TortoiseGit vs Git Extensions

I don't know GitExtensions, but I can share my experience with TortoiseGit (alluded to by marc_s's comment):

Pros:

• Excellent integration with Windows (it's a shell extension)
• Nearly the same UI as TortoiseSVN (if you already used TortoiseSVN, you know what to expect).

Cons:

• You will have a hard time understanding how to use git.

The problem with TortoiseGit is that people who worked with TortoiseSVN will think everything will (or should) work exactly like in SVN... and end up never really understanding how to work with git. As a personal experience, the company I work migrated from SVN to git after 2 years, and every single developer that used TortoiseGit ended up not really knowing what they are doing and sometimes screwing up their local repositories. In the end, they dropped TortoiseGit and spend time learning git "the hard way" (shell, msysGit on Windows) and everyone has been happy since then.

Conclusion: Just use msysGit directly and properly learn git. You will avoid many headaches in the future.

My company tried both and quickly dropped Tortoise Git. It crashed much more often. The coders claim that Tortoise Git is not capable enough but I did not check that myself. But I did see lots of The crashes myself.

The Coders prefer git bash, the others use but hate git Extensions. Although even some of them additionally open up git bash. Git bash is unavoidable to see the progress counters.

Git Extensions has no option to show progress counters during a pull. So with Git Extensions only, you sit in front of an enigmatic non-progress bar, not knowing what happens and whether something failed. The worst is a missing or incorrect password: Git Extensions just lets you wait forever, showing the same glowing bar as if it was doing something time-consuming. Another horror of Git Extensions is the frequent abort with "out of memory", when versioning many big files and pulling with rebase. After such an abort, non-coding users are always overwhelmed with problems. Many files that they did not change show up as changed and the lock file prevents them from dealing with the problem, etc..

In my opinion both GUI tools are immature.

You want Git Extensions for one important reason - it shows you the graphical view of the commit log (see below). Without that graphical view I don't think most folks new to git will ever get what is going on with branches, commits, rebasing, cherry picking, etc (I know I didn't).

You are going to do want to do some of your work on the command line also, it's your best bet to practically use git since all the help you get will be command line based.

All that said, you can use Tortoise Git also (assuming it works) since they all call the same command line executables and act on the same git repository.

Most IDEs have git support also, JetBrains IDEA does a great job of adding change lists and other functionality on top of it.