// Comparison

An alternative to Tower

GeeTree is free, has no subscription and no account, runs on Linux too, and is built for very large repositories.

Three reasons to look at GeeTree

  • No Linux build. Tower ships for macOS and Windows only — “All plans include versions for Mac and Windows” — so working on Linux means another tool.
  • It is a yearly subscription. $69 per user per year for Basic, $129 for Pro, $149 for Enterprise, with a 30-day trial and a free plan for students and educators. GeeTree is free: no subscription, no licence, no account.
  • It is built for very large repositories. A clone of the Linux kernel, 1.48 million commits: GeeTree puts the first screen up in half a second, finishes reading the history in about 1.6 seconds, and searches all of it in 77 milliseconds. Tower is not installed on this machine, so the section below makes no claim about its speed — only about what was measured here.

Side by side

Tower GeeTree
Platforms macOS, Windows macOS, Windows, Linux
Price $69–$149 per user per year, renewed Free
Account One, for the licence and the trial None
Source Closed Closed
Rendering Native on each platform; .NET on Windows Rust and GPUI, drawn on the GPU
Requirements macOS 14 or later, Windows 10 or later macOS 12 or later, Windows 10 1809 or later, Linux with glibc 2.35 or later
Opening a repository Not measured here Window in 0.8 s, on the history
Seeing the history Not measured here About 1.6 s, 1,485,419 commits
Searching the history Not measured here About 77 ms, all of it

The Tower column is what git-tower.com says, read on 28 October 2026: the plans, the prices and the two platforms from its pricing page, the system requirements and the .NET version from its own product overview. Its current releases are Tower 18.0 for Mac and Tower 14.1 for Windows, both from 6 October 2026; the two platforms are versioned apart. Tower is not installed here and I have not run it, so every row that would need running it says so rather than guessing. The GeeTree figures were measured on this Mac, on a clone of the Linux kernel — 1,485,419 commits and 958 refs, GeeTree 0.3.0, two runs, the page cache warm — by capturing the app’s window every 0.3 to 0.55 seconds and taking the frame where the commit list has content, so about half a second of precision.

What Tower does well

Tower is the most complete Git GUI on the market, and several of the things it does, GeeTree does not do at all:

  • Undo Anything. ⌘Z reverses virtually any Git operation. Nothing in GeeTree matches it.
  • Pull requests. Create, merge, comment and close them for GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and Azure DevOps, cloud and self-hosted. GeeTree signs in to those same hosts, but only to clone, push and list repositories; it does not touch pull requests.
  • The corners of Git. git-svn, patches, stash with partial apply, stacked branches with Graphite, automatic branch management, git-flow, 1Password SSH. GeeTree has worktrees, stashes, Git Flow and interactive rebase, but not the rest of that list.
  • Learn Git. A free ebook, a 24-episode video course and a shelf of cheat sheets, open to anyone.
  • Over a decade, and 100,000 users. Its own site counts them; GeeTree is still 0.x.

This section is what Tower’s own pages describe, read the same day — not something I checked by hand, because Tower is not installed on this machine. The GeeTree side of each line is checked: it is this repository’s own feature set.

What GeeTree does on a large repository

GeeTree showing the history of 1.5 million commits
The history is usable while it loads: the first screen in half a second, the rest behind it, down to the very first commit.
GeeTree searching 1.5 million commits
A local, incremental index: messages, authors, paths and the diff of every commit, answered in milliseconds, across the whole history.
GeeTree’s commit page with a side-by-side diff
Staging by hunk and by line, side-by-side and inline diffs, a three-way merge editor, blame, and any two versions compared.

Questions

  • Is Tower slow on large repositories? I do not know, and this page does not say it is. It is not installed here, and a claim about another program belongs on this site only once it has been seen on a machine, with the version written down.
  • Does my git configuration still work? It does. Everything that writes or talks to a remote runs your own git as a subprocess, so hooks, credential helpers, signing, LFS, submodules and insteadOf all keep working. Reading goes through gitoxide, which is why it is fast.
  • Do I need an account? No. Download it and use it: no account, no licence. Connecting a GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or Azure DevOps account is optional, and its token stays in the system keychain.
  • Does it upload my code, or anything about how I work? No. No telemetry, no analytics; see privacy.
  • Is it open source? No, but it is free to use.
  • What does it need? macOS 12 or later, Windows 10 1809 or later, Linux with glibc 2.35 or later, and git 2.30 or later.

Try it

Open your largest repository and scroll the history to the bottom.

Download GeeTreemacOS (Apple silicon)

Free to use, on macOS, Windows and Linux.

Last updated: 2026-10-28