Powerful tool for advance git developers, overwhelming for the rest
January 06, 2025
Powerful tool for advance git developers, overwhelming for the rest
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Sourcetree
Some developers use Sourcetree as a way of managing their git repositories. You can see what branches are present on the remote, when they were made and if/when they were closed. It's good for visualising lots of branches and commit history at the same time. There's lots of information in Sourcetree, but this can sometimes make it overwhelming.
For advance git developers or auditors it can be helpful when reviewing the history of a repo.
For advance git developers or auditors it can be helpful when reviewing the history of a repo.
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- 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.
- In my experience, using Sourcetree actually slows down development if you're the average developer needing to do simple git actions. Getting set up is fast, but the learning curve to use the tool is just too steep if you're just looking to push, pull, commit, branch etc.
- Sourcetree is not implemented by default at our company, but is recommended as we primarily use Atlassian products. However the lack of integration with other Atlassian products means that this git GUI doesn't give any more or less ROI for your Atlassian ecosystem compared to another git GUI tool.
- For auditing and exploring history Sourcetree can be very helpful. Having all of this information in one place with a plethora of actions and tools at your disposal means you can audit repos much quicker than any other git GUI or online repo explorer.
I actually recommend GitHub Desktop for any developer who uses git. It's far more friendly, has good functionality but not overwhelming, and you don't need to use it for GitHub repos.
Sourcetree is only good for if you're wanting to perform complex actions or audit historical information about the repo.
Sourcetree is only good for if you're wanting to perform complex actions or audit historical information about the repo.
Do you think Sourcetree delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Sourcetree's feature set?
Yes
Did Sourcetree live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Sourcetree go as expected?
No
Would you buy Sourcetree again?
No
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