What is Tower and what are its top alternatives?
Tower is a popular Git desktop client that provides a user-friendly interface for managing repositories, branches, commits, and more. Key features of Tower include a visually appealing interface, integration with popular Git hosting services, support for Git Flow, and powerful search and filtering capabilities. However, Tower is only available for macOS and comes with a price tag, making it less accessible to users on a budget.
GitHub Desktop: GitHub Desktop is a free Git client that offers an intuitive interface for managing repositories, viewing changes, and collaborating with team members. It is available for both Windows and macOS users. Pros include its simplicity and seamless integration with GitHub, while cons may include the lack of advanced features present in Tower.
GitKraken: GitKraken is a cross-platform Git client that boasts a sleek interface and powerful features such as a visual commit history, drag-and-drop functionality, and built-in GitFlow support. Pros include its user-friendly design and integrations with popular services, while cons may include a more limited free version compared to Tower.
SourceTree: SourceTree is a free Git client developed by Atlassian, offering a comprehensive set of features for managing repositories, visualizing changes, and collaborating with team members. Pros of SourceTree include its robust functionality and support for both Git and Mercurial, while cons may include occasional performance issues compared to Tower.
GitAhead: GitAhead is a lightweight and fast Git client with a focus on simplicity and performance. It offers features such as an intuitive interface, advanced search capabilities, and support for multiple platforms. Pros include its speed and ease of use, while cons may include the lack of certain advanced features found in Tower.
Fork: Fork is a feature-packed Git client for Windows and macOS, offering a range of tools for managing repositories, viewing changes, and collaborating with team members. Pros of Fork include its extensive feature set and customizable interface, while cons may include a steeper learning curve compared to Tower.
GitUp: GitUp is a minimalist Git client for macOS that focuses on speed and simplicity. It offers a streamlined interface for managing repositories, visualizing changes, and performing Git operations efficiently. Pros include its fast performance and clean design, while cons may include the lack of advanced features present in Tower.
SmartGit: SmartGit is a professional Git client that caters to advanced users with features such as commit staging, branching workflows, and conflict resolution tools. Pros of SmartGit include its comprehensive feature set and support for Git and Mercurial, while cons may include a higher learning curve compared to Tower.
Magit: Magit is a powerful Git interface built for Emacs users, offering a wide range of features for managing repositories, staging changes, and interacting with Git commands. Pros of Magit include its deep integration with Emacs and extensive customization options, while cons may include a potentially steep learning curve for new users.
Plastic SCM: Plastic SCM is a version control system that provides advanced features for managing code repositories, branching strategies, and workflow automation. Pros of Plastic SCM include its robust functionality and support for large-scale projects, while cons may include a more complex setup process compared to Tower.
GitTower CLI: GitTower CLI is a command-line interface for Tower, allowing users to perform Git operations directly from the terminal. Pros of GitTower CLI include its seamless integration with Tower and advanced functionality for power users, while cons may include a reliance on the Tower application for full functionality.
Top Alternatives to Tower
- AWX
AWX provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible. It is the upstream project for Tower, a commercial derivative of AWX. Ansible Towers powers enterprise automation by adding control, security and delegation capabilities to Ansible environments. ...
- Ansible
Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use. ...
- SourceTree
Use the full capability of Git and Mercurial in the SourceTree desktop app. Manage all your repositories, hosted or local, through SourceTree's simple interface. ...
- GitKraken
The downright luxurious Git client for Windows, Mac and Linux. Cross-platform, 100% standalone, and free. ...
- Fork
Manage your repositories without leaving the application. Organize the repositores into categories. Fork's Diff Viewer provides a clear view to spot the changes in your source code quickly. ...
- Sublime Merge
A snappy UI, three-way merge tool, side-by-side diffs, syntax highlighting, and more. Evaluate for free – no account, tracking, or time limits. ...
- SmartGit
It is a graphical Git client with support for SVN and Pull Requests for GitHub and Bitbucket. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. ...
