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Add to SafariWhen comparing TortoiseGit vs Intellij IDEA, the Slant community recommends TortoiseGit for most people. In the question“What are the best Git clients for Windows?” TortoiseGit is ranked 9th while Intellij IDEA is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose TortoiseGit is:
Licensed under GPL.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Open source
Licensed under GPL.
Pro Windows context menu integration
Context menu enables access to common commands quickly.
Pro Can parse and provide a pretty log of all commits or filter by branch
Pro Convinient blaming tool
Very friendly blame tool. Easy to walk in the history of a file.
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.
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.
Pro Intuitive and slick UI
IDEA has a clean, intuitive interface with some customization available (such as the Darcula theme).
Pro Stable and robust
IntelliJ IDEA hardly ever crashes or has any issues that plague other Java IDEs like file corruption or slowness.
Pro Support for many languages
IntelliJ supports many languages besides Java, some of these are: golang, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Bash, etc...
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.
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.
Pro Android support, JavaEE support, etc
A very complete development environment support.
Pro Clear and detailed documentation
The documentation is exhaustive, easy to navigate, and clearly worded.
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.
Pro Many convenient features
These simplify the daily work, e.g. copy/cut a whole line without the need to select it.
Cons
Con Windows only
No Linux or OSX versions available.
Con Renames git commands
Makes things hard to find for people used to the git CLI.
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.
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.
Con No support for staging
It does not support staging in any way. You'll never guess that this feature is exist in git.
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.
Con Somewhat expensive
IntelliJ IDEA is fairly expensive, with a pricetag of $149/year.
However there is a free community edition available.
Con Built with closed source components
The version with full features is not opensource. Parts of the code are under apache licence though.
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.
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).
