Gitolite vs Tower

Gitolite vs Tower: What are the differences?

What is Gitolite? Setup git hosting on a central server, with fine-grained access control. Gitolite allows you to setup git hosting on a central server, with fine-grained access control and many more powerful features. Gitolite is an access control layer on top of git.

What is Tower? The most powerful Git client for Mac & Windows. Use all of Git's powerful feature set - in a GUI that makes you more productive.

Gitolite can be classified as a tool in the "Code Collaboration & Version Control" category, while Tower is grouped under "Source Code Management Desktop Apps".

Some of the features offered by Gitolite are:

• Use a single unix user ("real" user) on the server.
• Provide access to many gitolite users: they are not "real" users, so they do not get shell access.
• Control access to many git repositories: read access controlled at the repo level, and write access controlled at the branch/tag/file/directory level, including who can rewind, create, and delete branches/tags.

On the other hand, Tower provides the following key features:

• Clone & create repos with a click - Manage your GitHub, Bitbucket & Beanstalk accounts from within Tower
• Open repos quickly - Tower's "Quick Open" dialog finds and opens repositories in no time
• Automate the boring stuff - Fetching and stashing are automatically done for you, if you wish

"Easy setup" is the top reason why over 4 developers like Gitolite, while over 16 developers mention "Git" as the leading cause for choosing Tower.

Gitolite is an open source tool with 7.44K GitHub stars and 958 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Gitolite's open source repository on GitHub.