I didn't set out to build a Git client. I set out to stop using the one I had.
For a long time, GitKraken was just part of my toolchain — the thing I opened without thinking about it, the same way you don't think about your terminal emulator until it starts lagging. Then, one day, it did start lagging. And once I noticed, I couldn't stop noticing.
This is the story of why I left, what specifically pushed me over the edge, and why I ended up spending my evenings and weekends building Gitoryx instead of just switching to a competitor.
Key Takeaways
- GitKraken got heavier over time — an Electron app that started stuttering on repositories with real history, not toy repos.
- It shipped features I never asked for, including a bundled MCP server that quietly ate into the context window of my AI coding sessions.
- Several other developers I talked to described the same frustration — creeping feature bloat and pricing that climbs for functionality they don't use.
- Gitoryx is my answer: a native (non-Electron) Git GUI, ~12 MB, with git bisect and gitmoji built in as first-class citizens instead of afterthoughts.
The Slowdown I Kept Making Excuses For
GitKraken is an Electron app. That's not a secret — it's on their own marketing at times, framed as cross-platform convenience. For a while, that trade-off didn't bother me. My repos were small, my laptop was fast, and the extra RAM footprint was just background noise.
Then the repos got bigger. More branches, longer history, more collaborators. And the app that used to feel instant started to feel like it was thinking before it responded — a half-second delay opening the commit graph, a stutter switching branches, a spinner where there used to be nothing.
I want to be precise here: I'm not claiming GitKraken is unusably slow for everyone. Plenty of developers run it daily without complaint. But for me, on the repositories I actually work in, the gap between "what I need" (open a repo, see the graph, commit, done) and "what I was getting" (wait, then do those things) kept widening. And once you notice a tool making you wait, you can't un-notice it.
How Gitoryx avoids the Electron tax
The MCP Server I Didn't Ask For
Here's the moment that actually made me start looking for alternatives, not just grumbling about them.
I use AI coding assistants throughout my day — that's not unusual anymore. What is unusual, and unwelcome, is when a tool I open for one job (visualizing my Git history) decides to insert itself into a completely different part of my workflow. GitKraken started shipping its own MCP server, wired in by default, and that server started occupying context space in my AI coding sessions. Not because I asked for it. Not because I opted in for a specific task. It was just there, taking up room that I would rather have spent on the actual problem I was working on.
If you've never run into this, here's the short version: your AI assistant has a finite context window, and every tool or server that gets automatically wired into a session competes for space in it. When a Git client — a tool whose entire job is showing you commits and branches — starts consuming that budget for a feature you never requested, it stops feeling like a convenience and starts feeling like a tax you didn't agree to pay.
I don't think this was malicious. I think it's what happens when a company chases every emerging trend at once and ships it to everyone by default instead of letting people who actually want it turn it on. But intent doesn't matter much when you're the one losing context mid-task.
Paying More for Things I Never Use
The MCP situation was the spark, but the pricing pattern is what convinced me this wasn't just my problem.
Over time, I watched the price of tools I relied on creep upward — not because the core thing I used got better, but because a bundle of new features got added on top, features I had no interest in and never touched. I paid more for the same workflow I'd always had, subsidizing capabilities aimed at a different kind of user than me.
When I mentioned this to other developers — not as a pitch, just as a complaint over a coffee or in a Slack DM — I kept getting the same reaction back: yeah, same here. Different tools, same shape of frustration. Nobody I talked to wanted a bigger bundle. Everybody wanted to pay for what they actually used.
That's the part that turned a personal annoyance into something I thought was worth building around: the right price for the right tool, not a subscription that grows every year regardless of whether your own usage does.
What I Actually Built Instead
Once I decided to build my own Git client, I had a short, very specific list of things I wanted to get right — mostly because they were the exact things that had pushed me away from what I was using before.
Native, not Electron. Gitoryx is a native app for macOS and Windows. No bundled Chromium, no hundreds of megabytes of RAM just to render a commit graph. It's about 12 MB and starts instantly, because a Git client's job is to get out of your way, not to announce itself.
Git bisect that's actually visual. I didn't want to remember git bisect start, good, bad, and the mental bookkeeping that goes with it. Gitoryx turns bisect into a guided binary search: you mark commits good or bad with a click, and it narrows down to the culprit commit for you, visually, without dropping back to the terminal.
Gitmoji, built into the commit panel. If you use gitmoji in your commit messages — and after years of 🐛 fix parser edge case and ✨ add search endpoint, I do — it should be a first-class part of writing a commit, not a browser tab you alt-tab to. The picker in Gitoryx is searchable, remembers the emoji you use most, and plays fine with conventional commits if you use both.
Nothing running in the background that you didn't ask for. No forced integrations. No server-side account requirement to use it on your public and open-source repos. It runs locally, and it stays out of tools it has no business touching — including your AI assistant's context window.
Pricing that matches what you get. Free forever for public repos and up to your last 30 commits on private ones, two Git identity profiles included. If you need more, Pro is €6/month, €50/year, or €130 once, for life — unlimited history, unlimited profiles, self-hosted integrations, and every future feature, no re-bundling required.
Why This Matters Beyond Me
I'm not writing this to tell you GitKraken is bad software — it clearly works for a lot of people, and it's the reason there's even a [/compare/gitoryx-vs-gitkraken](http://www.gitoryx.com/compare/gitoryx-vs-gitkraken) page on my site, because comparison is the honest way to let you decide, not a reason to trash-talk a competitor.
What I do think is worth saying out loud: developer tools that quietly expand their footprint — in RAM, in your AI context window, in your monthly bill — are asking for a kind of trust they haven't necessarily earned. You didn't sign up for a platform. You signed up for a Git client. When the two get blurred, it's fair to ask whether the tool is still serving you, or whether you're now serving the tool's roadmap.
Gitoryx is my attempt to draw that line clearly: do one job — showing you what Git is actually doing — do it fast, and charge you for exactly that, nothing more.
If any part of this sounded familiar — the slowdown you keep excusing, the feature you never wanted eating your AI context, the subscription creeping up for capabilities you'll never touch — that's the exact list of problems I built Gitoryx to solve. Try Gitoryx free. It runs on macOS and Windows, and public and open-source repos stay free forever.
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