Beanstalk is a version control service offering Git and SVN hosting solution offered by Wildbit.
N/A
Sourcetree
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Sourcetree, by Atlassian, is a free version control client for Mac and Windows that works with Git and Mercurial repositories. It's distributed version control allows developers to visualize code, review changesets, stash, cherry-pick between branches or commit with a single click.
For business or personal applications, where you wish your code to remain private and/or proprietary, Beanstalk could be a good fit. If you are also interested in beginning to automate with relative ease, their tools can be a great help. Code reviews can also be a key factor in the decision, as they provide a good framework for accountability.
Sourcetree is a great tool for any Git user. Whether you're well versed using Git commands in the terminal or a newbie, this tool wonderfully supplements your workflow. A quick glance at the UI and you know where your project stands. I find it most helpful when I need to determine what changed in a particular file in past commits. Having a visual graph of branches helps me to understand the big picture. Even though I'm comfortable operating Git most often in the command line, I always have Sourcetree open to check my work and see where my colleagues are.
There's lots of information about the repo, commits, authors, branches etc. For example you can explore the metadata of a single commit such as when it happened, it's ID, it's parent ID, the author, and any labels.
You can explore the history of the repo as a branch graph - This can be helpful to see what branches were live and what other work was going on at that time. You can explore each branch, commits etc. And the visualisation makes it easier to understand how 'busy' a repo was at a certain time period and see how branches were merged.
There's lots of functions and features which can make complex git actions more streamlined and GUI based. This is great for anyone looking to perform complex git actions or really dive into 'under the hood' management of repos. The merge conflict actions in particular can be helpful.
Adding tooltips when hovering UI elements would make Sourcetree even more intuitive for beginners
During installation, Sourcetree suggests creating or signing into Bitbucket account. This step can be skipped and is not a requirement but it's not intuitive whether these accounts are required to use Sourcetree.
Sourcetree has lots of information about the repo, it's history, metadata, and has lots of features, tools and actions. However absolutely none of this is helpful to the average developer and actually slows down the developer lifecycle and can be overwhelming. In my opinion, Sourcetree should only be used by those wanting to do complex git tasks or auditing. For everyone else, this tool will slow you down and make things needlessly complex.
If you are creating open source applications, there is almost no reason not to use GitHub. If you do need private repositories (for proprietary or private, business or personal use), Bitbucket could be an excellent solution. Beanstalk's main advantages lie in the support (which is excellent), deployment tools, and code review features.
I tried GitHub Desktop for a couple of days, but it is just not visual enough for me. It has no graph display for branches. Too much clicking is required to get info that the Sourcetree UI shows by default. Sourcetree gives you that "Big Picture" dashboard. GitHub Desktop seems unfinished to me due to its lack of this overview screen.
