I've been using GitKraken for the past three years. It's a solid tool, no doubt. But when they bumped the price to $99/year and started locking basic features behind the paywall, I started looking around. I didn't expect to find anything worth switching to.
Then I stumbled on GitSquid.
I honestly don't remember how I found it - probably a random thread on Reddit or Hacker News. The website looked clean, the screenshots looked promising, and it had a free tier, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Worst case, I'd uninstall it after 10 minutes like every other "GitKraken alternative" I'd tried before.
That was two weeks ago. I've since uninstalled GitKraken.
First Impressions
The install was fast. No account creation, no sign-in, no "let us send you onboarding emails", just download the DMG, drag to Applications, open. That alone felt refreshing.
The UI is dark by default (there's a light theme too if you're into that), and it immediately felt familiar. If you've used GitKraken, you'll feel right at home. The commit graph is front and center, rendered on canvas with smooth scrolling. Branches are color-coded, merge lines are clean, and Gravatar avatars show up next to commits.
I opened one of my work repos, a monorepo with about 15k commits, and the graph loaded fast. No lag when scrolling. That was already better than my GitKraken experience on the same repo.
What Actually Made Me Stay
The staging area. You can drag and drop files between unstaged and staged. You can stage individual hunks from the diff view. There's a tree view and a flat list view. It just works the way you'd expect.
The integrated terminal. Hit Cmd+backtick and you get a real terminal at the bottom. Not a fake shell, an actual terminal with your shell profile loaded. I use this constantly for quick npm commands or git stash operations without switching windows.
Multi-repo tabs. I usually have 3–4 repos open at any given time. GitSquid handles this with tabs at the top, and they persist across restarts. Simple, effective.
GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket integration. I connected my GitHub account with a PAT, and now I can see PRs, create new ones, review them, and manage issues, all without opening a browser. The clone dialog lets you browse your remote repos and clone directly.
Profiles. This one caught me off guard. I have a personal GitHub and a work GitLab, each with different email/name/GPG key. GitSquid lets you create profiles and switch between them. The git identity and provider tokens are tied to each profile. No more "oh crap, I committed with my personal email to the work repo."
The Pricing
Here's where it gets interesting. The free tier is genuinely usable, you get all core git operations, the commit graph, diff viewer, conflict resolution, terminal, and one integration. The limits are 3 tabs and 1 profile, which is fine for personal use.
Pro is €49/year. That's it. For context, GitKraken is $99/year for their Pro plan and $199/year for Teams. GitSquid Pro unlocks unlimited tabs, profiles, integrations, plus Gitflow, worktrees, Git LFS, submodules, GPG signing, reflog viewer, statistics, and PR reviews.
No account required for the free tier. No telemetry. No data collection. The license is validated offline with periodic online checks.
What's Missing
I want to be fair here, it's not perfect.
There's no support for SSH agent forwarding, so if you use SSH keys through a hardware token, you might need to stick with the terminal for push/pull. HTTPS with PAT tokens works great though.
The app is still relatively new, so the community is small. There's no plugin ecosystem yet.
Who Is This For
If you're a developer who :
-Wants a fast, good-looking Git GUI
-Is tired of paying $99+ for features that should be standard
-Works across multiple repos and git identities
-Doesn't want to create an account just to use a desktop app
-Uses GitHub, GitLab, or BitBucket
Give GitSquid a try. The free tier costs nothing and takes 30 seconds to set up.
Website: gitsquid.dev
It runs on macOS (Apple Silicon native), Windows, and Linux.
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I have no affiliation with GitSquid. I'm just a developer who found a tool that solved a problem and wanted to share it. If you try it, let me know what you think in the comments.
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