What are the best graphical git clients for macOS / Mac OSX?

Pros

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

Fast and easy to use

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS

Price:FREE / $49.99

Top Pro

Overall aesthetic

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 Pro

Merge Conflict Resolution is great

Top Pro

Smart Diff is very handy

Top Pro

Highlights the difference within a line

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

Dark theme support

You can see the spinning wheel all the time. 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

SourceTree

Top Pro

Fully-featured

Top Con

Really slow on OSX

Jason's Experience

Used command line, git-tower and sourcetree. For basic things the command line is fine but I'm finding more and more I like the visual representation of what has changed offered in sourcetree and git-tower. Sourcetree seems to have a history of working great, getting an update and then performing really slow until another update. However it was still very useable when it was slow except on my largest projects but I could fall back to the command line if needed. A short while ago it got really slow and it would mess things up just trying to do a simple append to the last commit (on a project where I am the only person submitting). I was just too frustrated this time so I moved to a trial of git-tower. git-tower was fast and was a little easier to use (for example automatic stashing) and things in the UI were worded a little more intuitively . I would have paid the $79 to buy it but that was in USA dollars and I felt that was too high in my currency when developers in my country generally make 1/2 of developers in the USA. Before committing I noticed sourcetree had a bunch of updates including a major one that seriously boosted performance on my large projects and the bug on appending was fixed. Although things are a little more hidden in the UI for stuff that was upfront in git-tower, all the functionality I needed was there. I gladly pay for tools but I need to see the value and sourcetree does more and has no cost so I just couldn't continue with git-tower. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS

Price:Free

Top Pro

Free

Top Con

"No fastforward" git merge option hidden in preferences

This is a real pain if your workflow involves both kinds of git merges. This needs to be accessible from the merge dialog itself. See More

keganv's Experience

I've been using SourceTree for about 5 years, and I really like it. It is feature rich, intuitive and easy to set up and use. I like how it displays the commit history and the branching especially. See More

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

Laggy

SincereTapio's Experience

Very powerful. Has all the git functionality in one place. You dont have to deal with git commands at all, just with few simple clicks. You have a big picture and a full overview of the whole source control of your project, visually, in one place. See More

Top Pro

Supports Git LFS

Top Con

Very convoluted UI

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

Supports only simple merges

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

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

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

Hangs when committing large files

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

Always slow

Top Pro

Built-in integration with Stash and Bitbucket

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

Top Con

Requires an account to install and use

Need an Atlassian account to install. See More

Top Pro

Comprehensive

Top Con

No auto stash

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

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 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 Pro

Fast performance

Finding the latest update makes performance blazing fast, even on large projects. See More

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

GitKraken

Top Pro

Beautiful user interface

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

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS, Linux

Integrations:GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket Server, Jira Issues, GitKraken Boards Issues

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Built on top of Electron, so it runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows. 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 $79/user/yr Enterprise option. It allows you to deploy a Linux License Server in an air-gapped/offline environment. 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

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

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

Slow

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

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

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 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

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

SmartGit

Top Pro

Easy to use

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

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

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

Issue Tracker support:Atlassian JIRA

See All Specs

Top Pro

Full-featured

Most advanced git features are supported, without cluttering the UI. See More

Top Con

Nonstandard cut and paste on macOS

Top Pro

Constantly upgraded and improved

New builds are coming out regularly, always with excellent fixes and improvements. See More

Top Con

Proprietary license

Not an open source license. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Works on OS X, Windows and Linux. 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

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

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). 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 Con

Free only for personal usage and not an open source license.

SmartGit is free as long as it's being used for private projects not meant to be profitable. 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 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. See More

Top Pro

GPG support

GPG in SmartGit makes for added security. See More

Top Pro

Powerful drag-and-drop

Easy to merge, rebase, reset, cherry pick by simply dragging head markers in log view. See More

Top Pro

Slim, uncluttered UI, yet very visual and productive

Top Pro

Fast and responsive

Even if implemented in Java for portability, UI is very fast and responsive. See More

Top Pro

Best sub module 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 mono-repo 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

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 Pro

Evolution submission program

See http://smartgit.userecho.com/ 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

Can rearrange Repository window and Log window views/panels

This allows great layouts as desired. 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

Syntax coloring for many languages

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

Every git command is available through the GUI

Not every, but nearly all. 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

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

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 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