- GitUp
GitUp lets you see your entire labyrinth of branches and merges with perfect clarity. Any change you make, large or small, even outside GitUp, is immediately reflected in GitUp's graph. No refreshing, no waiting. ...
Tower alternatives & related posts
related AWX posts
Ansible
- Agentless284
- Great configuration210
- Simple199
- Powerful176
- Easy to learn155
- Flexible69
- Doesn't get in the way of getting s--- done55
- Makes sense35
- Super efficient and flexible30
- Powerful27
- Dynamic Inventory11
- Backed by Red Hat9
- Works with AWS7
- Cloud Oriented6
- Easy to maintain6
- Vagrant provisioner4
- Simple and powerful4
- Multi language4
- Simple4
- Because SSH4
- Procedural or declarative, or both4
- Easy4
- Consistency3
- Well-documented2
- Masterless2
- Debugging is simple2
- Merge hash to get final configuration similar to hiera2
- Fast as hell2
- Manage any OS1
- Work on windows, but difficult to manage1
- Certified Content1
- Dangerous8
- Hard to install5
- Doesn't Run on Windows3
- Bloated3
- Backward compatibility3
- No immutable infrastructure2
related Ansible posts
Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).
It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up
or vagrant reload
we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.
I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up
, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.
We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.
If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.
The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).
Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.
Heroku was a decent choice to start a business, but at some point our platform was too big, too complex & too heterogenic, so Heroku started to be a constraint, not a benefit. First, we've started containerizing our apps with Docker to eliminate "works in my machine" syndrome & uniformize the environment setup. The first orchestration was composed with Docker Compose , but at some point it made sense to move it to Kubernetes. Fortunately, we've made a very good technical decision when starting our work with containers - all the container configuration & provisions HAD (since the beginning) to be done in code (Infrastructure as Code) - we've used Terraform & Ansible for that (correspondingly). This general trend of containerisation was accompanied by another, parallel & equally big project: migrating environments from Heroku to AWS: using Amazon EC2 , Amazon EKS, Amazon S3 & Amazon RDS.
- Visual history and branch view205
- Beautiful UI164
- Easy repository browsing134
- Gitflow support87
- Interactive stage or discard by hunks or lines75
- Great branch visualization22
- Ui/ux and user-friendliness18
- Best Git Client UI/Features8
- Search commit messages7
- Available for Windows and macOS5
- Log only one file1
- Search file content1
- Crashes often12
- So many bugs8
- Fetching is slow sometimes7
- No dark theme (Windows)5
- Extremely slow5
- Very unstable5
- Can't select text in diff (windows)4
- Freezes quite frequently3
- Can't scale window from top corners3
- UI blinking2
- Windows version worse than mac version2
- Installs to AppData folder (windows)2
- Diff makes tab indentation look like spaces2
- Windows and Mac versions are very different2
- Diff appears as if space indented even if its tabs2
- Doesn't have an option for git init2
- Useless for merge conflict resolution2
- Doesn't differentiate submodules from parent repos2
- Requires bitbucket account2
- Generally hard to like1
- No reflog support1
- Bases binary check on filesize1
- Can't add remotes by right clicking remotes (windows)1
related SourceTree posts
Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:
- GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
- Respectively Git as revision control system
- SourceTree as Git GUI
- Visual Studio Code as IDE
- CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
- Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
- SonarQube as quality gate
- Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
- VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
- Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
- Heroku for deploying in test environments
- nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
- SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
- Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
- PostgreSQL as preferred database system
- Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)
The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:
- Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
- Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
- Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
- Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
- Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
- Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
Tower appears to be between GitKraken and SourceTree in detail, but gave two scary error dialogs when attempting to merge resulted in a conflict. Doing the same in SourceTree just worked and showed the conflict in its handy file view that's always visible (unlike Tower's mere "Merge branch 'X' into develop" message when the commit is selected).
Both GitKraken and Tower lack the commit hash in their history overview, requiring one to select a commit to see it.
GitKraken appears to be the only Windows 10 Git GUI suitable for night shifts, but like Tower is only free for 30 days, unlike SourceTree.
