When comparing Visual Studio Code vs SourceTree, the Slant community recommends Visual Studio Code for most people. In the question“What are the best Git clients for Windows?” Visual Studio Code is ranked 4th while SourceTree is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Visual Studio Code is:
Visual Studio Code comes fairly complete out of the box, but there are many plug-ins available to extend its functionality.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Extendable through plug-ins
Visual Studio Code comes fairly complete out of the box, but there are many plug-ins available to extend its functionality.
Pro TypeScript integration
There is very solid TypeScript integration in Visual Studio Code. Both are developed by Microsoft and VSC itself is written in TypeScript.
Pro Integrated debugging
VSC includes debugging tools for Node.js, TypeScript, and JavaScript.
Pro Ready to use out of the box
You don't need to configure and add plugins before being productive. However, you can add plugins if needed but for the basics you're well covered.
Pro Integrated terminal
There's no need to press alt+tab to go to a terminal: it is directly integrated into the editor. Shift+~
is a handy hotkey to toggle the integrated terminal.
Pro Great performance
For a 'wrapped' web-based application, Visual Studio Code performs very well.
Pro Libre/open source
Released under the MIT License.
Pro Fast and powerful
VS-Code has the speed of Sublime and the power of WebStorm. Perhaps this is the best software that Microsoft has ever created.
Pro JavaScript IntelliSense support
JavaScript IntelliSense allows Visual Studio Code to provide you with useful hints and auto-completion features while you code.
Pro Embedded Git control
Visual Studio Code has integrated Git control, guaranteeing speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows.
Pro Updated frequently
There's a new release of Visual Studio Code every month. If you are one of the insiders then releases are daily.
Pro ESLint integration
ESLint integrates great. You can define your rules trough .eslintrc.* as usual and vs code will autofix your code on save. So your code is always in style.
Pro Extensions (aka plugins) are written in JavaScript
Extensions are written in either Typescript or JavaScript.
Pro Active development
It's really nice to see how the code editor evolves. Every month there is a new version with great communication of new features and changes.
Pro Integrated task runners
Task runners display lists of available tasks and performing these tasks is as simple as a click of the mouse.
Pro It has gotten really good
All it takes is one stop for all the features many people need.
Pro Custom snippets support
Snippets are templates that will insert text for you and adapt it to their context, and in VSC they are highly customizable.
Pro Huge community behind it
The ease of getting assistance and finding tutorials is increasing as the community grows.
Pro JS typechecking
It leverages TypeScript compiler functionality to statically type check JS (type inference, JSDoc types) with "javascript.implicitProjectConfig.checkJs": true
option.
Pro Python support
Excellent Python plugin, originally created by Don Jayamanne, now hired by Microsoft to extend and maintain the extension.
Pro Good support for new Emmet syntax
Pro High fidelity C# plugin
The Omnisharp plugin is very powerful providing full sln, csproj, and project.json support.
Pro Support RTL languages
It supports pretty web rtl languages like arabic languages when most of other editors don't support it.
Pro Inline definition picking and usages finding
These features allow you to have a glance at code without opening it as a whole in a separate tab. Moreover, editing is allowed.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pro Built-in integration with Stash and Bitbucket
Sourcetree integrates with repositories hosted on Bitbucket, Stash, GitHub, and Kiln.
Pro Free
Pro Supports Git LFS
Pro Git terminal
Comes with own built-in git terminal independent from other git installations and updated regularly. It's especially good for git beginners who would like to use advanced git functions, but are not ready yet.
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.
Cons
Con Embedded Git isn't powerful enough
You can do nothing but to track changes, stage them and commit. No history, visualization, rebasing or cherry-picking – these things are left to git console or external git client.
Con The autocomplete and code check is not as powerful as the one on WebStorm
Sometimes it doesn't tell you if you made a typo in a method name or if a method is not used and several other important features.
Con File search is extremely slow
It's absolutely not possible to use this tool with big projects given how long it takes to search for files.
Con Project search limits results
Because file search is so slow your results are limited in order to simulate a faster search.
Con Very bad auto import
Con Generalized
VS Code is a general code/scripting IDE built to be lightweight and for people familiar with their language of choice, not directly comparable to Visual Studio in power or scope.
Con Memory hog
Allegedly, VS Code is "lightweight". Yet, running multiple instances of it at once, you may get many "out of memory" messages from Windows despite 16 GB RAM. (While of course also running other things. The point is the comparison with some other IDEs/editors where running them alongside the same number of other applications doesn't cause Windows to run out of memory)
Con Poor error fix suggestions
Error detection and suggestions/fixes are poor compared to IntelliJ platforms
Con A "me too" offering from MS, far behind other well established editors that it attempts to clone
Other IDEs specific to a language often offer better tools for deep programming.
