20 best alternatives to GitExtensions as of 2021

tig

All

Experiences

Pros

Cons

Specs

Top Pro

Allows you to stay in the terminal

If you prefer to do most of your development inside the terminal, changing windows to move to a GUI git client can be annoying. Since tig runs inside the terminal, that's avoided. See More

Top Con

Steeper barrier to entry as compared to a GUI solution

Since you have to get used to working in the terminal (if you are not already used to doing that) and learn the commands, it has a steeper learning curve than GUI clients which are usually more intuitive and easier to grasp. See More

Top Pro

Fast

Top Pro

Vim-like bindings

Top Pro

Available in Homebrew

Can easily be installed with homebrew simply by running brew install tig See More

Top Pro

Works on any platform

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Technology:C

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72 5

Magit

Top Pro

Uninterrupted workflow for common tasks

Simple tasks, such as commits, can quickly be made without leaving the editor. See More

Top Con

Useful only for people who use Emacs

Magit is only useful if your text editor of choice is Emacs. It wouldn't really make any sense to open up emacs just to run Magit if you use another editor. See More

Top Pro

Diffs are easy

Since it's integrated with Emacs, diffs are very easy to fix. You can jump right to any file you want to fix as soon as it comes up in the logs or in the status view. See More

Top Pro

Easy to remember mnemonics

You can easily learn the mnemonics for the most common tasks and use them to your advantage to speed up your workflow. See More

Top Pro

Better visualization and interactive workflow

Top Pro

Stage hunks or even just parts of a hunk using a single key press

In Magit staging a hunk or even just part of a hunk is very easy. Magit also implements several other "apply variants" in addition to staging and unstaging. For example: you can also discard or reverse a change, or apply it to the working tree. See More

Top Pro

Blame information can be viewed inline with the file

Top Pro

Multiple buffers are used to show contextual information

Top Pro

Powerful rebasing

Top Pro

Available in Homebrew

brew install magit See More

Specs

Platforms:Any supported by Emacs (Linux, Windows,macOS,*BSD...)

License:GPLv3

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116 17

SmartGit

Top Pro

Free for non-commercial use (with some restrictions)

SmartGit can be used free of charge by Open Source developers, teachers and their students, or for hobby, non-paid usage. However, some features are only available with paid versions, like JIRA/GitHub Entreprise/Bitbucket integration, distributed review, DeepGit. See More

Top Con

Proprietary license

Not an open source license. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use

The clean and intuitive UI makes SmartGit very easy even for people with no prior experience with Git, even after reading just a bit on how Git works and what the main commands are. See More

Top Con

Very expensive and no multi-user licences

91 EUR per year per person for the base version is more expensive than top development IDEs, and is exaggerated. No multi-user and no site licence either, which makes the licence management a pain. See More

Top Pro

Uncluttered UI

SmartGit has a rather clean and uncluttered user interface. All the most useful tools and information are displayed at all times or are otherwise just a couple of clicks away. All repositories are displayed in the sidebar and through a tabbed interface you can view various info about a specific repository (files, branches, branch graph, etc). The most used git commands like pull, push, sync, commit and merge are always available on top. See More

Top Con

Unintuitive UI

At first glance, the sub windows are poorly organized. For example, there isn't an easy way to navigate the files in the repository. It's drastically differently designed than other popular source control clients. See More

Top Pro

Great overview of the project/repository's log

SmartGit's log viewer displays the full commit history in a clean UI. This can be filtered to only show commits matching a certain criterion (e.g. branch). See More

Top Con

Absolute git beginners will find it very complicated

If you're just starting out with git, SmartGit might feel overwhelming as it does not dumb-down the complexities of git but exposes everything. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Con

Diff display doesn't show long lines well

If changes are made in very long lines, the diff display is hard to navigate. See More

Top Pro

Supports GitFlow

GitFlow provides a consistent development process by defining a strict branching model that is great for managing large projects. SmartGit allows for setting up and integrating into repos that follow this model. See More

Top Con

Currently lacks support for git subtree

It's a useful feature when developing several independent project modules in parallel. See More

Top Pro

Can be integrated with Github, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Atlassian Stash

Using OAuth, you can connect SmartGit with your accounts in Github, GitLab, Bitbucket, or Stash and access the remote repositories there. You can then clone, fork, commit or push to your remote repositories from inside SmartGit. You can also view and manage pull requests for your open source projects from SmartGit. See More

Top Con

font size too small and cannot be changed

Top Pro

Auto stash

If normal Git commands would abort because of local modifications, SmartGit can stash them and apply later after the command ran successfully, e.g. a rebase. See More

Top Con

Requires non-beginner level of GIT to appreciate fully

Top Pro

Has the most features and most logical layout

Compared to gitk, git gui, SourceTree, GitKraken. See More

Top Con

Free version doesn't support Gitlab Community Edition

It requires paid commercial version. See More

Top Pro

Syntax coloring for many languages

The built-in compare and conflict solver has syntax coloring with customizable colors. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Allows rearranging views

If screen space is limited, one can stack some views onto another. 2 layouts are available - "Main" and "Review" - with independent view positions. See More

Top Con

It can be slow and resource hungry

It was written in Java, which is known for being a resource hog, and it can be slow on some machines, as well as prone to errors if developers are not very experienced. See More

