Slant community chat on Discord| 11 Recommended Products | Recommendations | Platforms | Price | Pro Features |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 SmartGit· · · | 14 | 1 | Linux, Mac, Windows | $79-$47.40/user (perpetual) or $5.99-$3.59/user (monthly subscription) | 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 |
| #2 SourceTree· · · | 21 | 10 | Windows, macOS | Free | – |
| #3 GitKraken· · · | 15 | 3 | Windows, Mac, Linux | Free / $49 per yr / $39-$25 per yr (teams) / $79 per yr (offline) | Support, Merge Conflict Editor, Multiple Profiles, GitHub Enterprise Integration, Commercial Use, Offline License Server |
| #4 Tower 2· · · | 9 | 1 | Windows; OSX | – | – |
| #5 GitUp· · · | 4 | 0 | – | – | – |
| #6 GitX-dev· · · | 3 | 0 | – | – | – |
Pro Same features on all platforms
The Windows, Linux and Mac variants are the same version and have the same feature set.
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 Built-in SSH support
Which asks for private key and passphrase instead of using command line to set it up.
Con Not free/libre
This application is proprietary, and thus cannot be modified, freely distributed, or trusted to be secure.
Con Hg not as perfect supported as Git
The Git support is superior, the Hg support is lacking.
Con Some hg functionality has been renamed
In order to preserve the same interface across Git and Mercurial, some naming compromises have been made.
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 actio...
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 bookm...
Con Limited repository support
Supports only bitbucket and github repositories.
Con Information density can be a bit much
It's possible to be overwhelmed with the information density presented in Sourcetree. Especially in history view since it includes a lot of data presented in various ways. It's great for getting a comprehensive overview of everything that's happening in one place, but it can take some...
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.
Pro Cross-platform
Built on top of Electron, so it runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows.
Con UI uses up a lot of space
The part of the UI element that lists tags takes up 10% to 25%. On larger screens this is not an issue but on larger screen or super high res screen set to 2x, this can become a clunky usability issue.
Con Not free/libre
This application is proprietary, and thus cannot be modified, freely distributed, or trusted to be secure.
Pro Pretty, modern-looking user interface
Tower 2 has a good-looking interface which consists of 3 main views - services, repositories and repository. Services view for managing integrations with hosting services like GitHub, Bitbucket and Beanstalk. Repositories view for organizing local and remote repositories into folders and getting...
Pro Offers a visual way to solve conflicts
Tower 2 shows conflicting files, their authors and the commit that made changes. It then allows selecting which files should be used in the final result.
Con Not free/libre
This application is proprietary, and thus cannot be modified, freely distributed, or trusted to be secure.
Con Inefficient UI
In order to not overwhelm the users with information, much of the information is either hidden by default or requires navigating to a different section to access.
Pro Allows doing complex things without memorizing git
Git usage beyond basic checkout/commit is arcane; GitUp lets you do things in git in seconds that would take you a half hour of research with the command line.
Pro Full undo
You can backup, or edit commits, if you make a mistake.
Con OS X Only
Only available for OSX, so if you are used to working with different OSes and you want the same tools in each of them, it's impossible to have that with GitUp.
Pro Fast GUI
Responsive even with thousands of files or large binary like files
Pro A lot of operations can be done visually
Allows for interactive staging of files or hunks and deleting of unstaged or non-git tracked files. Hunk size slider allows staging/unstaging individual lines, letting you stage pieces of a file easily.
Con Clumsy staging workflow
The staging workflow in GitX-dev is kind of clumsy and unintuitive.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
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.
Pro Great integration with GitHub services
This is the official GitHub desktop client built by the GitHub team.
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.
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