Formaldehyde (H2CO) tropospheric columns have been retrieved since 2007 from backscattered UV radiance measurements performed by the GOME-2 instrument on the EUMETSAT METOP-A platform. This data set extends the successful time-series of global H2CO observations established with GOME/ERS-2 (1996-2003), SCIAMACHY/ENVISAT (2003-now), and OMI on the NASA AURA platform (2005-now). In this work, we perform an intercomparison of the H2CO tropospheric columns retrieved from GOME-2 and OMI between 2007 and 2011, respectively at BIRA-IASB and at Harvard SAO. We first compare the global formaldehyde data products that are provided by each retrieval group, respectively via the TEMIS and NASA/mirador websites (http://www.temis.nl and http://mirador.gsfc.nasa.gov/). We then investigate each step of the retrieval procedure: the slant column fitting, the reference sector correction and the air mass factor calculation. Air mass factors are computed for OMI using external parameters consistent with those used for GOME-2. By doing so, the impacts of the different a priori profiles and aerosol corrections are quantified. The remaining differences are evaluated in view of the expected diurnal variations of the formaldehyde concentrations, using simulations performed with the IMAGES CTM.