Sourcetree vs. Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)

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.

Incentivized

I would not recommend Visual SourceSafe to anyone out there as there are so many better, more modern solutions that do what it does and much more. Visual SourceSafe should be retired in most cases.

• Merge Changes - helping you handle merge conflicts.
• Comparing branches.
• Visually showing various paths that existing branches are following.
• It is easy to import already downloaded repositories.
• And it integrates with Bitbucket (web), where I can click a menu in Bitbucket and have it download and import the repo to my local environment.

Incentivized

• At this point in its lifecycle there are not many things VSS does well
• Its main strength would be its ability to be self contained on a local drive
• It is a basic Code repository

Incentivized

• As an Atlassian product i'd have expected smart integrations/features with their other developer products like Jira or BitBucket, but this is not the case. It can sometimes pick up on Jira ticket IDs and show them as a label or as a unique piece of work to follow. But there's no actual integration to Jira and is just simple pattern matching.
• For the majority of developers it's just overwhelming and overkill. There's a plethora of metadata, supporting information, and many many actions/tools to help perform complex git actions. This is great if you're managing complex repos or need to perform an audit, but to the average user it's just not a user friendly experience due to how bloated it can feel.
• Very simple git actions such as 'git pull' have been massively overcomplicated. When pressing the pull button you get a popup with multiple dropdowns, checkboxes and settings on how you want to pull and the followup actions to run after the pull, both on the remote repo and local repo. It's just unnecessary and adding complexity where it's not needed.

Incentivized

• The system stability could be improved. Often we get file corrupted errors.
• The User Interface is not modern and not user-friendly.
• Concurrent check-outs could be added, allowing more people to work on the same file at the same time.
• Add conflict resolution, files comparison, blame file, features that any modern source control program should have.

Incentivized

It is one of the best Git GUIs out there, I have worked with multiple GUIs and this provides more insights and features compared to others, the Tree view and History helps keeping track and reverting commits, With help of different UI elements it helps the new developers to learn git using standards as well.

Incentivized

The current status of Visual SourceSafe is not usable. There are many things that are just so out of the date that it should be retired and not looked at any longer. If you have an existing application that is stored in it, I'd consider migrating it to a modern tool.

It's a Microsoft product so the customer support is great. The program has been around a long time so there are plenty of places on line to get assistance. Also almost any development shop you go to will have at least one developer who has used this product extensively in their career.

Incentivized

Sourcetree allows seamless integration across all widely used GIT services and is cross-platform compatible. This client is capable of managing workflows of any difficulty and its cross-compatibility eliminates the need to use different or multiple GIT clients altogether.

Incentivized

Incentivized

• Makes using Git more pleasurable increasing developer happiness.
• Visual display of branches and commits with their diff helps me find problems quickly.
• Complex Git commands are only a click away using Sourcetree.

Incentivized

• When we started using it, it allowed us to do source code versioning and store the code in a centralized location and not locally.
• We are using it for very few projects with few developers that still maintain those applications and do not have time to merge the source code to Git.

Incentivized