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

Has the most features and most logical layout

Compared to gitk, git gui, SourceTree, GitKraken. 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 Pro

Supports Mercurial & SVN

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

Free for non-commercial use

SmartGit can be used free of charge by Open Source developers, teachers and their students, or for hobby, non-paid usage. See More

Top Pro

Powerful file filtering

Files can be instantly filtered by multiple factors: file name, recursive or not, unchanged, new, modified, ignored, assumed-unchanged, skipped, from submodules, renamed. This is an incredibly powerful and useful feature. The recursive option is particularly useful when combined with the folder tree view, allowing for a broader or narrower perspective to your changes as desired. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Powerful index editor

Allows to visualize, manually edit and selectively transfer lines of codes between all 3 states of a file, side-by-side: repo, staged, working copy. This is an incredibly useful feature, especially in critical moments. 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 Pro

Can be integrated with Github, Bitbucket, and Atlassian Stash

Using OAuth, you can connect SmartGit with your accounts in Github, 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 Pro

Offers life-time updates

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

Top Pro

Can detect issue numbers and links to the issue tracker

Support GitBugTraq file : https://github.com/mstrap/bugtraq See More

Top Pro

Excellent dark theme

And support for own themes. 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

GitX-dev

Pros

In the diff, you can commit individual hunks via mouse See More

Top Pro

Lets you do visual partial commits

Specs

Platforms:Mac

Magit

Pros

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

Top Pro

Better visualization and interactive workflow

Specs

License:GPLv3

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

Multiple buffers are used to show contextual information

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

Available in Homebrew

brew install magit See More

Top Pro

Powerful rebasing

Top Pro

Uninterrupted workflow for common tasks

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

Great way to learn more about git

Magit, particularly when used with the command discovery capabilities of Spacemacs, will teach you more about git than anything short of reading the git source code. See More

prevented me from several heart attacks when working with Git :) also been around for about 10 years, so here to stay. Not like other Git clients like Gitbox that were abandoned See More

Tower

Top Pro

Interactive Rebase via Drag and Drop

Garv K.'s Experience

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Mac

Features:Pull Requests, Interactive Rebase, Git-Flow, Dark Mode, Undo, Quick Actions, Image Diffing, Reflog, Drag & Drop, User Profiles

Pricing:FREE, $69/year for Basic, $99/year for Pro, $149/year for Enterprise

Free Version:Yes, for students, teachers, schools, universities, coding bootcamps etc.

See All Specs

Top Pro

Very polished user interface

Top Pro

Undo Support

Many Git actions can be undone in Tower simply by using the keyboard shortcut CMD+Z. Examples: Deleting branches and files, staging changes, rebasing & merging branches, or publishing a branch on a remote See More

Top Pro

Github integration

Top Pro

automatic stashing and fetching

Top Pro

Quick Open

Top Pro

Cherry-Pick

Top Pro

Git LFS

Top Pro

Submodule support

Top Pro

single-line staging

Top Pro

Conflict wizard

really helps solving merge conflicts visually. See More

Top Pro

Drag & Drop Actions

you can perform tons of workflows via drag and drop. create, pull, or push a branch. create tags. partial stashing. cherry pick commits... See More

Top Pro

Free for students

If you are a student, you can get your free Tower Pro license here: https://www.git-tower.com/students See More

Top Pro

Free for students, teachers, schools and universities

Top Pro

Dark Mode

Top Pro

Native app

a truly native Mac app See More

Top Pro

GPG support

Tower offers user profiles. You can then connect GPG keys with your profiles, sign commits and see which commits have been signed and by who. See More

Top Pro

Reflog

Top Pro

regular updates

A license gives you 3 years of updates, and you can use the product after that indefinitely. See More

Sublime Merge

Top Pro

Not subscription based

HonestPandia's Experience

Excellent GUI, fast client, a pleasure to use. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

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

Pricing:FREE evaluation without time limit, $99 for personal license (including updates for 3 years), $75 per seat and year for business license, $168 for personal license bundle including Sublime Text (3 years of updates)

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 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

"Native" performance (Python based)

Very good performance. 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

Portable version

Windows portable version. 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

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

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

Bundled license available with Sublime Text (which is an amazing text editor)

git-cola

Platforms:Windows, macOS, Linux

License:GPLv2

GitAhead

Platforms:Windows, Mac, Linux

Technology:C++

GitEye

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Cycligent Git Tool