Over the years, Gitkraken has become of one my most beloved software tools that I cannot live without. It’s not that I couldn’t use git from the Command Line (for free), but why introduce additional complexities into my day when I don’t have to. For me personally, using Command Line git is totally fine until I get myself into a really tricky merge conflict or I need to unwind several commits, then there goes the next 45 minutes of my day to reading StackOverflow posts and praying I don’t lose my work.

I love using Gitkraken because it makes the more complicated git operations significantly easier. It gives you a visual on everything that is happening with the commit; what other branches are out there, which files are in the commits, what changed in them, what stashes you have, etc. I love this because it leaves nothing up to the imagination, and you know exactly the state your work is in. I often find myself resetting commits when I want to make significant changes to a commit or sometimes I will cherry pick commits from other branches. Gitkraken makes this so much easier for me, and it’s something I can do almost instantly.

There are other tools available like SourceTree that have a git UI tool, and I’ve tried a few others, but I think Gitkraken is the best tool on the market by a landslide. I think a large part of that is just that the UI is so sleek, clean, and easy to use. It’s stayed mostly consistent over the years too so I feel very comfortable using it. I’ve wanted to like SourceTree and adopt it because it’s free, but my issue is that the UI is so overwhelming and there are way too many buttons and windows on the UI so I end up making little mistakes using it.

The one sad thing about Gitkraken is that they no longer have a free tier of any kind, so you need a personal and a professional license to use it. I will gladly pay for licenses because this tool is totally worth it, and it makes my life so much easier so I can focus on the work I’m doing.