If you are one of the developers who use Git more frequently on your Windows machine and wish to have a nice graphical UI Git Client, this blog post will provide you with some insights on various tools available for you.
5 Best Graphical Git Client for Windows
These tools are not in any specific order of ranking and each of these tools has both pros and cons. Without wasting much time, let’s have a look at these one by one.
TortoiseGit
TortoiseGit provides the Power of Git in a Windows Shell for the developers. TortoiseGit integrates well with the Windows explorer so you don’t have more to learn from the UI perspective. TortoiseGit turns your Windows Explorer in to a Git client. TortoiseGit is an open source tool licensed under GPL and free to download. Installation and setup is pretty simple and straight forward. While it is a good tool for Windows developers, it is only Windows only tool and no Linux or Mac OS version is currently available.
You can download TortoiseGit from TortoiseGit’s download page
SmartGit
SmartGit is a yet another commercial tool that provides the Git client for Windows. However, it can be used for free by open source developers and students or for hobby projects with some restrictions where some features are available for only the paid version users. It provides a very clean User Interface and is pretty much easy to use for someone new to Git. SmartGit also supports GitFlow. You can connect to Github, GitLab, Bitbucket etc. using the OAuth and supports Mercurial & SVN. SmartGit supports all platforms like Linux, Mac, and Windows.
You can know more about the tool and try SmartGit from Syntevo’s site.
SourceTree
If you have used Jira, then this tool might be familiar to you. It’s from Atlassian and is yet another free Git client tool for download and is available for both Windows and Mac OS It supports GitFlow and Hg-flow and has a nice UI to use. It is feature rich and includes most of the features of Git. It supports Git LFS and has built-in integration with Stash and Bitbucket. It also supports Git & Mercurial repos side by side. You would need an Atlassian account to install and use SourceTree.
You can download SourceTree from Atlassian portal
Git for Windows
It is one of the Git tool that focusses on light weight, native set of tools that bring the full feature set of the Git SCM to Windows while providing appropriate user interfaces for experienced Git users and novices alike. It is one of the most powerful way to use git as it provides you access to CLI. It support 3 different interfaces – Git Bash, Git GUI and context menu interface. It has a great community support and provides a better overview of how git functions.
You can download Git for Windows at GitforWindows download page.
GitKraken
GitKraken is another commercial Git client for Windows, Mac and Linux users. It is free for open source developers. It supports tabs for multiple repo access and is slightly faster. You could setup multiple profiles and it comes with the built-in merge tool as well. It has an easy integration with GitHub or Bitbucket account.
Know more about GitKraken and download it here
Do you use any other Git Client for Windows tool that you don’t see in the list above?. Feel free to share them in the comments section.
