Homebrew vs GitKraken Client

Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.

Once installed, you control Homebrew using the brew command. You can find packages using brew search, install them using brew install and remove them using brew uninstall.

Macports seems to be able to get into a bad state where new packages are unable to be installed, or installed software was unable to be updated. This simply hasn't happened with Homebrew. In addition to not having to deal with corruption problems, Homebrew installs packages in userland. Not requiring root to install software is a big win.

Homebrew as much as possible uses already existing libraries and tools to install software thus making builds quick and requiring few dependencies.

Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local. Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix, and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like.

One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on.

Homebrew’s recipes try very hard to use the existing tools and libraries in OS/X, so they tend to build much faster and require fewer dependent libraries.

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).

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.

Built on top of Electron, so it runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

GitKraken has simple undo/redo buttons that work the same way you'd expect in any other software.

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.

There are both pro and free versions available. The free version is pretty complete feature-wise for day-to-day operations.

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.

Supports GitFlow out of the box.

GitKraken has a fuzzy finder to switch between repos/files.

GitKraken is easy to use and is brilliant for the beginner developers.

No more eyestrain staring at white screens - GitKraken has a lovely dark theme.