Con Slow launch time
Slower than it's competitors, e.g. Sublime Text.
Con Emmet plugin often fails on even simple p tags
Con Have no good default js style analyzer
In WebStorm there is analyzer that checks for warnings and highlight this in yellow, here you cannot find or add it even with plugins. It is possible to have it as errors with linter but while you are actively changing file that's not very nice.
Con .sass linting is terrible
Con Is not an IDE, is a text editor
Con Can sometimes be slow
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.
Con Always slow
Con Requires an account to install and use
Need an Atlassian account to install.
Con Terrible for resolving merge conflicts
It's hard to tell when you are in a conflict state, let alone what to do if it happens.
Con Unstable and terrible UX
The Windows version of SourceTree is riddled with bugs, causing some users to find it unusable.
These include failing to refresh, frequent freezing, and slow performance. The recent redesign (February 2016) has made the UI difficult to navigate.
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.
Con DEPRECATED -No dark theme
Dark Theme is now available on Windows as well as the MacOS version.
Con Chews CPU
Con The UI of version 2.0+ is so terrible
Tab looks good if you have no more than five repos. If you have a lot, you will know my pain. The source tree will not remember the order of the tab you drag. Everytime you restart the app, it will go back to whatever it likes.
Con Does not allow offline installation
Upon installation, the splash screen prompts you to login. There used to be a workaround for you to manually deploy this application in an offline environment, but they've patched it as of 2.0.20.1. It now does a dial-home on each start-up. Since it cannot reach the server, it throws an error to the user, and raises alerts to compliance.
Atlassian's final decision was that they are not going to support this feature at all. Quoted from their staff:
"We’ve never officially supported any form of pre-installation on device management capabilities. [...] As you know, last year, we removed the notion licensing and asked our developers to register the product by creating an Atlassian account. That said, SourceTree has always been a tool for the individual (emphasis mine) developer."
Con Browsing folders is troublesome
Choosing files of specific folders for check-in is troublesome.
Con UI is buggy and getting worse with updates
UI elements have been critically broken over the last few updates--interactive rebase for example has been entirely nonfunctional for the last 3 versions--and from the JIRA tickets, it seems UI bugs are not being addressed or triaged.
With the declining stability and lack of QA for this product over the last 2-3years, SourceTree seems a risky choice for teams going forward.
Con Not even possible to change the password
There are tickets about this issue sitting there for years and marked as medium priority. I experienced this since version 1.8. Up until now, there has been no fix. If your company's policy is going to enforce you to change your password, it means you need to remove all the repos and clone them again everytime you change the password. This is the worst ever experience.
Con Varied speeds across different versions
For example, the Windows version is quite slow is comparison to the Mac version.
Con Poor UX for interactive rebase
The interactive rebase window is a pain to use, with poor UX, such as not refreshing the list once a change is made. It's a downgrade from git rebase --interactive
.
Con Not always recognizes changed files
Seems to not always recognize changed files, which means that they will not be pushed to remote origin either. This means if you switch branches, the files will be overwritten and you lose your progress. Very annoying.
Con CRLF on Windows is a nightmare
There is a bug in 'Discard hunk' and 'Discard lines' constantly interrupting the work flow with inserting wrong line endings. Click here for more details.
Con Has trouble with Github's Yubikey integration
When your 2FA is a hardware key, it is difficult to find a way to bring up the ability to use anything but a pre-programmed password function on the Yubikey, which doesn't add much to security all things considered what a hardware key is supposed to do.
Con Crashes frequently
Stops responding every 5 minutes.
Con Login problems
Frequently unable to log in, despite the correct password.
Con Uninstalling won't remove the installation completely
If You decide to uninstall, you'll have to manually go to the folder inside the system and directly delete the files. If you uninstalled to reinstall fresh, this is a big issue.
Con Can't select install location
You can't select the install location (anymore). This is terrible for enterprise environments. It insists to install into "Users/<Name>/AppData/Local". What? Where? Why not "Recycle Bin" or Windows Temp?
Con Often rebuilds the graph visually noisy
E.g. after a reset command, the graph disappears and reappears after a few moments.
Con Flawed installer
Enforced registration process doesn't work, shows failure when connected to Bitbucket. Windows are too small to display installation text and options. Installs unwanted icon on the desktop. Slow and unresponsive at times.
Con Blame MS Office's word correction dictionary to be the source of the slowness while it's not
It's so obvious that ever since 2.0, it will try refreshing each of the repo a few minutes. If you have a lot then it will drive you crazy. When you try to expand a branch node, it refreshes. Try again, OOPS, it refreshed again. Sometimes, it will take you five minutes to select the node you want.
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.