Top Pro

Auto-detects repositories on disk

You don't have to search all the repositories when trying out SmartGit the 1st time, but it finds all of them magically. See More

Top Pro

Log with fine-grained display of branches

There is no option of just showing the current branch or all branches, but you can select very fine-grained what branches/forks should be displayed. See More

Top Pro

Extendable with external tools

External tools (which have a command line support) can be integrated to be used to open/view files, for diff or as conflict solvers. E.g. editors like Notepad++ or VS Code, p4merge to diff images or kdiff3 as diff view/conflict solver. See More

Top Pro

Great filtering options

The file list view can be tweaked and filtered in many ways (e.g. regex can be used). See More

Top Pro

Supports Mercurial & SVN

Apart from Git, SmartGit supports both Mercurial and SVN via a git bridge. See More

Top Pro

Log: ability to see dangling commits and stash commits

Rebased, but not yet garbage-collected commits can be easily made accessible again, e.g. after a reset hard. See More

Top Pro

The best multi-repository support

Can make a repo group containing multiple repos; it acts as a meta repo. Can submit selected files from multiple repos in a repo group in one commit action; uses the same commit message in all the repo commits. See More

Top Pro

Great support

Support responds quickly and they genuinely try to help you! If it's a bug, it will often be fixed within days. See More

Top Pro

Can edit file in workspace or index directly from the compare view

This is very useful when reviewing files before committing and finding a needed quick tweak. See More

Top Pro

Journal dedicated for current branch history

Showing commits from the current branch, its remote branch and one auxiliary branch. Independent of the that, there is a log window available that allows to view all (other) commits. See More

Top Pro

Every git command is available through the GUI

Not every, but nearly all. See More

Top Pro

Portable version for Windows is 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) or to test-drive without leaving traces on the machine after removing. See More

Top Pro

Ability to follow only first parent in the Log window

This is extremely useful in histories with a lot of merges. You can focus on the changes on the main branch and expand into a merged branch with a single click when you need to. See More

Top Pro

Can detect issue numbers and links to the issue tracker

Supports GitBugTraq file. See More

Top Pro

Can rearrange Repository window and Log window views/panels

This allows great layouts as desired. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Supports selecting open issues from JIRA

Allows you to select the desired issue, instead of having to do it manually. See More

Top Pro

GPG support

GPG in SmartGit makes for added security. See More

Top Pro

Excellent dark theme

And support for own themes. See More

Top Pro

Offers life-time updates

One payment, get updates for all future versions. See More

Top Pro

Evolution submission program

See here. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Top Pro

UX design is synergy with how a developer actually works

It may look confusing at first, but once you know each part, you love how useful they are. See More

Top Pro

Git squash

Git squash is a pain on CLI, and most Git clients allow some king of squash during Rebase only. I really like the Ctrl+J shortcup to simply squash commits. See More

Specs

Platforms:Linux, Mac, Windows

Pro Features:Conflict Solver and Compare (freely editable); Pull Requests, Comments for BitBucket, GitHub and provider independent (Distributed Review add-on); Git-Flow; highly configurable views, external tools

Issue Tracker support:Atlassian JIRA

Pull Request/Comments support:Atlassian Stash, BitBucket, GitHub, own Git server (Distributed Review add-on)

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1442 276

Fork

Top Pro

Fast and easy to use

Top Con

Requires granting access to your git projects for the developer of the app

Top Pro

Dark theme support

Top Con

Still a young client, thus not as feature rich

This git GUI client is quite young compared to industry old-timers like git-tower 2 or SourceTree. So it's not as feature rich as you'd like. Still a very capable client for a simple day-to-day work. See More

Top Pro

Comfortable when staging line-by-line changes

This feature is superior to the one that is implemented by SourceTree as it does not reset the file scroll view to the top of the file after each stage. If you do feature-specific commits after some time of development - it's very important to be able to easily compose the commit from different line-based changes. See More

Top Con

No Linux version

This git client is not compatible with Linux making the life harder for the developers that work on both, MacOS and some Linux distro. See More

Top Pro

Highlights the difference within a line

Top Pro

Smart Diff is very handy

Top Pro

Merge Conflict Resolution is great

Top Pro

Free (for the moment)

The majority of work on Fork is done in the developers' spare time and, despite requests from the Fork community (who are keen to support the app), the product is still free. The developers are open about the possibility that they might make it a paid app at some point in the future, but the price is expected to be low and it will not be on a subscription basis. See More

Top Pro

Overall aesthetic

The GUI components are flawless on the Mac. It is expected to be a similar experience on Windows. Once you realize that you can filter by branch, your appreciation for the product will go up dramatically. See More

Top Pro

Comfortable keyboard shortcuts

Top Pro

Tabbed interface

Several repos can be open at once in individual tabs, so it's trivial to switch back and forth between them. See More

Top Pro

Repositories with uncommitted changes have a * next to their name

This is an update from previous versions. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS

Price:$50

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303 83

Ungit

Top Con

Node.js dependent

Top Pro

Free and Open Source Software

Ungit is open source software available under the MIT Licence. See More

Top Con

Setup is not user-friendly

Ungit is distributed as an NPM package and requires git and Node.js to be installed on your system before you can run it. Ungit must be launched by running ungit in a command line terminal. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Works on Windows, Linux, and OS X. See More

