Best 12 Free Open Source Git GUI Clients for macOS
What is Git?
Git is an open-source free distributed version control system that developers use to manage their source code. It allows developers to track changes, collaborate and work together on the same project.
What is a Git GUI Client?
A Git comes with a CLI tool, which many developers use to, branch, add, commit, push, clone, and pull their code. However, many developers may require a GUI client which basically will do the same.
In this article, we list you a collection of a dozen free open-source Git GUI clients for macOS, as free options to commercial paid programs.
1- GitHub Desktop
GitHub Desktop is a free open-source Git desktop client for macOS, and Windows. It offers 2 versions for macOS: one for Intel and the other for the new Apple Silicon.
GitHub Desktop features
- Comes with a straightforward interface
- Integrated history manager
- The User can follow up changes easily
- Easy to manage branches and create new branches
- Attribute commits with collaborators easily
- Checkout branches
- Syntax highlighted diffs
- Expanded image diff support
- Extensive editor & shell integrations
- Checkout branches with pull requests and view CI statuses
- Quickly add co-authors to your commit
2- Sourcetree
Sourcetree is a free Git GUI desktop client for Windows and macOS. It eases the user dealing with Git without the need to dive into a complex command-line workflow.
Sourcetree Features
- Comes with a simple easy-to-use interface even for beginners
- Packed with dozens of useful tools
- Integrated image browser
- Built-in full-text search engine with filters
- Easy to visualize code
- Developers can visualize their commit progress
- Support large files
- Seamless Git workflow
- Supports Git submodules
- Local commit search
- Interactive rebase
- Remote repository manager
Atlassian
3- GitKraken
GitKraken is a feature-rick Git client that comes with a visual-rich interface. It may look complex, but it is easy to deal with.
GitKarken features
- Review commits in visually
- Git-Enhanced Terminal
- Tabbed user interface that allows user to manage many projects at once
- Add commits and comments easily
- Add co-author easily
- Easy to track channels updates
- Merge Conflict Resolution
- Safely Resolve Merge Conflicts
- Create & Manage Pull Requests
- Supercharge Rebases
- Easy Undo
- Deep Git Integrations
- Supports GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, and Bitbucket
- In-app merge
- Command palette access
- Built-In Code Editor
- Diff Split View
- File History & Blame
- Syntax highlighting
- Comes with a strong full-text search with in-files search
- File mini-map visualization
- Manages submodules easily
4- Gittyup
Gittyup is a graphical Git client designed to help you understand and manage your source code history.
Gittyup works for macOS, Windows (32/ 64 bit), and Linux (Flatpak).
5- Git Cola
Git Cola is a sleek and powerful graphical user interface for Git. Git Cola is free software and written in Python (v2 + v3).
It is available for macOS, Linux and Windows. It also comes with several keyboard shortcuts that increase the productivity and speed of the recurrent tasks.
6- MeGit
MeGit is an open-source Git client ton hat is originally based EGit (Eclipse Git Client).
It features a fancy visualization for the git history, a staging view, GitFlow operations support, and Interactive rebasing support.
eclipsesource7- CodeReview
CodeReview is a Git GUI tool to perform code review (Diff Viewer) written in Python3 and Qt5. It is available for Linux and can be installed on Windows, and macOS using PyPI.
CodeReview Features
- A straightforward easy-to-use interface
- display and browse the log and paches of a Git repository
- diff side by side using Patience algorithm
- watch for file system changes
- Code highlighting mode
- Line numbers
- Change font size
- Stage/unstage file
FabriceSalvaire8- GitX-dev
GitX-dev is an open-source free macOS Git client. It is basically a fork (variant) of GitX, a long-defunct GUI for the git version-control system. It is licensed under the GPL version 2.
It has been maintained and enhanced with productivity and friendliness oriented changes, with effort focused on making a first-class, maintainable tool for today's active developers.
GitX-dev features
- History browsing of your repository
- See a nicely formatted diff of any revision
- Search based on author or revision subject
- Look at the complete tree of any revision
- Preview any file in the tree in a text view or with QuickLook
- Drag and drop files out of the tree view to copy them to your system
- Support for all parameters git rev-list has
- Good performance on large (200+ MB) repositories
9- GitUp (native macOS)
GitUp is an open-source GUI native macOS program for Git.
Unlike most of the apps here, GitUp comes with a simple interface which is not busy with dozens of features.
With GitUp, you get a truly efficient Git client for Mac:
- A live and interactive repo graph (edit, reorder, fixup, merge commits…),
- Unlimited undo / redo of almost all operations (even rebases and merges),
- Time Machine like snapshots for 1-click rollbacks to previous repo states,
- Features that don’t even exist natively in Git like a visual commit splitter or a unified reflog browser,
- Instant search across the entire repo including diff contents,
- A ridiculously fast UI, often faster than the command line.
10- LazyGit
LazyGit is a free open-source git client packed as a terminal app with a nifty interface using Gocui (UI terminal library for the Go programming language).
LazyGit can be easily installed on macOS using the binary release package, using Homebrew, or MacPorts.
It is also available for Windows, and several other Linux distros as Void Linux, Arch Linux, Fedora, RHEL, Solus Linux, Funtoo Linux, as well as Unix (FreeBSD).
jesseduffield11- Ungit
Ungit is an open-source web-based Git client which you can install and run on your local machine or remote server to manage your local Git repos.
It features a user-friendly light interface which runs smoothly in all modern browser.
Ungit is written in Node.js, and it requires Node.js 14 or later to run.
How to install Ungit?
First, make sure Node.js (14+) is installed then run:
$ npm install -g ungitWhen the installation is done, run the app by typing ungit in your terminal.
FredrikNoren12- GitBlade
GitBlade is a clean and simple graphical client for Git that works on Mac, Linux and Windows.
It has a free Lite version that supports many of the "every day" features and there's also a PRO version for users who want to jump into the "here be dragons" section.
The Bottom Line
Git GUI desktop is an essential tool for developers and programmers, which offers an easy straightforward to handle complex operations developers often use the CLI.
We covered the best open-source free Git GUI desktop for clients as alternative for paid, and overpriced commercial solutions.
If you know any other open-source similar app that is not in this list, let us know.
