When comparing Visual Studio vs GitExtensions, the Slant community recommends GitExtensions for most people. In the question“What are the best Git clients for Windows?” GitExtensions is ranked 7th while Visual Studio is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose GitExtensions is:
It's totally free And its written and thought by developers who really know what you need as a developer. Open to contributions by everybody.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Free Community edition
Community edition is almost Pro edition, with just a few exceptions. Unlike old Express editions, it supports plugins.
Pro Amazing coverage over languages
Supports many types of C, and java, as well as ruby and python.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Pro Fast-paced development iteration
Fast-paced development iteration from the Microsoft team, with new versions and fixes almost every week.
Pro Comes With the .NET Framework
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.
Pro Fast
Pro Time travel in debugging
Pro Great UI for nugget packages
Pro Flexible to install/adjust payloads
Pro Same excellent Roslyn compiler/editor as VS for Code + powerful debugging tools
Pro Good support and community
Pro sda
Pro Open source
It's totally free
And its written and thought by developers who really know what you need as a developer. Open to contributions by everybody.
Pro Git commands visibility
GitExtensions typically displays all commands that it carries out in a separate window. The user can also open the Gitcommand log (under Tools) and view the git commands as they interact with the program.
Pro SSH support
Instead of using HTTPS and authenticating every time they are pushing their code remotely, plenty of developers prefer to use SSH to communicate with the remote server and authenticate using secure key pairs.
Pro Powerful commit screen
Staging/unstaging files and/or lines of code, ammending, overriding commit's author, commit templates.
Pro Many advanced features made easier to use
Complex git commands such as resolving a rebase conflict or performing a subtree merge are made much easier by a helpful UI.
Pro Great UI
GitExtensions has a simple layout, all usual functions being available without navigation menus. The branching and merging are clear and easy to follow.
Pro Lightweight and fast
GitExtensions is a lightweight and fast application.
Pro Very good stash support
Easy to save, view & pop stashes.
Pro Easy to set up
Can either be set up as a shell extension, standalone tool of Visual Studio plugin, allowing developers to choose the way that suits their workflow best and is easier for them to get into.
Pro Easy to use
Can be used as a Visual Studio plugin for developers who use it as their IDE, or as a standalone tool. Both are easy to use even for users not very familiar with git.
Pro Submodule support
Powerful submodule support, also when working with multiple cloned SuperRepos.
Pro Responsiveness
Pro Useful plugins
Includes Gitflow, also has a delete obsolete branches feature which is very useful to get rid of those old branches that have already been merged. There are also other options to clean overall clutter in repositories.
Pro Built-in git-bash console
This makes running custom git commands quicker.
Pro Eases initial git configuration
The settings window on first run helps you set lots of required settings such as your commit email address.
Pro Simple global / local diff and merge support
Makes working with repos using different languages and support tools much easier.
Pro Allows easy setting up of scripts to enhance productivity
Pro Plugin API
There are several out-of-the-box plugins installed with standard setup. Additional behavior customization is possible with new plugins (written in C#).
Pro Integration with common tools like Jira or TeamCity
Cons
Con Slow & Buggy (on Mac)
Visual Studio can get very slow on Mac... this is partly due to bad UI framework used - GTK. Also, quite buggy and too often have to Force Quit and restart.
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.
Con No Linux version
Con Mac version sub-par
The Mac version has the same great Roslyn editor as Win and VS for Code.
Con Too much storage eater for low-end PCs
For a particular task, you need to install workspaces. Workspaces mainly take up to 50 GB.
Con No side-by-side diff
There is no option to do side-by-side review of files. Creator(s) do not feel this is a desirable feature. While this is great software in almost all aspects, not giving the end-user a choice of side-by-side diff (inside GitExtensions) is a deal-breaker.
And no, using an external tool to do this is too much of a hassle, because of the amount of files to check in each change-set (in my case that are often 200 to 300 files).
Con Not truly cross-platform
GitExtensions is not truly cross-platform. It can run through mono on UNIX-based systems but this does not work as well as it does on Windows.
Con Missing tabs to have more repositories open at once
Con Doesn't offer " Repo Groups"
Repo groups (best done in smart git, Git Kraken's version is also decent) is an amazing time saving feature when you work with multiple repos on a daily basis. This is the only con!
Con UI does not render properly on Windows 10 x64
Con UI may feel cluttered with too much information
The sheer amount of information that the UI displays by default may feel overwhelming at times, if not outright confusing.
Con Linux version has no updates
If you want an updated version, you have to download the source and figure out how to build it yourself. Developers don't have any kind of documentation or faq about this process.