Top Con

Exposes git commands to your network

No authentication, if someone can communicate with your computer on the port this is running on, they can execute any git command they want on your repos as well as view your filesystem's folders. See More

Top Pro

Optional Integration with Modern Text Editors

Ungit can be integrated directly into modern text editors, Atom, Brackets, and VS Code. See More

Top Pro

Web-based interface

Ungit is web-based, meaning you can run it on your cloud/pure shell machine and then use the UI from your browser. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Mac, Linux

Price:Free

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28 11

GitKraken

Top Pro

Beautiful user interface

It's modern and beautiful, it looks clean and refined. It's simple: the most used features (pull, push, branch, stash, commit) are accessible in one click, and are the only buttons. The other features aren't in complicated menus nor in hundreds of buttons, but rather displayed when you right-click on something. It gives more space to the commits, i.e. the most important things. In fact, you can collapse or reduce the other menus/windows. It displays the current path (project, branch) on an horizontal (clickable) bar at the top. It's just a matter of taste but I prefer this to the traditional "tree" view. It has undo and redo buttons on the main window. It supports some drag-and-drop gestures (for example: drag-and-droping the local branch to the remote one pushes it). See More

Top Con

Must log into GitKraken servers to use the free version

All functionality is disabled unless you register for a free account and remain logged in. There is the $99/user/yr Enterprise option. It allows you to deploy a Linux License Server in an air-gapped/offline environment. See More

Top Pro

Extremely easy to use

A lot of care has gone into trying to make GitKraken as easy and intuitive as possible and it show. Every action is quick and painless with no more user interaction than necessary. For example, switching to another branch is as easy as a double-click on the sidebar. See More

Top Con

Has memory-related issues

Like most Electron apps, GitKraken has some memory-related issues. For starter, it requires more memory for an action than an equivalent non-Electron application. Although this should not be a problem most of the time for people who use machines with lots of RAM (after all, RAM is pretty cheap nowadays), it can have some issues when opening large repositories and there have been cases where GitKraken failed to open very large repositories or started lagging once they were opened. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Built on top of Electron, so it runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows. See More

Top Con

Not open source

It is gratis (no cost) but is not open source. The community cannot fix problems in it, audit it for security, or trust it in general. See More

Top Pro

Offers a simple way of undoing mistakes

GitKraken has simple undo/redo buttons that work the same way you'd expect in any other software. See More

Top Con

Not free for commercial use

The free version of GitKraken cannot be used in commercial projects. See More

Top Pro

Some of the best integration with hosted version control services

GitKraken can be connected to Github, Gitlab, or Bitbucket accounts through OAuth. From that point onward most if not all actions that are related to these services can be done inside GitKraken. Things like: cloning or forking a repository, adding a remote, pushing to a remote repository hosted on these services can be done inside the app. You can even manage pull requests inside GitKraken for example. All pull requests for a certain branch for example are shown on that branch's graph. See More

Top Con

Slow

Can take between 2 and 5 seconds to load a repository, if not crashing while loading See More

Top Pro

Free version available

There are both pro and free versions available. The free version is pretty complete feature-wise for day-to-day operations. See More

Top Con

No longer free for use with private repos

You can use GitKraken for free if you're working on a public hosted repo, but you can no longer work on a private hosted one without paying. See More

Top Pro

Under constant improvement

A quick glance at GitKraken's release notes shows how frequently it's updated. Updates are released on a 2-4 week cycle and each one brings new features and bug fixes. See More

Top Con

Crashes once in a while

Under specific circumstances, like resetting 5000+ changes, the GUI will crash. See More

Top Pro

Has a FuzzyFinder

GitKraken has a fuzzy finder to switch between repos/files. See More

Top Con

Has annoying popup reminders that ask you to upgrade to the Pro version

Understandable, since nobody is entitled to use work done by others for free, but annoying nonetheless. See More

Top Pro

GitFlow support out of the box

Supports GitFlow out of the box. See More

Top Con

Not free for private repository

The last update made the app total nonsense. from now on, you need to purchase a license if you have a private project. See More

Top Pro

Perfect for beginner developers

GitKraken is easy to use and is brilliant for the beginner developers See More

Top Con

Amending merge output is a pro feature

In most cases of Merge Conflicts, users are stuck with auto-merge or manually resolving it by hand. This is because in the Free Tier, users can only (1) Keep File (ver 1), (2) Keep File (ver 2), (3) Auto-merge, or (4) Use External Merge Tool. In addition, using External Merge Tools is very limited because GitKraken (all tiers) restricts External Merge Tools to only those it managed to Auto-detect. It also does not support custom arguments for the External Tools. Modifying the merge output directly, or Selecting lines to keep/discard, is a Paid Feature. See More

Top Pro

Has a dark theme

No more eyestrain staring at white screens - GitKraken has a lovely dark theme. See More

Top Con

Not free for private projects

The FREE plan does not allow you to open private repositories. This seems to be a recent change as of November 2019, previously that was ok. See More

Top Pro

Good keyboard shortcuts

Top Con

Not free for private repos

It is no more free for use with private in-house repos. On top, need to log onto the gitkraken account to use it at all. It's like enrolling in a home depot account just to be able to open your own front door. See More

