Tower vs TortoiseGit
When comparing Tower vs TortoiseGit, the Slant community recommends TortoiseGit for most people. In the question“What are the best Git clients for Windows?” TortoiseGit is ranked 9th while Tower is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose TortoiseGit is:
Licensed under GPL.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Pretty, modern-looking user interface
Tower has a good-looking interface and 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 general overview about them.
Repo view that consists of two main subviews:
Working copy view shows modified files and their diff and allows wrapping up changes in a commit.
History shows commits alongside metadata and projects file structure.
Additionally, it allows performing various tasks such as merging branches via drag & drop, search allows searching by message, commit hash, author, committer and file and there's a quick open that allows fuzzy-searching for folder names.
Pro Offers a visual way to solve conflicts
Tower shows conflicting files, their authors and the commit that made changes. It then allows selecting which files should be used in the final result.
Pro Github integration
Pro Very polished user interface
Pro Cherry-Picking via drag and drop
Pro Git LFS
Tower comes with built-in support for Git LFS. Handy when working with large files.
Pro Git-flow integration
Git-flow provide a consistent development process by defining a strict branching model that is great for managing large projects. T2 allows setting up and integrating into repos that follow this model.
Pro The UI only shows the needed commands at a time
Tower covers most of the daily tasks that a developer may need to complete. It shows only what you need for the most common tasks without overwhelming the user.
Pro Free for students
If you are a student, you can get your free Tower Pro license here.
Pro Interactive Rebase via Drag and Drop
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
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.
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.
Cons
Con Not free/libre
This application is proprietary, and thus cannot be modified or freely distributed.
Con Expensive
Costs $69 per year!
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.
Con Doesn't have a built in diff
Con Stability issues on Windows
On a simple repository, the UI often lags or freezes.
Con Doesn't support Subtrees
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.