It depends on what exact action you are using, and what the purpose of that action is.
For the update actions, for example, there should always be hooks that are triggered before doing the change (so that you may change or prevent it), and hooks that are triggered after the change has been completed (so that you can react to changes).
In your “user” case, if you want to compare the existing vs the changed user, you want to hook into the user_profile_update_errors action. This action gives you an object that shows you what the intended changes are, and whether there’s already an existing user. In that case, you can retrieve the existing user through its ID and compare them both.
See: https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference/user_profile_update_errors
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