Top Con

Can be confusing

Top Con

Ugly, looks like a web app

Top Con

No real commitement to Linux support

Infinite loop on Fedora 28, no debug feature or stacktrace available, no clear dependencies listing.... No real support on Linux. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS, Linux

Pricing:FREE, $29/year for Individual, $49/user/yr for Pro, $99/user/yr for Stand-Alone or Self-Hosted

Integrations:GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, Azure DevOps, GitHub Enterprise, GitLab Self-Hosted, Bitbucket Server, Jira Cloud/Server Issues, GitKraken Boards Issues

Free Version:Yes

See All Specs

See All Experiences

917 382

GitHub Desktop

Top Con

Limited

Can't handle complex tasks. The Help Manual advises to use command-line Git instead. See More

Top Pro

Great GitHub integration

This is the official GitHub desktop client built by the GitHub team. See More

Top Con

Does not support multiple Remotes for a repo

Only allowed to assign one URL as remote. To manage/sync/fetch other remotes, use command-line Git instead. See More

Top Pro

Simple, streamlined GUI

GitHub Desktop uses an extremely simplistic two-panel view. It's not capable of complex historical visualisations like other GUIs, but it is very easy to use (especially for git novices). See More

Top Con

Overly Simplified UI

UI that is designed not to support the needs of power and enterprise users. Management of more than five repos is next to impossible. See More

Top Pro

Supports pull requests

In addition to being able to seamlessly and easily integrate with all of GitHub's features, it also supports forking and submitting pull requests on any open source project hosted on GitHub. See More

Top Con

Buggy

Poster child for authors' programming ideology (FRP), likely the cause for the odd quirks and bugs it has. See More

Top Con

Not free/libre

This application is proprietary, and thus cannot be modified or freely distributed. See More

Top Con

No Linux support

There's no Linux version of this client. See More

Top Con

Non-GitHub repositories are not fully supported

Since this is mainly a GitHub client, other repositories are not fully supported and with as many features and setting up a repo hosted anywhere else but GitHub is troublesome. See More

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109 66

fugitive (via vim)

Top Pro

Great visualization and interactive workflow

The visualization and workflow are great in fugitive. You can do side-by-side or even intra-line diffs all without having to leave your text editor. See More

Top Con

Poor documentation

The documentation is rather poor and not very helpful. See More

Top Pro

Uninterrupted workflow for common tasks

Simple tasks, such as commits, can quickly be made without leaving the editor. See More

Top Pro

Seamlessly "Dive into Diffs" to trace the origin & intent of code

git blame only shows the last change (e.g. a variable rename), but how do you find the origin of the code? :GBlame to open blame window o on the relevant line to "git show" the commit select a diff line from a previous version of the file, and hit o to open it repeat 1 - 3, jumping back through history to find the origin of the line See More

13 0

SourceTree

Top Con

Requires an account to install and use

Need an Atlassian account to install. See More

Top Pro

Informative branch visualization

In addition to color-coded branches and icons that tell if a file has been added, removed or modified, SourceTree also displays the number of commits that are ahead and behind the remote branch. See More

Top Con

Can sometimes be slow

Some operations can be slow. If you know what you want (e.g you want to touch a file, add it, commit it, and push it) you can do it much faster on the command line. However you're often not going to know what you want, so the visual diffs (for example) help massively. See More

Top Pro

Comprehensive layout

SourceTree has three main repository views: file status, history, and search. File status view shows status of currently selected repo. It's split into two areas - file list and diff-view. History view tracks changes made to the currently selected repository. It's divided into three sections. The top section has a graph with progression of commits, branches, and merges. The bottom section shows commit details, files changed, and differences committed. Search view allows looking up commit messages, users, files changes, branches, and commit SHA. There's also a toolbar at the top that allows switching between the three views, as well as giving access to git commands (such as commit, checkout, reset, stash, add, remove, fetch, pull, push, branch, merge, and tag). See More

Top Con

Always slow

Top Pro

Built-in Git-flow and Hg-flow support

Git-flow and Hg-flow provide a consistent development process by defining a strict branching model that is great for managing large projects. SourceTree allows setting up and integrating into repos that follow this model. Clicking the Git-flow / Hg-flow toolbar button will give you access to actions for starting or finishing features, releases or hotfixes depending on the current state of repository. See More

Top Con

Terrible for resolving merge conflicts

It's hard to tell when you are in a conflict state, let alone what to do if it happens. See More

Top Pro

Quick setup

Once installed, SourceTree will automatically try to look for and set up repos that are worked on. SourceTree will also detect if git-flow is used and what is the current development state as long as default git-flow branch names are used. The software tracks all relevant repositories in the bookmark's window. Repositories can be added to the list by creating new ones, adding a local folder, supplying a clone URL or integrating with remote services such as Bitbucket or GitHub. See More

Top Con

Unstable and terrible UX

The Windows version of SourceTree is riddled with bugs, causing some users to find it unusable. These include failing to refresh, frequent freezing, and slow performance. The recent redesign (February 2016) has made the UI difficult to navigate. See More

Top Pro

Simple yet powerful

SourceTree allows you to do advanced Git operations while making them straight-forward for those who are still adjusting to Git. See More

Top Con

Chews CPU

Top Pro

Allows chunks and lines selection during commit

SourceTree automatically splits the changes to be committed into chunks allowing committing (or discarding) each chunk separately. Furthermore, the user can even select specific lines. This greatly increases the flexibility of the user in that matter. See More

