composition. However, the current methods fail to provide flexible and reusable architectures, a comprehensive understanding of the critical composition activities, and guidelines about how developers can use and extend them. These limitations are one of the reasons why state-of-the-art techniques are often unable to aid the development of new comparison tools. To overcome these shortcomings, this paper, therefore, proposes a flexible, component-based architecture for aiding the development of comparison techniques. Moreover, an intelligible comparison workflow is proposed to support developers to improve the understanding of significant comparison activities and their relationships.