TortoiseGit vs Git Extensions

What are the benefits and disadvantage of using either Git Extensions or TortoiseGit on a Windows Based OS?

I don't know GitExtensions, but I can share my experience with TortoiseGit (alluded to by marc_s's comment):

Pros:

• Excellent integration with Windows (it's a shell extension)
• Nearly the same UI as TortoiseSVN (if you already used TortoiseSVN, you know what to expect).

Cons:

• You will have a hard time understanding how to use git.

The problem with TortoiseGit is that people who worked with TortoiseSVN will think everything will (or should) work exactly like in SVN... and end up never really understanding how to work with git. As a personal experience, the company I work migrated from SVN to git after 2 years, and every single developer that used TortoiseGit ended up not really knowing what they are doing and sometimes screwing up their local repositories. In the end, they dropped TortoiseGit and spend time learning git "the hard way" (shell, msysGit on Windows) and everyone has been happy since then.

Conclusion: Just use msysGit directly and properly learn git. You will avoid many headaches in the future.

My company tried both and quickly dropped Tortoise Git. It crashed much more often. The coders claim that Tortoise Git is not capable enough but I did not check that myself. But I did see lots of The crashes myself.

The Coders prefer git bash, the others use but hate git Extensions. Although even some of them additionally open up git bash. Git bash is unavoidable to see the progress counters.

Git Extensions has no option to show progress counters during a pull. So with Git Extensions only, you sit in front of an enigmatic non-progress bar, not knowing what happens and whether something failed. The worst is a missing or incorrect password: Git Extensions just lets you wait forever, showing the same glowing bar as if it was doing something time-consuming. Another horror of Git Extensions is the frequent abort with "out of memory", when versioning many big files and pulling with rebase. After such an abort, non-coding users are always overwhelmed with problems. Many files that they did not change show up as changed and the lock file prevents them from dealing with the problem, etc..

In my opinion both GUI tools are immature.

You want Git Extensions for one important reason - it shows you the graphical view of the commit log (see below). Without that graphical view I don't think most folks new to git will ever get what is going on with branches, commits, rebasing, cherry picking, etc (I know I didn't).

You are going to do want to do some of your work on the command line also, it's your best bet to practically use git since all the help you get will be command line based.

All that said, you can use Tortoise Git also (assuming it works) since they all call the same command line executables and act on the same git repository.

Most IDEs have git support also, JetBrains IDEA does a great job of adding change lists and other functionality on top of it.

I don't have much experience with TortoiseGit, but I installed, and am currently using GitExtensions v2.21.

The biggest advantages with using GitExtensions:

• visual gitk-like graphical display of codelines and branches, with all essential info available in tabs, eliminating any need to work with the unfriendly SHA's.
• ability to install as Administrator and all other users on the same PC can use it just like any regular user.
• built-in shell integration with Windows Explorer
• out of the box integration with Visual Studio (Windows Eclipse users only need msysgit, as they have their own GUI to replace the need for GitExtensions)
• easy to use installer that comes pre-packaged with all necessary and pre-requisite functionality to start out of the box (SSH Client, KDiff, msysgit).
• integration with GitHub (Fork,clone, pull are all streamlined)

Disadvantages:

• documentation does not keep up with the new features constantly being added. For example, I still don't know how to use the scripting features.

Lest we forget that it is a completely free program, and offered to us as an option with no strings attached, I don't see the rationale for such high expectations placed upon it, as if we were paid clients? I have seen some of the aborts and freezing that the previous user mentioned, but I believe the majority of that has been fixed in v2.24. Alot of the aborts and failed actions are really not the fault of GitExtensions, but more a symptom of a systemic problem outside of GitExtensions (eg. misconfigured SSH setup, file permissions issues on the server hosting the remote repo, etc). For example, there was one time when I did a simple push which caused fail and abort. It turns out that the remote I was trying to push to was on a very long pathname which was causing problems for the Mac server that hosted the repo.

Anyways, that said however, my experience with GitExtensions has been fairly positive. I find the benefits outlined above have made it worthwhile to put up with the occasional aborts and freezes until the bugs are fixed.

I can't speak to Git Extensions as I've never used it. Had some problems with pure GIT. Couldn't integrate GVIM, for instance. Tortoise Git has an integrated editor and diff tool (which is amazing), so that's a very nice convenience. I loved the branch diagrams in the Scott Chacon book and was hoping TGit would have a similar diagram. They do have a tool for showing branches but it's not as nice as the one in the book.

One thing to bear in mind is that since TGit is just a shell on top of GIT, there's no harm in mixing the two methods. I use TGit for most everything, but dip into GIT for commands that are awkward or that I simply don't understand well in TGit. But even if you plan to use TGit, it's still important, as mentioned above, to understand the basics of GIT first. I'd read through the first, say, three chapters in the Chacon book (available for free online at http://progit.org/book/ or by purchase at Amazon). If you're like me you may want to read them several times over to let the paradigm sink in. It's not all that complicated, but it is very different from previous VCS's.

TGit never crashed on me, as it has for some of the other reviewers, but then my repo's have been small. It did eat my commit comments on more than one occasion, which could have been user error. Since you can go back and re-edit comments this was just an annoyance and worth the convenience of having a GUI, with windows that show a great deal of info at a glance.