Top Con

Requires users to be online when starting up

As of 2.3.5, it needs to dial home on every start-up, else it raises alerts to compliance. See More

Top Pro

Built-in integration with Stash and Bitbucket

Sourcetree integrates with repositories hosted on Bitbucket, Stash, GitHub, and Kiln. See More

Top Con

The UI of version 2.0+ is so terrible

Tab looks good if you have no more than five repos. If you have a lot, you will know my pain. The source tree will not remember the order of the tab you drag. Everytime you restart the app, it will go back to whatever it likes. See More

Top Pro

Free

Top Con

Does not allow offline installation

Upon installation, the splash screen prompts you to login. There used to be a workaround for you to manually deploy this application in an offline environment, but they've patched it as of 2.0.20.1. It now does a dial-home on each start-up. Since it cannot reach the server, it throws an error to the user, and raises alerts to compliance. Atlassian's final decision was that they are not going to support this feature at all. Quoted from their staff: "We’ve never officially supported any form of pre-installation on device management capabilities. [...] As you know, last year, we removed the notion licensing and asked our developers to register the product by creating an Atlassian account. That said, SourceTree has always been a tool for the individual (emphasis mine) developer." See More

Top Pro

Supports Git LFS

Top Con

Browsing folders is troublesome

Choosing files of specific folders for check-in is troublesome. See More

Top Pro

Git terminal

Comes with own built-in git terminal independent from other git installations and updated regularly. It's especially good for git beginners who would like to use advanced git functions, but are not ready yet. See More

Top Con

DEPRECATED -No dark theme

Dark Theme is now available on Windows as well as the MacOS version. See More

Top Pro

Supports Git, Mercurial, and Subversion

Allows managing Git & Mercurial repos side by side. It even allows Subversion interoperability via git-svn or hgsubversion plugins which set up a bridge between either Git and SVN or Mercurial and SVN respectively. See More

Top Con

Not even possible to change the password

There are tickets about this issue sitting there for years and marked as medium priority. I experienced this since version 1.8. Up until now, there has been no fix. If your company's policy is going to enforce you to change your password, it means you need to remove all the repos and clone them again everytime you change the password. This is the worst ever experience. See More

Top Con

Varied speeds across different versions

For example, the Windows version is quite slow is comparison to the Mac version. See More

Top Con

Poor UX for interactive rebase

The interactive rebase window is a pain to use, with poor UX, such as not refreshing the list once a change is made. It's a downgrade from git rebase --interactive. See More

Top Con

Not always recognizes changed files

Seems to not always recognize changed files, which means that they will not be pushed to remote origin either. This means if you switch branches, the files will be overwritten and you lose your progress. Very annoying. See More

Top Con

CRLF on Windows is a nightmare

There is a bug in 'Discard hunk' and 'Discard lines' constantly interrupting the work flow with inserting wrong line endings. Click here for more details. See More

Top Con

UI is buggy and getting worse with updates

UI elements have been critically broken over the last few updates--interactive rebase for example has been entirely nonfunctional for the last 3 versions--and from the JIRA tickets, it seems UI bugs are not being addressed or triaged. With the declining stability and lack of QA for this product over the last 2-3years, SourceTree seems a risky choice for teams going forward. See More

Top Con

Has trouble with Github's Yubikey integration

When your 2FA is a hardware key, it is difficult to find a way to bring up the ability to use anything but a pre-programmed password function on the Yubikey, which doesn't add much to security all things considered what a hardware key is supposed to do. See More

Top Con

Crashes frequently

Stops responding every 5 minutes. See More

Top Con

Login problems

Frequently unable to log in, despite the correct password. See More

Top Con

Uninstalling won't remove the installation completely

If You decide to uninstall, you'll have to manually go to the folder inside the system and directly delete the files. If you uninstalled to reinstall fresh, this is a big issue. See More

Top Con

Can't select install location

You can't select the install location (anymore). This is terrible for enterprise environments. It insists to install into "Users/<Name>/AppData/Local". What? Where? Why not "Recycle Bin" or Windows Temp? See More

Top Con

Often rebuilds the graph visually noisy

E.g. after a reset command, the graph disappears and reappears after a few moments. See More

Top Con

Flawed installer

Enforced registration process doesn't work, shows failure when connected to Bitbucket. Windows are too small to display installation text and options. Installs unwanted icon on the desktop. Slow and unresponsive at times. See More

Top Con

Blame MS Office's word correction dictionary to be the source of the slowness while it's not

It's so obvious that ever since 2.0, it will try refreshing each of the repo a few minutes. If you have a lot then it will drive you crazy. When you try to expand a branch node, it refreshes. Try again, OOPS, it refreshed again. Sometimes, it will take you five minutes to select the node you want. See More

Top Con

Information density can be a bit much

It's possible to become overwhelmed with the information density presented in SourceTree. This is especially the case in history view, as it includes a lot of data presented in various ways. Though this is great for getting a comprehensive overview of everything that's happening in one place, it can take some getting used to. See More

Top Con

No auto stash

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS

Price:Free

See All Experiences

587 373

Sublime Merge

Top Pro

Pure Git behind the scenes

All actions are real Git actions which minimizes confusion and makes it perfect for beginners and professionals alike. See More

