SmartGit is very handy at viewing diffs, logs, history and deleting/staging working copy files
SpecsUpdate
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Clean UI
The UI is clean and therefore very easy to use. The main view only displays the files that have changed and buttons to commit, merge, push or pull branch(es).
Pro Easy to use
SmartGit is a very easy tool to use even without any prior git experience.
Pro Smart embedded difference viewer
When the changes affect only a few characters in a line of code, the embedded difference viewers in the majority of competitors (such as SourceTree) show the whole line as removed and re-added. SmartGit highlights the characters that have been removed / added, so they are easier to read.
Pro Great view of the timeline of the project (the log)
Pro Free for private use
SmartGit is free as long as it's being used for private projects not meant to be profitable.
Pro Git-flow support
Git-flow provides a consistent development process by defining a strict branching model that is great for managing large projects. SmartGit/Hg allows for setting up and integrating into repos that follow this model.
Pro Supports Git, Mercurial, and SVN
SmartGit/Hg supports Git and Mercurial, as well as SVN via git bridge.
Pro Portable version for Windows available
SmartGit also has a portable bundle that can be downloaded and can be run from external devices (such as a flash drive for example).
Pro GPG support
GPG in SmartGit makes for added security.
Pro Auto-detects repositories on disk
Pro Best submodule workflow on the market
You can easily update submodules from the containing repo, unlike other GUIs that require you to open each repo separately. Saves a lot of time when working on a monorepo managed using submodules.
Cons
Con Irritating starting screen
The start screen gets on top of all and every window that's open until SmartGit itself opens up (which takes some time).
Con Auto clean-up consumes a lot of resources
Leaving SmartGit idle for some time will launch project clean-up, which uses a lot of PC processing power, making it completely unusable until it finishes. This can be disabled from the options menu, but should have been disabled by default.
Con Proprietary license
Free only for personal usage and not an open source license.
Con Some git functionality has been renamed
In order to preserve the same interface across Git and Mercurial, some naming compromises have been made so that the various VCS it supports are all consistent with each other.