- Dark theme59
- Best linux git client34
- Great overview29
- Full featured client21
- Gitflow support20
- Beautiful UI19
- Very easy to use18
- Graph16
- Works great on both linux and windows13
- Effortless13
- Easy Merge Conflict Tool6
- Amazing Github and Bitbucket integration5
- Great UX4
- Integration with GitHub3
- Automatic Repo Discovery3
- Submodule support3
- Easy to Learn and Setup3
- Super fast3
- Fuzzy find (CTRL P)2
- Very user friendly1
- Much more stable than source tree1
- Great for non-dev users1
- Because it has Linux client1
- Command palette (CTRL Shift P)1
- Extremely slow when working with large repositories3
- No edit/fixup in interactive rebase3
- Hangs occasionally (not as bad as sourcetree)3
- Not as many features as sourcetree2
- Do not allow to directly edit staging area2
- Does not work like a Mac app2
related GitKraken posts
Tower appears to be between GitKraken and SourceTree in detail, but gave two scary error dialogs when attempting to merge resulted in a conflict. Doing the same in SourceTree just worked and showed the conflict in its handy file view that's always visible (unlike Tower's mere "Merge branch 'X' into develop" message when the commit is selected).
Both GitKraken and Tower lack the commit hash in their history overview, requiring one to select a commit to see it.
GitKraken appears to be the only Windows 10 Git GUI suitable for night shifts, but like Tower is only free for 30 days, unlike SourceTree.
GitKraken is the best git client so far. The user interface is very friendly. Everything is easy to do with this tool. A branch tree vizualization is very clear. I've tried SourceTree and I got lost in such many panels. Also performance of SourceTree is not as goot as GitKraken. I like Sublime Merge but it doesn't have so many features as the other tools. I've choosen GitKraken and as bonus I got GitKraken Glo that is the next perfect tool.
- One of the easiest and fastest git GUIs19
- Nice UX14
- Does the job way better than others13
- Fast, Great support, Does-it-all, blazing fast13
- Dark theme11
- Intuitive interactive rebase and conflict resolution UI9
- Gitflow support9
- Excellent commit history tree view7
- This even looks the same as SourceTree5
- Repository Manager4
- Built-in developer feedback3
- Countless quality of life features3
- Github Notifications2
- Not buggy, works smoothly2
- Keyaboard-only2
- Visual branch history2
- Reflog support2
- Git ammend1
- Smart 'Open in' menu; e.g. explorer, bit, giithub .1
- Interactive rebase window1
- Native application1
- Intuitive merge conflict resolution1
- Unique Activity Manager shows current/past operations1
- Poorly written license2
- Stability is fragile when looking deeply into history1
- Merges that require interactive user decision1
related Fork posts
- Speed11
- Hotkeys5
- Beautify UI5
- Command Palete4
- Blame and File History3
- Submodule Management3
- Command Line Integration3
- Commit Editing3
- Outputs matching git CLI command3
- Sublime Text Integration3
- Three-Way Merge3
- Only light mode available for evaluation2
related Sublime Merge posts
We use Visual Studio Code because it allows us to easily and quickly integrate with Git, much like Sublime Merge ,but it is integrated into the IDE. Another cool part about VS Code is the ability collaborate with each other with Visual Studio Live Share which allows our whole team to get more done together. It brings the convenience of the Google Suite to programming, offering something that works more smoothly than anything found on Atom or Sublime Text
GitKraken is the best git client so far. The user interface is very friendly. Everything is easy to do with this tool. A branch tree vizualization is very clear. I've tried SourceTree and I got lost in such many panels. Also performance of SourceTree is not as goot as GitKraken. I like Sublime Merge but it doesn't have so many features as the other tools. I've choosen GitKraken and as bonus I got GitKraken Glo that is the next perfect tool.
- Dark theme1
- Non-intuitive actions1
- Bugs1
related SmartGit posts
- Fast6
- Can edit commit messages6
- Simple interface5
- Native OSX App5
- Easy rebase3
- Great branch visualization3
- Search commit messages2
- Beautiful UI2
- Visual history and branch view2
- Incredibly easy squash2