Top Con

Too expensive

And they're continuing to increase the price over the time, from the $60 that was at the start. See More

Top Pro

Very keyboard friendly

All actions have either direct hotkeys or corresponding entries in the palette (same as Sublime Text). This means a very streamlined and fast usage. See More

Top Pro

"Native" performance (Python based)

Very good performance. See More

Top Pro

Portable version

Windows portable version. See More

Top Pro

No account info needed

No account- or server checkbacks (only for updates). All password handling is pure Git which means much less trouble and confusion. See More

Top Pro

Using the trial version forever without limitations

Sublime Merge may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however, a license must be purchased for continued use. There is no enforced time limit for the evaluation. See More

Top Pro

Speed

Nothing is faster. I used to use Gitkraken, but on large projects Gitkraken is barely usable. See More

Top Pro

Lifetime testing

The product is paid but you can test for your life without paying (similar to sublime text). See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Features:Line Staging, Syntax Highlighting, Image Diffs, Merge Tool, Git Flow Integration, Submodule Management

See All Experiences

32 5

Intellij IDEA

Top Pro

Free version available

There is a free community edition (open source) and an ultimate edition, which you can compare here. The ultimate edition is available for free for one year for students but must be registered through an .edu e-mail account. See More

Top Con

Bugs are not solved as often as they should

They are more interested in adding new features or issuing new versions than solving bugs. See More

Top Pro

Fast and smart contextual assistance

Uses a fast indexing technique to provide contextual hints (auto-completion, available object members, import suggestions). On-the-fly code analysis to detect errors and propose refactorization. See More

Top Con

Somewhat expensive

IntelliJ IDEA is fairly expensive, with a pricetag of $149/year. However there is a free community edition available. See More

Top Pro

Intuitive and slick UI

IDEA has a clean, intuitive interface with some customization available (such as the Darcula theme). See More

Top Con

Built with closed source components

The version with full features is not opensource. Parts of the code are under apache licence though. See More

Top Pro

Stable and robust

IntelliJ IDEA hardly ever crashes or has any issues that plague other Java IDEs like file corruption or slowness. See More

Top Con

Lack of plugins

IntelliJ supports a very small amount of plugins. Althrough thesse are 'quality approved', many features are missing and can't be implemented because of that. See More

Top Pro

Support for many languages

IntelliJ supports many languages besides Java, some of these are: golang, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Bash, etc... See More

Top Con

Standard hotkeys behave differently

Seems like hotkeys assignment in Idea has no logical consistency. Like «F3» is usually next match, «Ctrl+W» - close tab, etc — they map to some different action by default. There is a good effort in making the IDE friendly for immigrants from other products: there are options to use hotkeys from Eclipse, and even emacs. But these mappings are very incomplete. And help pages do not take this remapping into account, rather mentioning the standard hotkeys. So, people coming from other IDEs/editors are doomed to using mouse and context menus (which are rather big and complex). See More

Top Pro

Smart refactorings

IDEA places an emphasis in safe refactoring, offering a variety of features to make this possible for a variety of languages. These features include safe delete, type migration and replacing method code duplicates. See More

Top Pro

Lots of plugins

Many plugins are available for almost any task a developer may need to cover. Plugins are developed by Jetbrains themselves or by 3rd parties through the SDK available for writing them. See More

Top Pro

Android support, JavaEE support, etc

A very complete development environment support. See More

Top Pro

Clear and detailed documentation

The documentation is exhaustive, easy to navigate, and clearly worded. See More

Top Pro

Very powerful debugger

With ability to step into a certain part of a large method invocation (Shift+F7), drop frame, executing code snippets, showing method return values, etc. See More

Top Pro

Many convenient features

These simplify the daily work, e.g. copy/cut a whole line without the need to select it. See More

Specs

License:Apache 2.0

See All Experiences

62 11

Visual Studio

Top Pro

Official IDE developed by Microsoft

If a project type or a platform is available for C#, it's available in Visual Studio. Some IDEs and code editors may cover some project types, but Microsoft always starts with VS. If you work with a cross-platform technology like ASP.NET MVC, it matters less. If you work with Windows-only technologies like UWP or WPF, you have no choice really. See More

Top Con

Slow

Visual Studio is very slow if you don't have a decent system, but even then it can still be slow. Once you get past the first few minutes of slowness, it runs fine, but this should not be acceptable for a professional-grade IDE. This can be caused by a multitude of factors, such as extensions. See More

Top Pro

Free Community edition

Community edition is almost Pro edition, with just a few exceptions. Unlike old Express editions, it supports plugins. See More

Top Con

No Linux version

Top Pro

Excellent and broad range of plugins

The plugin development ecosystem is very mature and covers a lot of use cases. For example, it is often easy to find a plugin which allows you to have the keybindings of your preferred editor. See More

Top Con

Professional pricing is a bit steep

The professional edition's pricing is endearing since it costs more than IntelliJ, however, you wouldn't need that if you're not developing for a enterprise. See More

Top Pro

Partial cross-platform support

Visual Studio runs on Windows and macOS, so even if you develop on a Mac you can still develop with Visual Studio. See More

Top Pro

Amazing coverage over languages

Supports many types of C, and java, as well as ruby and python. See More

Top Pro

Supported by ReSharper and other plugins

Code productivity tools improve code editing experience greatly, provide static code analysis, refactorings, navigation etc. They are considered by many developers as essential. See More

Top Pro

It can run c#, c++, etc.

You can use too many programming lang. And you can select them! Like "I want to do this, not this". See More

Top Pro

Cloud storage

Your Visual Studio Online account gives you a place to store your code, backlog, and other project data with no servers to deploy, configure, or manage. See More

Top Pro

Product backlog

In agile development teams one really needs features such as product backlogs where you can assign features to team mates and track their progress on them. VS provides a web based interface for you to track your team's complete progress on the project. See More

Top Pro

Fast-paced development iteration

Fast-paced development iteration from the Microsoft team, with new versions and fixes almost every week. See More

Top Pro

Comes With the .NET Framework

Top Pro

Fast

Top Pro

Time travel in debugging

Top Pro

Good support and community

Top Pro

Flexible to install/adjust payloads

Specs

Platforms:Windows Mac

Git:yes

Bracket Matching:yes

Integrated Debugger:yes

See All Experiences

351 62

Visual Studio Code

Top Pro

Extendable through plug-ins

Visual Studio Code comes fairly complete out of the box, but there are many plug-ins available to extend its functionality. See More

Top Con

The autocomplete and code check is not as powerful as the one on WebStorm

Sometimes it doesn't tell you if you made a typo in a method name or if a method is not used and several other important features. See More

Top Pro

TypeScript integration

There is very solid TypeScript integration in Visual Studio Code. Both are developed by Microsoft and VSC itself is written in TypeScript. See More

Top Con

Embedded Git isn't powerful enough

You can do nothing but to track changes, stage them and commit. No history, visualization, rebasing or cherry-picking – these things are left to git console or external git client. See More

Top Pro

Embedded Git control

Visual Studio Code has integrated Git control, guaranteeing speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows. See More

Top Con

Project search limits results

Because file search is so slow your results are limited in order to simulate a faster search. See More

Top Pro

JavaScript IntelliSense support

JavaScript IntelliSense allows Visual Studio Code to provide you with useful hints and auto-completion features while you code. See More

Top Con

Very bad auto import

Top Pro

Integrated debugging

VSC includes debugging tools for Node.js, TypeScript, and JavaScript. See More

Top Con

Generalized

VS Code is a general code/scripting IDE built to be lightweight and for people familiar with their language of choice, not directly comparable to Visual Studio in power or scope. See More

Top Pro

Ready to use out of the box

You don't need to configure and add plugins before being productive. However, you can add plugins if needed but for the basics you're well covered. See More

Top Con

Memory hog

Allegedly, VS Code is "lightweight". Yet, running multiple instances of it at once, you may get many "out of memory" messages from Windows despite 16 GB RAM. (While of course also running other things. The point is the comparison with some other IDEs/editors where running them alongside the same number of other applications doesn't cause Windows to run out of memory) See More

Top Pro

Integrated terminal

There's no need to press alt+tab to go to a terminal: it is directly integrated into the editor. Shift+~ is a handy hotkey to toggle the integrated terminal. See More

Top Con

Poor error fix suggestions

Error detection and suggestions/fixes are poor compared to IntelliJ platforms See More

Top Pro

Great performance

For a 'wrapped' web-based application, Visual Studio Code performs very well. See More

Top Con

A "me too" offering from MS, far behind other well established editors that it attempts to clone

Other IDEs specific to a language often offer better tools for deep programming. See More

Top Pro

Updated frequently

There's a new release of Visual Studio Code every month. If you are one of the insiders then releases are daily. See More

Top Con

Slow launch time

Than it's competitors, e.g. Sublime Text. See More

Top Pro

Extensions (aka plugins) are written in JavaScript

Extensions are written in either Typescript or JavaScript. See More

Top Con

Emmet plugin often fails on even simple p tags

Top Pro

Integrated task runners

Task runners display lists of available tasks and performing these tasks is as simple as a click of the mouse. See More

Top Con

Have no good default js style analyzer

In WebStorm there is analyzer that checks for warnings and highlight this in yellow, here you cannot find or add it even with plugins. It is possible to have it as errors with linter but while you are actively changing file that's not very nice. See More

Top Pro

ESLint integration

ESLint integrates great. You can define your rules trough .eslintrc.* as usual and vs code will autofix your code on save. So your code is always in style. See More

Top Con

File search is extremely slow

It's absolutely not possible to use this tool with big projects given how long it takes to search for files. See More

Top Pro

Active development

It's really nice to see how the code editor evolves. Every month there is a new version with great communication of new features and changes. See More

Top Con

.sass linting is terrible

Top Pro

Libre/open source

Released under the MIT License. See More

Top Con

Is not an IDE, is a text editor

Top Pro

Custom snippets support

Snippets are templates that will insert text for you and adapt it to their context, and in VSC they are highly customizable. See More

Top Pro

Fast and powerful

VS-Code has the speed of Sublime and the power of WebStorm. Perhaps this is the best software that Microsoft has ever created. See More

Top Pro

Huge community behind it

The ease of getting assistance and finding tutorials is increasing as the community grows. See More

Top Pro

It has gotten really good

All it takes is one stop for all the features many people need. See More

Top Pro

Python support

Excellent Python plugin, originally created by Don Jayamanne, now hired by Microsoft to extend and maintain the extension. See More

Top Pro

JS typechecking

It leverages TypeScript compiler functionality to statically type check JS (type inference, JSDoc types) with "javascript.implicitProjectConfig.checkJs": true option. See More

Top Pro

Good support for new Emmet syntax

Top Pro

High fidelity C# plugin

The Omnisharp plugin is very powerful providing full sln, csproj, and project.json support. See More

Top Pro

Support RTL languages

It supports pretty web rtl languages like arabic languages when most of other editors don't support it. See More

Top Pro

Inline definition picking and usages finding

These features allow you to have a glance at code without opening it as a whole in a separate tab. Moreover, editing is allowed. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS, Linux

License:MIT

Multi Language Support:Yes

Auto Complete:Yes

See All Experiences

3556 703

TortoiseGit

Top Pro

Windows context menu integration

Context menu enables access to common commands quickly. See More

Top Con

Windows only

No Linux or OSX versions available. See More

Top Pro

Can parse and provide a pretty log of all commits or filter by branch

Top Con

Renames git commands

Makes things hard to find for people used to the git CLI. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Licensed under GPL. See More

Top Con

Buggy file status icons

The file icons are also often buggy and do not reflect its true status. Often times the icon is missing and makes you think a file or folder is untracked, when it is already staged, or sometimes even already committed and pushed. See More

Top Pro

Convinient blaming tool

Very friendly blame tool. Easy to walk in the history of a file. See More

Top Con

May clutter your Windows Explorer

If you have synced your dev folder to a cloud service, TortoiseGit's git status file icons will override your cloud provider's icons. See More

Top Con

No support for staging

It does not support staging in any way. You'll never guess that this feature is exist in git. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows

Technology:C, C++

See All Experiences

224 92

Git for Windows

Top Con

Terrible UI

Although it does most of what needs to be done, the actions are not obvious. It is definitely not user-friendly. See More

Top Pro

The most powerful way to use git

By using the CLI, one is given access to every single git function available, thus providing complete flexibility in managing git. See More

Top Pro

Offers three kinds of interfaces

Git for Windows includes a command-line interface in the form of Git BASH, a graphical interface in the form of Git GUI and a context menu interface. Git BASH offers the complete power of git, Git GUI aims to cover all git functionality (though it falls a bit short) in a graphical way and the context menu enables quick access to simple commands. See More

Top Pro

Great community support

Since most devs invoke git via CLI, there's a higher chance of getting an answer to a CLI-based git problem than that which is GUI-based. See More

Top Pro

Can generate an RSA key pair

It's possible to generate an RSA key pair using Git BASH. Instructions on how to do so can be found here. See More

Top Pro

Gives a better overview of how git functions

By using the git from the command line, it's possible to learn how it functions and how best to get the desired result. See More

Top Pro

Visual representation of commit-history is possible

Even a visual representation of various branches and how they're merged is possible. To visualize history: git log --graph See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows; OSX; Linux

See All Experiences

39 23

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What is the best alternative to GitExtensions?

Allows you to stay in the terminal

Steeper barrier to entry as compared to a GUI solution

Fast

Vim-like bindings

Available in Homebrew

Works on any platform

Uninterrupted workflow for common tasks

Useful only for people who use Emacs

Diffs are easy

Easy to remember mnemonics

Better visualization and interactive workflow

Stage hunks or even just parts of a hunk using a single key press

Blame information can be viewed inline with the file

Multiple buffers are used to show contextual information

Powerful rebasing

Available in Homebrew

Free software

Limited feature set

Cross-platform

Full unicode support

Minimalist interface

Available in Homebrew

Free for non-commercial use (with some restrictions)

Proprietary license

Easy to use

Very expensive and no multi-user licences

Uncluttered UI

Unintuitive UI

Great overview of the project/repository's log

Absolute git beginners will find it very complicated

Smart embedded difference viewer

Diff display doesn't show long lines well

Supports GitFlow

Currently lacks support for git subtree

Can be integrated with Github, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Atlassian Stash

font size too small and cannot be changed

Auto stash

Requires non-beginner level of GIT to appreciate fully

Has the most features and most logical layout

Free version doesn't support Gitlab Community Edition

Syntax coloring for many languages

Some git functionality has been renamed

Allows rearranging views

It can be slow and resource hungry

Auto-detects repositories on disk

Log with fine-grained display of branches

Extendable with external tools

Great filtering options

Supports Mercurial & SVN

Log: ability to see dangling commits and stash commits

The best multi-repository support

Great support

Can edit file in workspace or index directly from the compare view

Journal dedicated for current branch history

Every git command is available through the GUI

Portable version for Windows is available

Ability to follow only first parent in the Log window

Can detect issue numbers and links to the issue tracker

Can rearrange Repository window and Log window views/panels

Best submodule workflow on the market

Supports selecting open issues from JIRA

GPG support

Excellent dark theme

Offers life-time updates

Evolution submission program

Cross-platform

UX design is synergy with how a developer actually works

Git squash

Fast and easy to use

Requires granting access to your git projects for the developer of the app

Dark theme support

Still a young client, thus not as feature rich

Comfortable when staging line-by-line changes

No Linux version

Highlights the difference within a line

Smart Diff is very handy

Merge Conflict Resolution is great

Free (for the moment)

Overall aesthetic